[acoustic eclectica]

If You Came to this Blog Seeking Lyrics or Chords...

2004-12-09T14:39:00.000-05:00

My referrer logs indicate that much of the little traffic I get here is from folks looking for lyrics or chords to the songs I mention. Unfortunately, this is just a personal weblog: I don't maintain an archive of lead sheets or lyrics online.

Still, I'm happy to answer whatever questions I can. Feel free to e-mail me if there's anything I can help you with. It may take me a day or two to get back to you, but all mails will be answered.

Sleep Mode

2004-12-09T14:33:00.000-05:00

This blog has gone dim, and will remain dormant for a while.

For various reasons, I have not played out since April 2004. I've been keeping busy (aside from gainful employment, I mean) with learning songs, working up new material, and giving lessons. With any luck, I'll be lining up some gigs for 2005, and posting about them here.

In the meantime, enjoy the other kinds of writing over at my main blog.

Thanks, and godspeed.

Quandary

2004-04-04T08:06:00.000-04:00

So the deal is this. Played my show at the rez last night, and it was remarkable—funny, raw, exciting. People who are poorly socialized can make a terrific audience, if you as a performer can keep a handle on the whole thing: they don't sit on their hands—the feedback you get is immediate and uncensored. And there were moments and incidents that left me quite moved.

Trouble is, I don't know if I can write about any of it.

See, when I signed up for this gig I signed a set of standard volunteer forms, including a confidentiality agreement—and although I'm not sure about the restrictions that are on me, I do know that I cannot do justice to any account of the show without mentioning specific residents and their histories. And I'm pretty sure I'm on soggy ethical (and legal) ground there.

I'll need to work on this. I'm going to type up some preliminary notes, then consult with my contact at the rez—the music therapist who organized the gig—and try to work out what's kosher and what isn't. With any luck, I'll have something up by the end of the week.

Sorry to disappoint—but I am loath to betray the trust and goodwill extended to me last night. Maybe you needed to be there. For all my trepidation leading up to the show, I'm certainly glad I was.

Hooray For Us

2004-04-01T14:20:00.000-05:00

Adding a new song to the set for this show—another standard, and a song that everyone knows but that no-one really knows; one of the finest and saddest pieces of pop songcraft I know, but a song that nearly everybody remembers as being funny; and a reminder of a different era in pop—and of a different audience.

People of a certain age remember those awful Bob Hope TV specials. Each one ended with Hope singing “Thanks For The Memory,” his signature song, the familiar title phrase interspersed with newly-composed rhyming jokes that Hope didn’t even bother to pretend he wasn’t reading off cue cards. There are dozens—maybe hundreds—of variant lyrics. But what about the song itself—the song as it was before it became simply a hook on which to hang the latest set of allegedly-topical gag lines?

Looking to Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger’s original lyrics, we find a series of snapshots—after the soaring title line at the start of each verse, there’s a litany of funny images, tender moments, and the sort of private jokes that can only grow out of a long, intense relationship. So far, so familiar—with the version I find in my jazz songbooks, we’re safely in “These Foolish Things” territory.

But when I went looking for a recording of the song, I turned up a later permutation, with yet again different lyrics, and this is the version that slew me dead. I found it on a P2P service, so I know nothing about it, except that it seems to be from a film soundtrack—the orchestration is lush and sentimental in a Charlie Chaplin kind of way, and it’s got that scratchy, compressed quality to it—and it’s Hope, younger but unmistakable, alternating verses and phrases with a female co-star.

The lyric is just as funny and charming, but the laughter catches in your throat... because it’s a song about divorce—about two terribly civilized people who simply could not remain married, but who nonetheless cannot shake the feeling that they are still in love. It’s steeped in nostalgia and regret, but entirely without bitterness—even the hurt is suffused with fondness.

This is pop written about and for adults—and as such a relic of the pre-rock era, before the advent of the concept of the “teenager” as a demographic sector and (more importantly) as a target market. This is pop from an era when hit songs didn’t drop out of the sky and into the gloriously fractured heads of young boys on beaches—they were written in offices, by guys in suits who kissed their wives and kids goodbye before leaving for work, guys to the far side of thirty; from an era when youth was a handicap, when what you wanted from a songwriter was a little wisdom—not the inward-looking wisdom of the mystic or the junkie sage, but the empathy that comes from living a long time in a disappointing world, where there may be nothing left to look forward to but remembrance of a faded past.

Thanks for the memory
Of sentimental verse
Nothing in my purse
And chuckles when the preacher said, “for better or for worse”—
How lovely it was!
Thanks for the memory
Of Schubert serenades,
Little things of jade
Of traffic jams, and anagrams, and bills we never paid—
How lovely it was!
Many’s the time that we feasted
And many’s the time that we fasted—
Oh well, it was swell while it lasted—
We did have fun,
And no harm done...
Thanks for the memory
Of faults that you forgave,
Rainbows on a wave
And stockings in the basin when a fellow needs a shave—
How lovely it was!
Thanks for the memory
Of tinkling temple bells,
Alma mater yells,
And Cuban rum and towels from the very best hotels—
How lovely it was!
We, who could laugh over big things,
Were parted by only a slight thing:
I wonder if we did the right thing—
That’s life, I guess—
So long, God bless—
Thanks for the memory
Of rainy afternoons,
Swingy Harlem tunes
And motor trips and burning lips and burning toast and prunes—
How lovely it was!
Thanks for the memory
Of sunburns at the shore, nights in Singapore—
You might have been a headache, but you never were a bore—
How lovely it was!
We said goodbye with a highball
Then I got as high as a steeple—
But we were intelligent people:
No tears, no fuss—hooray for us...
...And strictly entre nous,
Darling, how are you?
And how are all those little dreams that never did come true?
Awfully glad I knew you—
Cheerio, toodle-oo—
Thank you... so much.

A breakup song that’s pained but gentle, that’s an expression of fundamental decency and kindness in the face of heartbreak: there’s nothing in rock songwriting to match it, with the possible exception of Ray Davies’s masterpiece “Days.”

Into which, conveniently enough, we segue directly. See how it works?

Tripmaster Monkey: His Fakebook

2004-03-13T10:57:00.000-05:00

The bitch, of course, about gearing up to learn the Great American Songbook is that the more I learn, the more I want to learn—the parameters keep expanding, in directions both practical (i.e., knowing these songs will help me get gigs) and devotional.

