Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Getting Flooded, By the Pint or By the Gallon

These days there are lots of ways to get a little Flood in your life, all through the magic that is the Web.

You can order complete CDs and have those little boxes of plastic delivered to your house by mail. Or you can download CDs, song by song, and save them in your computer, cutting the postal service right out of the equation.

But wait -- say you don't want an entire Flood CD. You can say that. Oh, you might break our hearts, but you can say that. In that case, you'll want to sample the tunes on the Flood CDs and then just pick and choose the specific tracks you want and have only those tunes downloaded to your computer.

Here are some ideas for flooding your ears...

iTunes

An easy way to get Flood audio is through the free iTunes software. Go to the iTunes store with this link, which takes you to a display of Flood albums. Click any cover to see (and sample) tracks. Options let you buy and download entire CDs for $9.99 or individual tracks for 99 cents each.

Of course, to use this, you'll need to be an iTunes user. It's great, free software from Apple that runs on Windows machines as well as Macs. Here's the link for a page where you can download and install iTunes software.

Amazon.com

If you want to save a few dimes on your downloads, Amazon.com offers full Floodishness for $6.99 to $8.99 per CD, and individual songs on Amazon can be had for a little as 89 cents per track. Here's the link for Amazon.com's Flood store.

Rhapsody

If you're a user of Rhapsody.com, where individual downloaded tracks are 99 cents and the complete CD downloads range from $10.99 to $12.99, here's your link.

CD Baby

Our CD Baby location enables you to buy CDs to be mailed to you for $15 each or will let you download entire CDs $8 (but provides no facilities for buying individual tracks). Here the CD Baby link.

Getting Discs Directly from the Flood

If you'd rather have discs mailed to you directly from us, we're happy to help. Just use this link to our page.

Getting Flooded for FREE

Finally, while all the above has been about buying Flood CDs or individual tracks, remember, the Original Old Boy Band has a lot of free music available too in the form of online streaming, free weekly podcasts of our "digital jam session" and free .mp3 downloads. Check it all out on our Freebies page on the site.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

The Flood Goes Web 2.0 Crazy

Hey, The 1937 Flood can be as Web 2.0 cyber savant-ish as the next guy. Lately, in fact, the Original Old Boy Band has been expanding its online footprint into the new world of social networking, opening Flood-happy outposts on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and last.fm.

Here's a roundup of our social network connections and the links that will take you to them.

-- Facebook is a primary social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. On Facebook, floodsters Pamela and Charlie Bowen, David and Susie Peyton, and Michelle Walker all have already created their own individual pages. And now to the Flood itself has set up a public Facebook page. Click here to reach it. If you too already have a Facebook account, we urge you to drop in at our public page and sign up as a Flood fan. (We're trying to jazz the numbers.) If you're not Facebook-friendly yet, hey, consider joining -- it's free and it's fun.

-- last.fm is perhaps our favorite Web 2.0 network, because it is all about music and musicians. The Flood uses last.fm to provide full-length samples of tracks and to run the popular Flood Radio feature, which we wrote about in an earlier blog. To reach us on last.fm, click here. You'll find that we also use last.fm as a major distributor of our weekly Digital Jam Session files, in addition to podcasting them, as we've reported earlier.

-- MySpace is one the of the oldest social networking site, offering email, a forum and communities. We're here on MySpace. Now, we're just getting started on this service and, honestly, from what we've seen so far, it doesn't seem as powerful or as interesting as Facebook. However, we're open to persuasion. If you're a MySpace mavin and think we're missing the point, feel free to enlighten us about what we're not seeing in this obviously popular network.

-- Twitter is a free social messaging utility for staying connected by using "mini-blogs" (messages limited to several hundred characters) in real time. To twitter and follow the Flood, click here. Well, like MySpace, Twitter is one of those services whose value seems to elude us. We're guessing we're missing something big here, because twittering has become an obsession with so many folks. OK, so here's the deal: if a lot of people sign up to twit about, oh, when The Flood is stuck in traffic, what the guys are having for lunch and who's having what operation when, we'll start using Twitter religiously. We're like that. And seriously, twitting does seem like it would be useful to report whether the weekly jam session is on schedule, when a gig is coming up and so on. As we say, we can be persuaded.

So, there you have it. Let us know what you think about any of these new net connections. And if you have suggestions for others we might explore, just sing out!

Sunday, February 1, 2009

Freebies from The Flood

There are freebies from The Flood all around the web site. For instance, George Walker, who recorded, produced and mixed the Flood's second and third CDs (Plays Up a Storm and I'd Rather Be Flooded), recently started experimenting with some new recording software and decided to take a fresh listen to some of this older work. The result? Remasters of four flood tracks from 2002. Thanks, George!

Click here to reach the page and then click on a title from the list to hear and/or download the .mp3 for that specific tune. George's collection includes remixes of:

-- Alabama Jubilee. Penned in 1915 during Tin Pan Alley’s love affair with ragtime, this classic good-time tune was written by George L. Cobb, who that same year published his great “Are You From Dixie?”

-- Alberta, Let Your Hair Hang Down. This old folk tune actually is an Ohio River song, sung by the roustabouts who loaded and unloaded the steamboats. Hundreds of contemporary versions exist, including one by The Blues Project back in the late ’60s to a fairly recent Bob Dylan cover.

-- Lulu's Back in Town. Written by Harry Warner and Al Dubin for the 1935 stage show “Broadway Gondolier,” this great old tune was performed by the Ted Fiorito Orchestra, Mel Torme and The Mills Brothers, not to mention a fabulous version by another of our heroes, Leon Redbone.

-- Rag Mama/Gimme Dat Ding. We learned the first part of this medley (“Rag Mama”) from a 1964 recording by David Grisman’s Even Dozen Jug Band. The Flood takes the blame for combining it with “Gimme Dat Ding.” The wonderful old Albert Hammond-Mike Hazelwood novelty tune was first recorded by The Pipkins, but a better known version was the 1970s release by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show.

Don't forget we also have downloadables from the weekly jam sessions. Each Wednesday night, some or all of the folks gather at Charlie & Pamela's house for the Flood jam session. These sessions usually are recorded and these days, we share occasional tracks through a project called Jam Logs, Freebies from The Flood. We stream the Jam Logs tunes on our Digital Jam Session page and we also make them available as free downloads on our last.fm pages.

And speaking of last.fm, we also allow for free listening of the Flood tracks on that site -- click here to visit our albums page on last.fm.