What happened to MC Devlin?

Much.  This is my fifth or sixth attempt at writing a blog to explain to the followers of Mad Conductor what has been up with us and why we've been so under the radar.  My first two rough drafts were way too long, so long they could have been made into books.  The others were not informative enough.  I hope that this one will give you a good idea of what's been going on without boring you too much or taking up too much of your time.

I moved to New Orleans almost two years ago now, leaving my band and my right hand man Dan McKinney back in Pennsylvania.  I was supposed to be here for only three months, to write some songs, then head back to the north, record an album and head out on tour again.  I thought I was moving here to be inspired and create music.  Now I realize I was moving here to get away from music.

The two years preceding my move to New Orleans were some of my best and worst times.  I was either on tour, playing shows in foreign countries, hanging out on beaches and partying with my friends; or bumming around aimlessly with no sense of self-worth, couch surfing, jobless and scrounging desperately for money.  It was like a double life, or actually a single life considering these are the struggles and triumphs of a moderately well-known yet underpaid musician.  My happiness was dependent on my success in the music industry, and since I deemed myself to be relatively unsuccessful I knew happiness to be a fleeting thing.  I had a lot of fun traveling and playing shows for appreciative supporters, but if you aren't truly happy fun is only a distraction.  So really I think I moved away for a change of pace, to view life from a different angle, and although I didn't know or wouldn't admit it at the time, I believe I moved to find peace with myself.

Within a month of living here in New Orleans I got a job as a construction foreman renovating houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina.  I was working for an absent minded rich guy who didn't know a hammer from a two by four, so I basically had total control of the projects.  In addition to this I could hire who ever I wanted.  Naturally I would hire all my friends and cool Mexican and El Salvadoran guys in need of work.  Our crew had a lot of fun while working hard and getting the job done, plus we were all making mad money.  This went on for over a year until I made a huge mistake and started dating my boss's daughter.  He was cool with it at first, but then she made a decision to not go away to a college that he had planned on her going to.  My boss, who knew about my having had dropped out of high-school, assumed that I had "brainwashed" her to not go away to college, thinking that I wanted her to stay here with me.  He gave me an ultimatum, either convince her to go away to school or lose my job.  I don't let people give me ultimatums, so I told him to get the fuck out of my face.  This was the end of my tenure as a highly paid foreman.  The funny thing is, shortly after getting fired, or quitting, or whatever you want to call it, I realized that I wasn't at all compatible with the girl and I broke up with her.

Two important things happened to me during the time I was working for that guy.  The first was the beginning of my love and appreciation for dogs, primarily pit bull type breeds.  I never had dogs growing up as my Mom is allergic to most animals, so I never really got the chance to understand the canine species.  But when I first moved to New Orleans my roommate's pit bull-labrador mix, Django, became my closest friend.  He would pull me on my skateboard along the Mississippi River for miles everyday, when I would have just been sitting alone.  In the time we spent together I learned how great the relationship between a man and a dog could be.  When I was evacuating for Hurricane Gustav I found a stray pit bull in my neighborhood and brought him with me to Texas.  I named the dog King Solomon and we became real close buddies.  A month later, while taking him for a walk back in New Orleans, a dude pulled up on me in his blacked out Chevy Tahoe and exclaimed that the dog was his.  A scuffle ensued and he ended up taking the dog from me.  That brings me to the second important change in my life, the commencement of my training in Shaolin Kung Fu.

I began studying the art of Shaolin Kung Fu in January of 2009 under Sifu Joseph Meissner.  It has since taken the position of the main focus of my life, going to class five days a week with no exceptions.  About a month ago I earned the rank of 3rd degree brown belt (brown belt counts down from 3rd to 1st).  In a year and a half I will be eligible to test for my 1st degree black belt.  Although belts are only good for keeping your pants up they are a good bench mark for setting personal goals, some of mine are to achieve full front and side splits and also to master the Iron Palm program; using wooden posts, steel bars and gravel bags to make my shins, hands and forearms like iron, with the ability to block strikes from bats and deliver devastating blows to opponents.  I have never been stronger in my life, even when I was weight lifting 3-5 days a week back in Pennsylvania.  Weight lifting only works isolated muscles, martial arts training develops full body strength that is much more practical for everyday use.  I have also changed my diet considerably, cutting out all unnatural substances including hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup, mono-sodium glutamate and other processed foods.  I pretty much stick to eating meat, fruits and vegetables, oats and occasionally bread if it is made with only a few ingredients.