Library research inevitably leads me down strange, unexpected paths; indeed, that's the beauty of it. Blurring boundaries accounts for much of it—the hazy borders between jazz and blues, country and pop. The best music (or at least the music I love best) lives comfortably in the no-go zones in between. When Norah Jones does "Cold, Cold Heart" on her debut album, how do you define it? As a pop cover (with jazz signifiers) of a country song itself heavily blues-influenced? Inasmuch as it defies categorization, how much of that is due to what Norah brings to it, and what was inherent in the song itself?

In the end, it's Norah Jones Music™, a wholly new thing. Creating the New is a worthy goal—maybe the only worthy goal. And it's a tricky process, consisting of both selection and interpretation. In other words, it's both what you do and the way that you do it—that's what gets results.

Anyway: to the list already posted, add these...

Ain't Misbehavin'
Barb'ra Allen
Black Coffee
Bonnie and Clyde
Champagne Charlie
Cold, Cold Heart
El Paso
Fever
Folsom Prison Blues
Ghost Riders In The Sky
Glow Worm
Grandfather's Clock
I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good)
Ice Cream Man
In The Gloaming
It Makes No Difference Now
Last Date
The Letter Edged In Black
Maple Leaf Rag
Mighty Lak' A Rose
Nine Below Zero
Nobody Knows You When You're Down And Out
On The Road Again
The Orange Blossom Special
Paying The Cost To Be The Boss
A Perfect Day
Poor Wayfaring Stranger
Pride And Joy
The Rosary
Silver Threads Among The Gold
Stella By Starlight
Stormy Weather
Sweet Georgia Brown
Things Ain't What They Used To Be
This Ol' House
Tobacco Road
The Touch Of God's Hand
Wildwood Flower
Woke Up Cold In Hand

Notes:

"Bonnie and Clyde" is the Serge Gainsbourg tune, by the bye. (Not that I have anything against Eminem, of course.) I've wanted to add some Gainsbourg to the set for a while now, and after long consideration, given the format, I think this is the one to do—although if I thought I could do justice to "Who Is 'In,' Who Is 'Out'," I'd be on that like a heartbeat.

(Parenthetical aside: Fans and novices alike could do worse than to check out the CDs Intoxicated Man and Pink Elephants, both consisting of Gainsbourg songs performed in English by Mick Harvey, who runs amusingly through a variety of Sixties pop styles throughout.)

"Stella By Starlight," "The Orange Blossom Special," "Last Date," and "Maple Leaf Rag" all point towards something I find oddly appealing: all are best known as instrumentals (as is "Tuxedo Junction," which I performed last year as a slow blues)—and, in the case of these four, had lyrics added after the fact. "Maple Leaf Rag" is the real oddity here—Scott Joplin's signature piece adapted by vaudevillean Sydney Brown, who used it as a showpiece: Brown's lyrics (as boastful as any gangsta rap) ballyhoo his dancing prowess. which he then proceeds to demonstrate in a tap-dance routine to the second half of the tune.

There's a tempting notion... but given the complexity of Joplin's music—and the difficulties of translating eighty-eight keys to six strings—even with the simplified transcription I'm using, I'll be fortunate if I can play the tune with any accuracy while singing; it's gonna take a hell of a lot of practice, even without adding hoofing to the agenda.

Since the "John Barleycorn" debacle of last Fall, I've shied away from traditional material—which is both odd and a shame, since I became something of a scholar in the brief days of We Saw The Wolf v3.0. I'll have to be cautious integrating it into the set, which is a gimpy mongrel to begin with: but "Poor Wayfaring Stranger," "Wildwood Flower" and "The Letter Edged In Black" are just too pretty to not have on deck. Boston band Abunai! used to do a roaring psychedelic version of "Barb'ra Allen" that's going to take some beating.

"On The Road Again" is the Canned Heat boogie tune, not the Willie Nelson twanger of the same name... although I'll doubtless end up covering Willie some day: a seriously underappreciated songwriter, that man... even (for a long time) by me.

Although Rosemary Clooney's pop version is the best-known, "This Ol' House" is a gorgeous country ballad. I keep thinking I should do it as a segue into Richard Thompson's "Dimming Of The Day," with its opening line This old house is falling down around my ears...

Then again, just about everything makes me want to segue into a Richard Thompson song: imagine "Ice Cream Man" into "Hokey Pokey," for instance, or Bryan Ferry's giddy-up take on "Let's Stick Together" into "Don't Renege On Our Love." I'm starting to think there are only two kinds of music in this world: Richard Thompson songs, and songs that remind me of Richard Thompson songs.

Finally: "The Rosary" is a Gilded Age parlor ballad—in fact, a secular love song, albeit one with a heavy religious metaphor—and blessed with a gorgeous, floating melody. "A Perfect Day," from the same era, is the work of Carrie Jacobs-Bond, one of the few professional women songwriters of the time; and if you think I won't be playing it in medley with the Lou Reed song of similar name, then you overestimate my capacity for shame.

Sources: the Hal Leonard Company's Blues Fake Book, the Reader's Digest Country and Western Songbook, and Denes Agay's collection Best-Loved Songs of the American People.

Face In The Crowd

2004-03-06T22:33:00.000-05:00

Did I ever tell you about the time I tried to brazen my way into rock'n'roll history—well, into a footnote, at least?

No?

That's because I myself hadn't thought about it in years. And it took a Mark Wahlberg movie to jog my memory.

Rock Star was on VH1 the other day. It's a pretty standard "small town boy achieves stardom and must deal with the attendant temptations" kind of picture, but it's interesting in that it's sort of a roman à clef, loosely based on one of the weirder incidents in the annals of rock—the story of Tim Owens, lead singer for a Judas Priest tribute band, who got called up to the majors (as it were) when JP's lead singer quit.

It's an adequate film—Wahlberg gives his amiable-if-a-tad-self-important lunkhead a weightless charm, and there are a couple of bits that nicely convey the creepy obsessiveness of the tribute-band scene. There's a recurring motif in the movie, though, that struck me hard. In two key scenes, a rock star prowls the proscenium, while below a young, charismatic imitator sings along, eyes heavenward, body language joyous—We are sharing this moment, my idol and I—but also supplicant, pleading to be noticed; to touch the hem, desperate for some of the magic to rub off, hoping against hope to somehow be assumed into this world, to be plucked from the shadows of the orchestra pit and up into the somehow-far-realer world of the stage.

That yearning came right off the screen, and it split me wide open: This was me, a long time ago.

It was at the Orpheum Theatre in Boston, and the Pogues were playing. Shane MacGowan had either quit the band, or been fired, or was—the official explanation—"too ill to travel" (ahem). Joe Strummer was fronting this tour, but the band's future was very much up in the air. As far as anybody knew, the Pogues were in the market for a new lead singer.

