By Pam Long

Mike Craghead has been on the local Humboldt music scene performing his personal stories in breweries and coffee houses for the better part of a decade. If you are at all familiar with Craghead's work then you will at once enjoy Straight With You, a new collection of classic Craghead along with a few newly penned beauties.

Along with Craghead, local musicians Eldin Green (bass) and Bobby Martinez (drums) provide just the right amount of rhythm and driving energy while never drowning out their main man. All together they all a solid trio and a pleasure to listen to.

With music in his head and emotions on the loose in his heart, Craghead communicates such subject matter as betrayal, anger, discovery, unconditional love and letting go into well-crafted songs. Yes, these are serious subjects, and left in the hands of a lesser wordsmith they often become gooey, causing a symphony of listener winces.

Songs like "Words Like Forever," "Last One With You," and the title track, "Straight With You," have all been recorded on previously released cassette format. And as fortune would have it, here they have been polished up, reworked and re-recorded onto CD making them as listenable as hearing them performed live.

Of the new songs, "It's Only Me" is an honest, poignant stream of thoughts attesting to the confounded wonder of being a father. This awe-inspiring reproductive experience seems to have given the singer a more powerful and grounded vocal quality and ultimately(time will tell) a slightly different view of the lyrical world.

-Pam Long, former music director of KHUM radio and the multi-channel internet radio site The Green Witch.

The Hum
By Bob Doran

of the Journal

The Mike Craghead Band hosts a CD - release party celebrating its new album, Straight With You, on Saturday, Oct. 30, at Six Rivers Brewing Co. It�s Craghead�s third album - the two previous were a self-produced tape, Feel the Rain and Hot Brew Live, assembled from tapes of a series of shows at the Fortuna coffeehouse.

Craghead is an acoustic guitarist with a percussive style. With his heartfelt songwriting and the ringing sound of his Ovation guitar, he is well established in the local singer/ songwriter scene.

"Everybody tells me,�You should go to L.A.� or �You should go to San Francisco.� Well, I would if wanted to," said Craghead in a call from his Eureka home. "But I like it here and hopefully I can exploit some of the recent changes in the recording business without leaving.

"As a no-name person in a little town, the changes benefit me a lot. But if I were a record company executive I�d be pretty nervous. None of the rules are the same The whole industry is in big trouble if they don�t figure out what to do with all this new technology."

Straight With You is totally homemade, an example of the next wave of CD production possible with a home computer. For the most part the album was recorded in bass player/co-producer Etdin Green�s laundry room.

"We went analog on an 8-track reel-to-reel. then mastered down by plugging into the back of the computer." Craghead explained. "You can do that with any old computer with a Soundblaster sound card. The medium at that point is the hard disk instead of a DAT tape or something else. Eldin did the mix. There �s still an art to turning the knobs just right."

With the 11 songs mixed down onto the computer�s hard drive and a CD burner, Craghead has his own disc factory. It�s not as fast as the majors. He urns them one at a time.

"I have the first machine that showed up at Costco, so it�s the slowest. It only has two speeds, but it�s not bad. I set it to run and then go do something else while it�s working."

Craghead, who is also a graphic artist, creates anti prints the CD inserts on his computer. He has also used it to compress several tracks that he posted for downloading on MP3.com, giving anyone in the world access to his music.

Despite the technological nature of the production, his music is quite earthy. The lyrics of the opening track, "Yesterday�s Dead," are not about the record industry; they are about a friend leaving town without looking back. In fact, Craghead seems more interested in learning how to write a good song than he is in computers.