Also, right around the time I began my Kung Fu training I bought my own dog from a kid in Texas who I met through the Mad Conductor myspace page.  He is of the American Pit-bull Terrier variety and I'm pretty sure he's mixed with bull terrier, like Sid's dog in Toy Story.  I named him Shinobi after the ninja video game, and also as a shout out to Wu-Tang Clan's Inspectah Deck who mentioned the name in his classic lead-off verse in the song Triumph.  Shinobi just made one year on Thanksgiving.  He still has his balls as I don't believe in cutting them off.  I wouldn't want anyone to cut mine off.  Balls, in my opinion, are one of the main generators of male chi and I consider them to be essential in cultivating energy for all male creatures.  Shinobi is a little bunny rabbit though, he just loves to snuggle up and keep me warm at night.  His favorite foods are raw eggs and lamb chops, he gets spoiled a lot.

As far as music goes I did write four songs worth releasing while living here.  I recorded them with Dan McKinney at his studio in Pennsylvania and they are just about ready to hit the streets. For a while I was organizing emcee battles here in New Orleans.  We were the first to do the battles with a live backing band which is now a growing trend here in the south.  I played guitar in the band and was co-creator/ organizer of the event with my roommate Cash Moore, who will most likely play bass in the new Mad Conductor live band if I ever get around to putting it together.  The battles went on monthly for the good portion of a year but were curtailed due to our lack of motivation to advertise, which is unfortunate because they were always a real fun time for everyone.  I realize this is my problem with Mad Conductor.  I love playing music and writing raps, but I have no desire to push it in everyone's faces.  If Mad Conductor is ever to thrive we really need a manager or a P.R. person to get our songs out there.  That is easier said than done, right now the world wants bullshit-pop-rap and corny-ass-pussy music, nothing real or from the heart.  Mad Conductor may be confined to the dungeons of the underground, which is fine with me as I no longer base my self-worth on how well my albums sell or how many people come to my shows, thus is the personality of a humble student of Shaolin.

Over the summer my best-friend from Pennsylvania moved down here to New Orleans.  He came to work with me for that rich guy, but since that fell through about a month before he got here we spent the summer scrounging for jobs.  We got a gig as roofers for a company on the West Bank, also known as the worst bank, but I quit after a month as I found it to be boring as hell, plus I wasn't getting along with my racist co-workers.  My friend is still working for the roofing crew, however we're in the process of starting our own construction company.  My goal is to start buying gutted houses, renovating them and selling them.  I hope to continue this process until we have several crews going to town on a few houses at a time, at which point my friend and I would become supervisors overseeing the jobs.  This should be considered a five year plan.

I miss my friends and family up north, but as Gza said about the Wu-Tang Clan going on to do solo albums, "a family needs to branch out, that's what makes it a tree."  If you don't branch out, you're just a stump.  Everyone branches out in there own way though.  Some people might not want to leave their home area, this is fine, in this case you need to branch out mentally.  Don't depend on your parent's in your adult life, make it so your parents can depend on you in the later stages of their lives.  This is a beautiful thing to me.  If you have suffered the loss of your parents at an early age, know that they are still within you, in your blood and in your soul, so you should carry on in a way that would make them happy and proud, then you will have branched out spiritually.  If your parents are around but you don't communicate well with them, as I have experienced with one of mine before, don't let the substance of their nature that is within you make it difficult for you to communicate with other people, instead step outside of yourself and see these aspects of your own personality and improve on them.  In doing this your tree will continue to grow and your branches will be impervious to the sharpest of axes.

Life continues to thrive all around us and I think you need to stay centered in the moment and see where it takes you.  You can't plan everything out because there are millions of pitchers in this game and they all have a myriad of pitches they can throw at you.  If you adapt to your situation in a positive way you will be able to hit any pitch, even if it's just a sacrifice bunt to advance a runner, it's all a part of the game.  This is what I have learned in my time down here.  You can see how this has become obvious to me with all I've told you in this essay.  I came to New Orleans thinking that I had it all figured out even though I was relatively unhappy, now I'm in a situation that I could not have predicted and I feel a lot better about myself than I did when I was constantly striving for something else with grim determination and blindly mistaking pleasure for happiness.  It is apparent to me now that in order to fully appreciate life one must be like water; a boat will be destroyed in tumultuous rapids if you try to sail against them, but the water itself is unbreakable.  So I guess this is another way of saying "go with the flow".

***

There is this girl that I really care about.  I have known her for quite some time, and though we live far apart our lives seem to cross paths every so often.  We may go a year with out seeing each other, but the time we do spend together is very special to me.  When we leave each other I always wonder when I will get to see her again.  It has been proven to me that there is no need to worry, because even though we go our own ways and do our own things, we always seem to end up in the same place at the same time for some reason.  This can easily be compared to my relationship with music.  I may have set the mic down for a little while, but I am certain a day will come when I pick it back up and rock that shit hard.