Now, I've written about this show before: but I neglected to mention that we'd made our way out of our second-row orchestra seats and up to the lip of stage right, close enough to count the lace-holes on Philip Chevron's shoes. And that in the inside pocket of my jacket, next to my heart, was an audiocassette—hissy, amateurish, recorded mostly in my mother's basement—of me singing and playing my own songs.

The idea was that, at some ideal moment, I would fling the tape onto the stage; from there it would make its way to the band, and the contents—the evidence of my talent and dedication—would do the rest.

I never threw the cassette. The moment never came. I don't really know why, even now: I was intimidated, I suppose—by the security goons, by Strummer's huge presence, by my own sudden, crippling doubt. And until now, when I have remembered that show, I have chosen not to remember the agony and ecstasy of wanting in which I watched it unfold.

Were I there now, would I throw the tape? Sure. What's there to lose? Nothing but my dignity—which meant a great deal to me then, but a great deal less, now.

Volunteer

2004-02-26T13:59:00.000-05:00

I just sealed a deal to play a free gig: a coffee hour at an adult-care facility for patients with long-term mental illnesses.

The jokes just write themselves, don't they?

This happens in early April. And of course you'll hear about it here.

The Marimba On The Landing

2004-01-29T20:42:00.000-05:00

Long years ago, when D was still at school, I lived with her in the basement apartment on University Avenue, below West Campus. Ithaca is a city of hills: the ground drops away so steeply in places that the city fathers in their wisdom built stairways instead of footpaths.

One warm, sunny day in early Fall, having spent the morning in the library, I was homeward bound down one of those staircases following a ramble down the Slope. It was about noon, and the day was growing hot. I passed Llenroc and the Boneyard and picked up the stairs. The stairway cuts a Z-track down the hill; as you round the bend, there's a sort of mezzanine—a walled platform of paving-stones jutting out from the hillside and overlooking the street. On the mezzanine, partly blocking my way down the stairs, stood a man playing a marimba.

I can't imagine it could have been a full concert-size instrument. Still, it seemed improbably huge and unlikely in this context—like a subway busker playing a grand piano. The man was about my age, perhaps a bit older. He moved gracefully, bronzed and shirtless in the sun, four mallets dancing over the rosewood bars of his instrument as if by their own volition. The music had a Baroque precision, with a Spanish tinge. I paused on the steps to listen.

He finished the piece, and we talked a little. He was a student at Ithaca College, he said, working on a degree in performance. "Is there much of a repertoire for solo marimba?" I asked. He smiled, and admitted that he was building his repertoire largely from scratch. Much of what he played consisted of his own transcriptions of pieces written for classical guitar; the two instruments, seemingly so dissimilar, share certain tonal qualities—a sharp attack, a swift decay, a way their notes have of seeming to linger in the air even when the instrument is silent.

I forgot his name almost immediately, registering it only as something WASPy and faintly absurd. My memory of the entire encounter seemed suspect, as if I had been drinking (I had not). He was a bright, intense fellow, and if, in retrospect, he seems like a bit of an attention-seeking prick—lugging a marimba across the street and up those stairs is the act of a man begging to be noticed—his talent was such that surely a bit of ego was surely permissible.

Over the years, I have thought often about that strange encounter. It was, it seemed to me, one of those random things that can only happen in the hothouse environment of a college town. But until today, it had never occurred to me to try to find the man on the landing. After some time sifting through Google results (Ithaca College connections apparently run deep in the world of professional marimbists, thanks to the residency of renowned percussion professor Gordon Stout) I think I've found my man. He no longer looks like a surfer, but I'd be willing to bet that the guy on the landing all those years ago was Gifford Howarth.

And by God, he lives just a few towns over, even teaching at Nazareth, right here in Rochester.

Gifford—if you read this, drop me a line. If you are indeed my man, then at the very least I owe you a beer for all the times I've remembered that afternoon and shook my head with wonderment.

Images Of Abundance, Parts I & II

2004-01-27T20:45:00.000-05:00

Indulge me, if you will, in a moment of avarice; for things, yes, just as it seems, but moreso for states of being, for selves I never was—but may yet be: for Blesséd George tells us it is never too late; and Blesséd Shakti points the way; and Blesséd Julia advises us to surround ourselves with these "images of abundance," on the theory that seeing leads to being.

The National Reso-Phonic Style "O" is simply one of the most beautiful and strange musical instruments ever crafted. And a tool (which is what a guitar is, after all) should be pleasing as well as functional.

Now, in days gone by, O Best Beloved, when this world was young and I had all my hair, I wore gaudy shirts and listened to The Church and dreamed of music that roared like the ocean and sang like the wind. I dreamed of '68 Fender Custom Telecasters. Perhaps you've seen the Pink Paisley model—James Burton played one for years—but I've always had a soft spot for its lesser-known companion, the Floral Blue. It brings out my eyes, don'cha know.

Dreaming also of an acoustic-electric nylon-string classical, with a single cutaway and a full-scale neck. I love the classical guitar; I love the snap of the strings beneath the fingers, the sweetness of the tone, the finger-stretching broadness of the neck—it's so responsive, but requires such delicacy and discipline. As my playing has developed over the years from hard, primitive strumming to a more deft, almost pianistic approach, it's become clear to me that this is the instrument I've been working towards.

There's no picture now, because I haven't found it yet. But I'll know when I see it. Or, more properly, when I play it. And I'll know me, when I am who I should be.

Desafinado (Slightly Out Of Tune)

2004-01-25T20:46:00.000-05:00

So on my way home from the video store last night, I decide on a whim to stop into this place I've played a couple of times, to check out who's on tonight. In part this is because I've got seven dollars in my pocket from Friday's efforts, and karma demands that I put some of it in someone else's bucket; in part it's because I'm curious as to what kinds of acts the owner's booking when he's not booking me.

Mostly, though, it's because (as noted before) I'm looking for perspective on how I'm doing at this gig business, and the best way to get that perspective is by comparison. So while I'm watching and enjoying the gig on one level, I'm very much taking my own measure, as well.

There's a Brazilian fellow on tonight, playing guitar and singing. "Have you seen this guy? This guy's fantastic," the owner tells me as he hands me a decaf latte. Certainly the crowd seems to dig him; there's a raucous little cluster near him as he whomps his way through "Just Like Heaven," a couple of Beatles tunes, "Garota de Ipanema," and a few songs em Portuguese.

