Sunday, December 9, 2012

Melrose Rock Bar in Pyrgos, Ilia Greece

The Melrose Rock Bar hosts start-up acts on week-nights and seasoned professional bands on week-ends as Harry has owned the place for quite a while and has been running a determined campaign to bring rock of all kinds to Pyrgos.

Note:  the link to Melrose Rock Bar is to a test version intended to replace the current production version.  The reason for the replacement is the original author was in England but is now, I believe, in Kuwait or someplace like that and he can't provide the site support from there.  My reaction was to make Harry another one as this will put control of the site back in his hands.  He has not seen the new one yet as I'm reviewing it to ensure it's suitable but all aspects of the original site have been carried forward so it's looking good so far.  The only remaining question is whether I can hijack the domain name from where it is now as it may be only the original author can do that.  We shall see on that one.

It's good to be able to give something back as Harry and his family have been going all-out to help me get started in Greece so it's very nice to be able to give something to them for a change.  Besides, I like giving stuff away.

The best way I have to survive is to play.  Harry asked me again a couple of days ago about playing at Melrose and it's a cool idea but you saw my reservations on that the other day.  Unless you're turning on the young girls, they won't come and if they don't come then the young boys don't come and then you're playing to an empty house.  That ain't cool.  So, we shall see.  Not that we shall see about how to turn on young girls but rather whether it'd make sense to play there.

There are multiple pending gig offers in Second Life and I went through that the other day as well so you've seen the arithmetic on doing it.  I'll be talking to Harry in the next day or two and then I can find out if it will be ok to get a phone line installed.

It's all about rock in Greece.  Don't think for one minute that's it's all about bouzoukis here.  They're wonderful and people love traditional music here, much more so than, say, Americans love folk music. It's not at all the same overall cultural appreciation for something that's unique to each culture.  Both are different forms of folk music but the styles are unique and there's very much an integration with modern instrumentation in traditional Greek music, right along side the classic styles.  It's all very much loved here.

Update:

The Melrose Rock Bar is largely complete.  I added a Twitter timeline to it so Harry can post quick news updates without the need for updating / uploading a Web page.  However, it frequently doesn't work.  I'm not sure if there's a good resolution as there's nothing I can change on my end or, at least, I don't think there's anything I can change.  If it's going to continue to be this erratic then I'll remove it but that function can be quite convenient and you've seen how I use it for the blog.  If writing a blog article is too much of a hassle then a Tweet can serve nicely.

Quite likely I'll talk to Harry tomorrow and then we'll see how it goes.  I sent him an email this morning but we haven't talked so we'll see tomorrow.

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