In closing, the new Mad Conductor EP is on it's way.  We have matured a great deal in our style, but I think everyone will enjoy the new songs as much as Dan and I do.  I hope it will be released on I-Tunes and on CD by early 2010.

And don't be scared, I will never leave you.  I'll be there forever no matter what happens.

Peace.

MC Devlin

(p.s.) Ninja Assassin was the biiiizznomb!

...wanna be calling me cousin.

Yo fools, so the fine folks at Interpunk.com have made the new MC logo into a killer t-shirt.  Check it out here:

http://interpunk.com/item.cfm?Item=169495&



Buying one for yourself would not only be really cool for you, but also a huge help for me.  I'm going through rough financial times right now; having gotten fired from a good job for fooling about with my bosses daughter , then I went to jail for making an illegal left-hand turn and was slapped with a bunch of bullshit fines, then I went to work in Alabama and lost my dog while I was up there and spent half of the money I made to get him back. 

Ok, I'm being a little bitch, shit ain't that bad.  But the truth is we don't have enough money to press the new EP.  So we're in the process of trying to procure that financial backing. 

Peace to the gods,

MC Devlin

Yo, 

I just recovered a bag of MC merchandise including Renegade Space Rock CDs, Mechanical Claw CDs, and a couple different MC shirts that won' t be printed again; one shirt is black with the classic MC skeleton over top of the El Salvador flag, the other is the Mechanical Claw logo on a spaghetti strap for girls.

The CDs are $12 ea.

The shirts are $12 ea.

Plus $2.50 shipping per each item you get.

Send cash or check or money order made out to Chris Tray to:

700 Monticello Ave
Jefferson, LA 70121

Word up,

MC

Yo,  looks like y'all are diggin' the new MC joint. 

I'd say as far as MC listeners go this is the point where we separate the men from the boys.  This is where we see who can hang and who can't.  I trust most of you can.  It doesn't take much, other than listening to our music.

It looks like I'm entering yet another new chapter in my saga.  Mr. McKinney is urging me to get a band together and start playing shows as MC again.  I'll tell you the truth right now: it doesn't look like I'll be moving back to the north anytime soon.

The only sad part is that this is like breaking up with a girl you actually like.  I love playing with my band from Pennsylvania, but our lives moved in different directions.  So, I'm gonna assemble a band down here in New Orleans. 

I'll let you know when it's ready.

In the meantime, spread the word about our new song.  Tell all your rap friends about it. And listen to the lyrics until you know what I'm talking about.

PEACE.

Still MC Devlin

Yo,

So this is our new song: Cross Gates Estates.

Listen on our myspace.  Add it if you like it.

I hope you dig it.

-MC Devlin

I just got back into reading comics.  I'm on some Venom, son

I am looking to build the story of the Venom symbiote in order to conduct research on the subject.  I need the following to get a good start on thoroughly understanding this alien obsession of mine:

The Amazing Spider-Man #200-275 (ish)
Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #75-100
Web of Spider-Man #1-25
Marvel Secret Wars #1-10 (?)

I know that's a lot of comics, but that follows the period of around when Venom was concieved.  I will be able to get an idea of what was happening in the Marvel universe during this era. 

So, I know this is a long of shot.  But if anyone can come up with any of these comics I'd be willing to trade some copies from my share of the upcoming Mad Conductor EP for any of those issues.  Of course I will consider other offers, such as:

Incredible Hulk vs. Venom
Wolverine vs. Venom
She-Hulk vs. Venom
etc.

But my main research will be in the pre and post conception of the Venom symbiote itself.


________________


At the end of the Month you can expect a new look for the MC, and a new sound.  The single will drop in May as planned.  Word up and down. 

I hope y'all are chillin'.

Peace.

MC Dog-Nog the Frog.

I tried to create a facebook account for MC 4 times and couldn't figure it out.

I give up.

Would anyone be willing to run a facebook page for The Mad Conductor?

Preferably someone I know and trust. 

Hollar at me.

Devlin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtxfz7__MW8

Yo, So we're getting ready to release this first single from the "America Central" secret EP and I'm trying to come up with ideas on how  to get the song heard more.  I'm sending this message out to ask if any MC listeners are involved in any radio or online podcast type things and if so what would it take to get you to play the new MC song on your show.

Really, any scale of media attention would be helpful for us at this point.  Only if we can generate a big enough buzz for our music will we be able to do any tours in today's economy.  You dig? 

Hollar at your boy.

Thanks,

MC DEVLIN