And, you know, he's not bad—but he's far from great. He makes his way through the jazzy changes of the Jobim okay, but is clearly flummoxed by the waltz rhythm of "Hide Your Love Away." Mostly, though, he sounds—well, kinda like me. Me with a Brazilian accent.

Except that, frankly, I think I put on a better show. For one thing, I have a better sound mix; he's using a single mic, aimed roughly at his sternum, to capture both guitar and vocals. It works close-up, but it doesn't fill the room—it's thin and trebly towards the back. (For the record, I mix my CC67's horrible tinny pickup signal with a mic close to the soundhole, which gives me a serviceable balance of warmth and punch.)

Also, he sits throughout. I suppose he has to—he's playing a nylon-string classical on some numbers, and, as is traditional, there's no strap—but it robs the show of energy. I've tried sitting for gigs, and I just end up tired and depressed: I need to be up and bopping. Personal preference, I guess.

And the pauses between songs are interminable. When I don't actually segue song-into-song—and I'm doing a lot more of that these days, crafting my set lists as a series of mini-medleys—I'm always engaging the audience with jokes and stories. Some nights it's hard for me, but I make myself do it. Why? Because I can't afford to lose them.

My Brazilian compatriot just stops dead, takes a while to change instruments or tune up (insight: the appeal of my electronic tuner is not primarily its greater accuracy, but the way it speeds up my tuning process), squirming in his seat, sipping his drink, staring into the middle distance. The seconds drip by. Five seconds is an eternity in stage time; the gaucho lets a full minute elapse before unleashing another three-minute pop blast. And so it goes.

In a typical hour, I'll play twelve or fourteen songs. This guy averages, I'd say, ten. Bang for your buck? Advantage = Fear. ( All right, so no one pays to get in. Still.)

Two peculiarities: the Brazilian pins me instantly as a fellow player when he sees me staring at his technique—he's a lefty but plays a standard right-handed guitar upside-down, brushing the bass strings with his fingertips and the treble strings with his thumb, Libba Cotton-style.

Secondly: his girlfriend (or wife) sits stone-faced in the armchair closest to him throughout the performance, reading a magazine in Portuguese and studiously ignoring him as he plays. Occasionally he murmurs to her in the long pauses between songs. God only knows why she's there: her impassive presence is strange and uncomfortable.

D rarely comes to my gigs: it's not her duty, she says, to gaze at me adoringly all night. This once distressed me, but dammit, she's got a point. And her absence, if anything, forces me to extend myself more fully to the audience, instead of retreating into a hermetic solitude à deux. A lesson, there? Maybe.

In the end, I have a good time. I enjoy the show for what it is, have a few useful insights, and come away with a set of new questions to chew on: Am I trying too hard to engage the crowd? Is eclecticism a viable strategy after all (let's face it, Brazilian pop in Portuguese is as obscure to the wholly-Anglo audience as anything I'd ever play)? Where's the proper balance between the familiar and the exotic? Et bleedin' cetera.

Overanalyzing? What else is new?

Gig Diary, cont'd: ¡Viva Monkey!

2004-01-24T20:47:00.000-05:00

Date: Friday 23 January
Venue: One Way Café, Gates, NY
Duration: two hours (7:00 PM - 9:00 PM)
Proceeds: Seven dollars. Oh, the pain...

Wore
black jeans
cranberry three-button henley
blue chambray workshirt
black belt
white socks
lucky rock'n'roll shoes

The Crowd
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha FUCK.

The Rundown
On the plus side: this is probably my most consistent show ever in terms of quality. There are only a couple of brief moments of uncertainty—a missed chord here, a mumbled word there—but never that familiar, horrible deer-in-the headlights what-am-I-doing-here feeling. Given the unfamiliar surroundings and all the new material, that's both surprising and gratifying.

On the minus: I'm starting to get tired of playing great shows to empty rooms. Aside from two guys who stayed for most of the first set, I was playing most of the evening for five people—the owners and a few of their friends—while patrons came and went. It's practice, sure, and it's experience, and it keeps the rust off—but at this point I think I've got the fucking point, y'know? What good am I getting out of this that I can't get out of sitting in my living room learning new songs? I'm left with an awful emptiness at the end of the night.

Now, part of this is my own fault—I haven't promoted the show at all (my budget won't allow for posters, these days)—and part of it's the brutal cold, and part of it's a lack of awareness, because (a) the One Way is a relatively new shop and (b) I'm their first show ever, so there's simply no buzz in place, no rep. And part of it is the time, I think; I talk to the owners about it at the break and after the show, talk about their traffic patterns and gently suggest that, given their proximity to a movie theater and the relation of their spikes and troughs to showtimes, they might want to schedule the music for, say, 8:00 - 10:00 instead of 7:00 - 9:00.

The fact that there's an avalanche of patrons at 9:10, as I'm beginning my loadout, seems to bear out the wisdom of this suggestion. Ah well. Live and learn.

Highlights

A guy's watching me as I set up, and I hear him murmuring to his companion, "He's got a tuner, down by his feet, there..." and indeed I do. "Would you like to have a look?" I say, and he does. He's a guitarist himself, of course: we talk shop for a minute, talking about gear and such. I'm left both chuffed and a little anxious—Shit, now I've got to impress a guy who actually understands what I'm doing up here.

"In honor of the Chinese New Year," I say, as I strum my opening chords, "I'm doing nothing but songs about monkeys tonight." There's some laughter. I shake my head no, dismissively, and then, Eddie Izzard-style, nod a grave affirmative. Finally, I equivocate: "Well... some will be more obviously about monkeys than others, y'know?"

Just as all pop songs are CCM, if you're mentally substituting "Jesus" for "baby."

It's a new room, so the game plan tonight is to fade into the surroundings as much as possible, to not hog the foreground until and unless the atmosphere of the venue invites it. Start accordingly soft and mellow, kicking things up a wee bit with a hard-strummed, bluesy "Man Of Constant Sorrow." The crowd (such as it is) digs this. Maybe rockin' out is my strength, after all. Lord knows it's fun to do.

Torque down again with "All The Diamonds"—another song brand-new for me; I added it to the set list four days ago after deciding I was kinda sick of "Lovers In A Dangerous Time." It's achingly pretty, but slight—if I hit it too hard, it will fall apart. I don't hit it too hard.

"Seven Steps" has been giving me conniptions—Victor Feldman's tune rides a tricky groove and lightning changes, and I don't have Cassandra's luxury of handing off solos or scatting; I've got to make the interesting—make it essential—by approaching it as a singer/songwriter piece. Tonight it seems to work. It's quick and sharp and playful. I'd planned to interpolate a verse of Prince's "Seven" into the coda, but in the heat of the moment I forget. The ascending chromatic riff does inspire me to quote a couple of lines from "The Wind Cries Mary," though.

