We made it! We reached the GoFundMe goal. A massive shout-out and thank you to everyone that contributed, it made all the difference, and we would not have been able to do this and get The Archive ready for Phase 3 without this support. The renovation of an old lab in the centre of Porto that hadn’t had the rusty gate opened for five years needed some serious work and the final total was close to double what we received with the campaign. We have posted some photos on the In Deep Music Archive Facebook page for your perusal, an earlier post shows what it was like before the renovation began. Next, we have to find the funds to transport everything from the storage in Wells in Somerset, England. Have you ever been to a museum and seen a list of benefactors on a plaque? Well, I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that, but we will certainly invite you for a day to come and join us here and see what you have made happen.

Still in the process of organising the fundamentals of the place, today we had to go to the water company and get it transferred from the previous landlord into my name. It was relatively simple, it cost €33 and that will be added to our next bill. We’ve certainly used a lot of water cleaning this place up, and although we did our best to clean the floors, it looks like we are going to attempt to paint them to cover up the ugly lab-stained lino – who knows what the stains are, failed experiments spilling over the floors, unknown fluids and compounds, something escaped and was squashed, the imagination runs wild.

Brad the builder came and got his ladder today, the last of the renovation tools, but the paint that’s left over stays with us, it’s paid for, and we’ll use it for the floors or for touching things up as needed. I have instructions from Brad’s partner Mafalda on how to prepare and paint the towel rails in the toilets, small things that didn’t get quite finished so like the floors, we will attempt that ourselves, it would be more costs to get Susie and Hayden, the painters, in to do this, we should do as much of the work as we can, now the needed professionals have completed the main task, it’s time for the amateurs, what could go wrong? Haha.

Music today has been on the subject of paint, but not happy paint. The Band’s classic debut album Music from Big Pink (1968) reminds us that we just lost Robbie Robertson in the last few days (he was 80). This leaves Garth Hudson as the only surviving member of the original group (he is 86). Richard Manuel died in 1986 from suicide (age 42), Rick Danko died in 1999 (age 55), Levon Helm died in 2012 (age 71). I recommend making your way through The Band’s albums but start here and have a look at the house where it all began. I went there once to see it.

Music Of The Daze