The Linn County Blues Society has retained a new webmaster, Mr. John Shultz. He’ll be taking over the design and administration of the LCBS web site, www.lcbs.org.  Many of you will recognize John as one of our local musicians. He plays keyboards with The Beaker Brothers, The John Shultz Organization, The John Shultz Trio, Big and Easy, and The Saints Dixieland Band. In his nonmusical life, John is immersed in web applications.

One of the first things John will be working on is improving the LCBS calendar of events. The LCBS calendar is available in 3 forms; (1) printed in the monthly BluesPaper, which is mailed to our members, distributed free through local outlets, and available free from the web as a download at www.lcbs.org, (2) sent in our weekly BluesBlast e-mail to our members, and (3) viewable on our web page at www.lcbs.org.

Space limitations in the BluesPaper require our newsletter editor, the esteemed one Evan Vulich, to trim the events to fit one column. This requires us to sometimes omit some events. Our first priority is to include local blues events in the BluesPaper. It is hard line to draw sometimes. However, we wish to support ALL the LIVE music venues and the great bands they hire.

As we improve our calendar, we hope to include a wider variety of genres, bands, and venues, in the non-BluesPaper formats.  We also hope to make our calendar more current, keeping up with late breaking events. We often are notified of changes and additions to our weekly BluesBlast e-mail after it comes out, to say nothing of additions to our monthly BluesPaper calendar during the month.

We’d like to know what you want to see in the LCBS calendar. We can’t promise to do everything everybody wants (that’s for politicians), but we’ll try to make the calendar work for you. Wider geographic area, like Iowa City or Waterloo? Maybe occasional events in “the big city”? Want to know when Polka Night is? (I threw that in for Evan’s benefit; don’t even ask.) Want to know when national blues act tours get near Eastern Iowa? Have comments on how you get the calendar?

If you have any comments or suggestions or ideas for improving the LCBS calendar, please send them to me at president@lcbs.org. If you would rather talk than type, send along your contact information and when you are available, and I’ll return your call.

We’re excited to have John Shultz with us now, and are looking forward to improvements to the LCBS calendar of events.

Remember to say hi to the Rev when you see him.