As with the Bruce Cockburn song, I've decided to rotate "Walking The Long Miles" out of the set for a while, to keep it fresh; I'd hate to grow either bored or boring. That said, I could play all Richard Thompson all night. "Wall Of Death" is an old favorite, and always fun to play.

"All God's Children" is another delicate beauty. I first heard it in a Wim Wenders movie, and I've loved it long. Self-indulgent? Sure. But it's still not the most obscure song I'll play tonight. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

There's a cassette tape among the promotional materials that I give to potential employers. I'm planning to record some upcoming shows so I have a new promo tape, because the one I use now was recorded years ago and doesn't reflect my current repertoire at all. For instance, I haven't played "One Way" in half a decade—but I'm inspired to pull it out tonight in honor of the venue's name. It's still a barn-burner; I've got knots in my shoulder and aches in my arms when it's through.

Brian, the manager, calls for "A New England"—which he heard me play on the same tape—and I'm happy to oblige (Christ, it's Old Home night). It's basically the Kirsty MacColl version, with the third verse but without the key change. Again, I haven't played it in ages, but it falls under my fingers like a dream.

I'm two verses into "Hallelujah" when a guy says to his wife, "Check it out—it's that song from Shrek!" It's all I can do to keep from cracking up. He's right, though; my version hews a lot closer to John Cale's than to Jeff Buckley's, or (eek) Bono's—or even, God help us, Leonard Cohen's original, which is frankly dire. Like "All Along The Watchtower," it's a song that would never truly blossom until it left its composer's hands.

Now, for the most obscure song I'll do all night: "Heartbeats," of course. I nearly struck this from the list a number of times, for a number of reasons—too hip for the room, too self-indulgent, too new, too untested, too difficult. And it's true that the guitar line, while not complex, demands a degree of precision that's not always easy to muster when one is trying to remember a set of unfamiliar lyrics. But, you know, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And if it's not a rapturous high point (it's probably too low-key for that, anyway) neither is it a godawful, blood-on-the-saddle catastrophe. A competent break-even.

Then on to a gender-swapped version of "Orphan Girl," one of those Gillian Welch songs that sounds like it was written two hundred years ago. The open G tuning works really nicely for what's basically a midtempo blues progression, lending the whole thing some of the ringing spaciness of Emmylou Harris's version (which was, of course, touched by the hand of Daniel Lanois—of whom more later).

Second set begins amiably with a string of recognizable oldies and no one in the place. Cut "The Walking Song" at the last minute—I'm running slightly long, it feels too musically similar to "Hallelujah," and I really don't feel like pouring out my guts to an empty house. It takes more out of me, singing one of my own songs, and the rewards are less immediate. Tonight, I just don't feel like putting in the effort—and it's never missed.

I've never played "Looking For Jack" live (though I've loved the song for years) because (in addition to being relatively obscure) it could be taken as hugely egocentric. Fuck it: it's a great song, funny and wistful in the best sense. The Sting-stylee cod-jazz arrangement of the album version does it no favors, mind, Herbie Hancock's piano notwithstanding—but I like the way I sound doing it.

My G string, which has been fraying at the second fret for weeks, finally breaks during "Join Together." It's nearly 9:00 by this point, so I just bring the song to a quick finish and call it a night, rather than restring just so I can play one wore song. It's a bit of a shame, though: I'm pretty happy with my workup of "The Maker" (which I play in an open G tuning), and have been looking forward to debuting it live.

Seeing Daniel Lanois at the Paradise, years ago, was a pivotal show for me. This was shortly after the release of For The Beauty Of Wynona. That record was a bit of a slow grower for me, after the warm immediacy of Acadie, and I wasn't sure what we were gonna get. I guess, given Lanois's careful attention to sonics, I was expecting a large, well-drilled backing band and a mellow groove. Instead, a revelation: Our Man Dan brought the Rock, fronting a nimble, tricksy power trio, fingerstyle Fender Jazzmaster cranked to Hendrix proportions. It was like a street-magic show—I could clearly see his hands at work and I still couldn't figure out how he did his tricks. That night, "The Maker" was just blistering, the long simmer of the verses (Dan's throaty murmur mingling with Darryl Johnson's gospel-angel croon) exploding into a long guitar-and-percussion coda. It sounded appropriately Biblical; like the Voice Of God, only louder.

I think I've caught a spark of that in my arrangement, and that's really all I can ask. So—yeah, slightly disappointed there.

What I Learned

Timing is everything.

First through the door doesn't count for as much as you'd think.

Sometimes, having fun is not enough to make the night worthwhile.

Being a professional will only get you so far when you're dealing with amateurs.

Gig Diary: Too Hip For This Room

2004-01-23T20:48:00.000-05:00

In the duo context, the division of labor was pretty mutable—our roles were, for the most part, not ironclad. While I acted mostly as the engine, motoring the songs forward with strums while Dan provided color and ornament, that equation could easily flip from song to song; while Dan was the primary theorist, shaping the sound around our strengths and limitations, I brought my share of arrangement ideas to the mix. There was one clear line of demarcation, though; Dan was a populist, while I was ever an obscurantist.

That's not to say that Dan pushed us to pander to the lowest common denominator—far from it, his disdain for what he dismisses as "Happy Hour stuff" is still sharp (we took it as a point of pride, for instance, that we never did a Jimmy Buffett song). But it was nearly as important to him that our material be accessible as that it be quality—accessible while shying away from the obvious. If we were to do a Dylan song, for instance, we'd steer away from war-horses like "Hard Rain" or "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Like A Rolling Stone" and towards things like "Positively 4th Street"—songs that would bring a pleasant shock of recognition, not the rolled eyes of "Oh, God, that again."

But neither would it be "This is cool—what is this?" So no "Political World," no "Cold Irons Bound," no "Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll." And certainly no Nick Cave, no Suzanne Vega, no John Wesley Harding, no Sixteen Horsepower...

Does it sound like I'm complaining? I'm not. My brother is and was the most supportive and adventurous musical partner I could ever ask for, and we brought our powers to bear on a dizzying range of material, all of it chosen and worked up in a spirit of equality and fairness, with no diktats, no quotas, and remarkably little ego. We were a democracy of two; in such a system, compromise is inevitable.

In my infrequent solo shows, I was uncompromising to a fault, indulging my taste for quirks and obscurities even when inappropriate. I remember one show I did in a community hall, a show that was taped for broadcast on local cable TV; there's a moment on the tape when I'm pounding my way through John Cale's "Dying On The Vine," spitting out the lyric Meet me when all the shooting's over... as the camera pans away from the stage over to a group of happy babies crawling on the floor. That about sums it up, right there.

During the break in that show, as I went out onto the fire escape for a smoke (I still smoked, then), the sound engineer came up to tell me how much he, personally, was enjoying the show: that's quite a set list, he said, some real buried treasures. Then he looked at me thoughtfully and said, "Maybe too hip for this room, though, y'know?"

SET I

Winter Song (Lindisfarne)
These Days (Browne)
Man Of Constant Sorrow (traditional)
What Is Life (Geo. Harrison)
All The Diamonds In The World (Cockburn)
Seven Steps (Miles, Cassandra Wilson)
After The Axe (J. Fear)
Wall Of Death (Thompson)
All God's Children (Simon Bonney)
One Way (Levellers)
Hallelujah (Cohen)
Heartbeats (The Knife by way of José Gonzáles)
Orphan Boy (Gillian Welch)
Ring Of Fire (Cash)

SET II

Sweet Thing (Van Morrison)
My Baby Just Cares For Me (Nina)
Tracks Of My Tears (Smokey)
Downtown (Petula)
Can't Help Falling In Love (Elvis)
Every Little Kiss (Hornsby)
Earn Enough For Us (XTC)
The Walking Song (J. Fear)
There She Goes (The La's)
God Bless' The Child (Lady)
Angel Of Harlem (U2)
Looking For Jack (Colin Hay)
Join Together (The Who)
The Maker (Daniel Lanois)

Everything in context: a coffeehouse isn't the family concert at the town green or the community center. There's a little more leeway to be dark or odd. At summer concerts and Happy Hours, the audience expects (and fairly so) to know every song by heart, or at least to recognize them all; in a coffeehouse setting, they'll accept a song that's new to them—usually assuming that I wrote it myself, unless I tell 'em otherwise.

The One Way Café, where I'm playing tonight, is a different kind of gigging experience for me; although it's not an explicitly Christian-identified establishment, its owners are Christian; there's a rack of Christian literature by the door; the usual ambiance is CCM—Christian Contemporary music. I'm their first "secular" booking—the first artist the owners have booked whom they didn't know from their church. I would like to make a good impression, and perhaps be invited back. I do not want to offend. I do not want to shock. I do not want to be too hip for the room.

Now, you might think this would be an easy gig for me, given my extensive background in church music—but that experience is of little help here. My expertise is in liturgical music, rather than (for lack of a better term) Christian entertainment; these are not songs to listen to, they are songs to pray.

CCM has its own conventions—as the joke goes, it's easy to write a CCM hit; just write a pop song, then every time the word "baby" appears in the lyrics, cross it out and write in "Jesus" instead—and its own audience, with its own tastes; if you try singing "Abide With Me" to this crowd, you're gonna get laughed out of the room. Whatever you think of CCM (and I can't stand most of the stuff, myself—to me it all sounds like jingles for house paint), its fans are vociferous and don't cotton to fakers. So I'm sidestepping the issue entirely, and sticking with my usual mix of pop, jazz, and postpunk rock—albeit with a spiritual kick.

A higher proportion than usual of new material this time around, much of it added at the last minute—maybe a bit reckless, given the disastrous consequences of under-rehearsal in recent shows. But many of these are songs I've been playing around the house for years, but have never taken live. The one I'm most worried about, though, is "Heartbeats": I first heard the acoustic version of this song just a few days ago, courtesy of Matthew's blog, and (as you can tell from the Comments section to that post) I've been debating ever since whether or not I should include it in the set. It's exactly the sort of thing that can lead to accusations of being too hip for the room—but in the end, it's too beautiful to not play.

And, there, if anywhere, is a clear line of demarcation.

Chrysostom

2004-01-07T20:49:00.000-05:00

Spent this morning working the coffeehouses, hustling for gigs, and Jesus Christ! when did I become such a sweet talker?

I still think of myself as a stumbling, stammering teenager when it comes to social interaction: but here I was, talking to the young and earnestly Christian owner of a brand-new café—so green he was that he asked in all seriousness if he would have to pay me to play (and why oh why did I not say yes?)—and within moments it was clear that I was in charge.

He had the power to hire me or not, but it was a forgone conclusion the moment I started talking—establishing my credibility with references to other places I've played, confirming my standing in his community by casually mentioning my sacred-music background, answering his questions about my technical needs with offhand confidence. I was open, reassuring, approachable—just the kind of musician you want as an ally when you're starting a new venture.

And I'm still stunned by my success. How did this happen?

Maybe it's genetic. My Dad was salesman, though he never really wanted to be; he was, I think, an introvert by nature. My brother is a salesman, and damned good at it—the proverbial consummate, in fact: extroverted, friendly, entirely genuine. He's got an expansiveness, a personality that fills any room he's in—and frankly, I find it kind of exhausting to be around him for a long time.

I've held sales jobs, in the past, and did fairly well at them, but vowed years ago to never work in sales again. I was never entirely comfortable with the process; neither, I think, was my father. I could never invest so much of myself—my reputation, my identity—in any product for which I could not be entirely certain of the quality.

That, I think, is the key difference, the source of my silver tongue: for the first time, I am selling the one product for which I can, at last, vouch 100%—myself.

Sublist 2: The Songs

2004-01-04T21:05:00.000-05:00

Pages from the American popular songbook—and a few imports: my personal checklist of jazz standards, each to be crossed off the list when I know it cold, changes and lyrics, and play it live from memory to my own satisfaction.

All Or Nothing At All
All The Things You Are
Aos Pes da Cruz (with Portuguese lyrics)
As Time Goes By
A-Tisket, A-Tasket
Bewitched, Bothered & Bewildered
Blue In Green (Sky & Sea) (Cassandra Wilson lyrics)
Blue Skies
Brazil
Caravan
Cheek To Cheek
Come Sunday
Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars)
Darn That Dream
Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye
A Foggy Day In London Town
Get Thee Behind Me, Satan
The Girl From Ipanema
Heart And Soul
The House I Live In
I'll Be Seeing You
It's Only A Paper Moon
I've Got You Under My Skin
La Vie En Rose (with French lyrics)
The Lady Is A Tramp
Meditaçao (with Portuguese lyrics)
My Funny Valentine
My Ship
The Nearness Of You
Nice Work If You Can Get It
A Night In Tunisia
A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square
On Green Dolphin Street
Rockin' In Rhythm (as arranged for guitar by Richard Thompson)
September Song
Seven Steps To Heaven (Cassandra Wilson lyric)
So In Love
Speak Low
Stella By Starlight
Stompin' At The Savoy
Swinging On A Star
Thanks For The Memory
That Old Black Magic
These Foolish Things
They Can't Take That Away From Me
Tuxedo Junction
The Very Thought Of You
Wait 'til You See Her
Weird Nightmare (as arranged for guitar by Bill Frisell)
When the Lights Go On Again (All Over the World)
Why Do I Love You?
Willow, Weep For Me

Some notes on my approach and relationship to this canon here.

ÜberList 2004

2004-01-01T21:12:00.000-05:00

Idea lovingly ganked from Kelly Sue, who in turn lovingly ganked it from Nikol Lohr...

PERSONAL

drop the first 30 pounds: use DietPower
see a doctor
see a dentist
get the moles under my arm looked at
get new clip-on shades
investigate contact lenses
investigate Lasik
bring the bling!
keep up a skin care regimen
get back waxed
less coffee, less soda, more water
eat more vegetables
eat less fat
aerobic exercise three times a week
walk a half-hour every day

KULCHAH

see one good movie a week...
...starting with movies on the List (see sublist 1)
read one book a week...
...starting with the ones you own but have never read
go to the movies at least four times
subscribe to The New Yorker
subscribe to The New Republic or TNR Digital

FRIENDS & FAMILY

[ private ]
[ private ]
[ private ]
go out to dinner once a month
have Jeff & Tammy over for dinner twice a month
write to Steve once a month
call Mom once a week
write to Cathy once a month
write to Dan & Mimi once a month
have dinner with Charlie & Renée
have dinner with Holly & Brad
read with Claire every night
keep up with Claire's school work
send Christmas cards & photos
visit Aunt Anne at least once

MAKE YRSELF USEFUL

get a day job
volunteer with the Girl Scouts
investigate paid church choir positions
spend less time overall online: 2 hours/day max
use online time more productively: action plans, prewriting, etc.
vacuum twice a week
TV: 1 full-length movie or 1 hr/night, not before 8 PM
cull books & CDs
rip choice CD cuts to .mp3
donate old books & CDs
recycle
get everything out of the old house
get a new computer/get old computer running (new hard drive)
set up a home network

BUY STUFF

a house
a new black suit
an electric trimmer
multitrack DAT recorder
acoustic-electric nylon-string guitar
effects pedals (delay, chorus)

VERBIAGE

update blog three times a week
recommence dream journal
start keeping a reading journal
start a keeping a film journal
participate in Nanowrimo 2004...
...and finish my novel!

PROJECTS

write a general interest magazine article
sell a general interest magazine article
cultivate comics artists
finish OGN script Seven Souls
find an artist for Seven Souls
find out what it would take to get jackfeerick.com up & running
get jackfeerick.com up & running
fill a sketchbook

OUR FAIR CITY

find a local comics shop
take a summer house at the lake
get a membership at the Strong Museum
spend a day at SeaBreeze
take two day-trips to Ontario
see a film at the Eastman House
see a film at the Little Theatre
day trip to Spencerport
go out to see a local band
see some live local theatre or dance
day trip to Skaneateles, including lunch at Doug's
day trip to Ithaca
two day trips to state park(s)
attend Scottish festival this summer

MUSIC

play out once a month
write at least three new songs
find at least three new places to play
learn one pop standard per month (see sublist 2)
learn more about digital recording
record some shows
investigate affordable studio time
record some studio demos
make CDs to sell at shows
play at a summer festival

SPIRITUAL

get Sam baptized
church every weekend!
pray every day, morning & evening
recommence Morning Pages
work through The Artist's Way
work through The Vein of Gold
work through Tarot For Your Self
keep up with Claire's religious education
more compassion, less anger

Gunfighter

2003-12-07T21:18:00.000-05:00

Another bit of creative writing from the archives. True story, this one—well, more or less.

from Writing Exercise: The Hat

It's a good gig, as these things go, thinks the bass player: the crowd is well-oiled and receptive to their off-kilter cowpunk, he's locked in with the drums, and the mix is punchy and pleasingly loud. He turns to glance over his shoulder: from under the broad brim of his battered gunfighter hat, he can see drumsticks cutting arcs in the air. He swings away, looking down at his bass, at the cheroot smouldering between the fuck-off and ring fingers of his pick hand, at his foot stomping time. He does not look at the singer, only four feet away from him but too close to the crowd for his comfort: his hatbrim is pulled low so none can see his eyes.

They're opening for a national band tonight, which is some comfort—the crowd, however enthusiastic, isn't there specifically to see them. That will make it easier to get away afterwards; to push through the terrifying throng with a mask of indifference, to sprawl on the backstage sofa feigning sleep, hat over face siesta-style, counting the hours until Last Call, until the room clears out, until he stumbles out to collect his pay and go home.

Alone at last.

True Stories From Imaginary Wars

2003-12-04T21:38:00.000-05:00

Browsing in search of something entirely other through Barbelith's Creation forum—the writers' collective that thinks it's a message board—I kept running across little fragments I'd posted and forgotten: bits of verse, microfictions, sketches. I barely remember writing this bit but somehow it seems appropriate...

from Return of the Base Canard

My tenure as electric-zither player for the pioneering folk-funk band Flanagan's Peascods was tumultuous. Arising from the ashes of the Bozeman, Montana "flunkie" scene (literally—the Lazy i Club, epicenter of the scene, was burned to the ground during a concert by local flunkie stars Withered 'n' Dyed, in what was later discovered to be a fire started when an overheated amplifier tube ignited the cattle farts permeating the building: the future members of Flanagan's Peascods were the only survivors of the blaze), Flanagan's Peascods melded cowboy yodels and phat beats to the plaintive joiks of lead singer Kaigal Fluugi's native Urkutsk. With our flamboyant look (furry goatskin chaps, Beatle boots and fezzes), Kaigal's dynamic overtone-singing, and the supafly rhythms of drummer Flex McKechnie, we began to make a name for ourselves across the frost belt and were quickly signed by Bodean Records after an intense bidding war: our debut disc Steppe Lively debuted at #37 with a bullet.

The crowds got bigger, the booze got louder, the drug dealers' breasts got firmer, and the pressure to be more and more spectacular began to crush us. Our unscrupulous manager, Dunkirk Dunharrow, contrived a fantastic publicity tactic: doing Def Leppard one better, he would arrange for our drummer Flex to lose both arms in a horrific car crash, and then return in triumph, aided by new technology. If only he had told Flex before that fatal night... if only I hadn't borrowed Flex's Jaguar to head out to the Shop'n'Save to buy Kaigal fresh pantyhose...

...if only I had known, then I wouldn't be sitting in a double-wide trailer, wearing a urine-stained bathrobe and typing this with a pencil between my teeth as I watch (again) a well-worn videotape of Flanagan's Peascods collecting their six Grammy Awards... with a brand-new zitherist. Computers may be able to play the drums, but the zither requires the human touch, and that, alas, I am no longer able to give.

Pop And Me

2003-11-29T21:41:00.000-05:00

My brother Dan is seven years older than I, and we've been playing music together since I was about sixteen, since he drafted me to play keyboards (and later bass) for his scrappy semi-pro GB band—me underage at open-bar wedding receptions, playing for hours dozens of songs we barely knew for Chatham crowds too drunk to care. The material wasn't always to my taste, but those gigs were my music school. I learned how to pick up tunes and progressions on the fly, how to bluff, how to handle an audience with humor. Most importantly, I learned the value of being an entertainer, as opposed to an "artist."

There were other bands, together and separately. The last—an acoustic duet that played coffee-shops for beer money—was probably our most adventuresome, musically. I played six-string guitar, while Dan alternated between twelve-string, mandolin, and various percussion instruments; we both sang, in classic tight brother-harmonies; and we played, um, an eclectic repertoire.

That is to say, we played songs that an acoustic duo had no damned business playing. "I Got You," from Split Enz. Cream's "Badge." Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade Of Pale." The Left Banke's "Walk Away Renée." Songs by the Cure, R.E.M., Little Feat, Van Morrison.

And we played them in minimal arrangements, stripping the tunes down to the essence and then re-building them in witty, interesting ways. Our key criterion for choosing songs was; Can we make this our own? If the best we could hope for was to re-create the record, then we gave the song a pass. Always, the goal was an embrace of Mies's lovely paradox—to add something, by the very act of stripping away.

My acoustic guitar drove many of those arrangements—while Dan made 'em fly, I was holding down the bottom, providing the structure and the heartbeat; my right hand was a precision machine, and on a hot night I could've punched it through six inches of concrete and never missed a beat.

That worked in the duet context. But I'm learning (all over again) that solo performance requires both power and finesse—requires me to both pump and soar. Five years of hymnody left my guitar-playing more subtle and inventive, less reliant on sheer velocity, and when I think of it objectively, I guess I'm pretty good.

But I am so far from where I want to be.

Part of it, I think, is that I'm lacking the necessary perspective. Although my life allows me time to practice and, occasionally, play out, I haven't actually seen a gig in ages. Except for a brief walk-through at Jitters on a Friday, where I heard two would-be musos crucifying "Little Wing" at excruciating length, I cannot remember the last time I was in a coffeehouse as a patron. And so I have no idea what kind of shows my peers are putting on—how ambitious and eclectic their programming, the general state of their chops—no idea even of the clichés to be avoided.

The bar I've set for myself is people like Richard Thompson or Luka Bloom; guys with a presence that puts a chill in your spine, with a sound that fills the room, with wide-ranging musical ideas that somehow all fit together perfectly, guys with an offhand mastery of mood and pacing—oh, and, incidentally, instrumental virtuosos in the bargain.

I know, myself, how far short I fall of that ideal.
But is anyone else aiming that high?

The First Snow Winter Carnival (Gig Diary, cont'd)

2003-11-16T10:12:00.000-05:00

Date: Saturday 15 November
Venue: Leaf & Bean Coffee Co., Chili NY
Duration: two hours (8:00 PM - 10:00 PM)
Proceeds: $7.00. Seven. Fucking. Dollars. (More on that later)

Wore
black jeans
black shoes & belt
white button-down long-sleeved shirt
wolf-hammer-cross pendant

Fancying myself a jazzman, I considered, for a while, wearing my suit, or perhaps just the gabardine slacks and a decent tie—collar open, of course. Trying this look out in the mirror, I had an epiphany: This doesn't make you look like Miles, or even like Harry Connick Jr—it makes you look like a drunken salesman singing karaoke in the airport lounge while waiting for his flight back to Topeka.

The Crowd
Good, as it always is here. Older people, engaged, chatty, well-informed, and a scattering of young families—all the sorts of people I can engage with, during the set and at the break.

The Rundown
Sweet William has rearranged the room since the last time I played here, so the performer ( and the performer's tip-jar) is now at the back, instead of, you know, right by the front door so as to catch each patron both entering and leaving. A stunning innovation, this, allowing you to play a great show, fill the house, and STILL MAKE NO MONEY.

I don't know—I can see the point, as it divides the room neatly into a comfortable, intimate space to see music and a more chaotic space in which to order and consume food & bevvies; but it also make it much less likely that a casual customer will drop a buck in the basket, as doing so entails making a trek back beyond the room-divider. Last time I played this room, I was upfront—and though I played a show not as good, to a house not as full, I made four times as much money. Why? Because you had to walk past the basket on your way into or out of the house.

In my church-musician days, I once met an organist who would only play instrumentals at the while the offering was being taken—never anything that people had to sing. Why? Because, he said, the take goes down when the congregation has to sing at the offertory: "They can't reach for their hymnals and their wallets at the same time," he said.

Lesson: People may sincerely wish to contribute to a good cause—but their generosity fades if you make it difficult for them to do so.

Highlights
Start with the lowlight first: "Don't Get Around Much Anymore" was a slaughter—mutually assured destruction: I destroy it, and it kills me. Kills me dead. And I so, so wanted it to be good; it's a rolling-and-tumbling groove with a sweet little Django-style stinger of a solo, melody punctuated by fat crashes of ascending chords. But my fingers, so nimble and relaxed in rehearsal, are thick and stiff. Playing too hard. I think—I think—that the amplification problems that will plague me throughout this set begin here; that I can't hear my own guitar well, which leads me to overcompensate. A nasty trifecta—a new song, the first fingerpicked song of the night (after the strumfest of "Sweet Thing," this is, in effect, a soundcheck), and a fucked-up cable connection conspire in disaster.

Introduce "Baby Just Cares" by saying,"The end of the year is the time we remember those who've died—much as I'm doing up here..."

Pull out one of my favorite absurdist between-song riffs; "I'd like to introduce you to the band..." Long pause. "...ah, maybe later."

"Join Together" is always a treat for me (I can hack around in drop D all night); a mess, but a joyous, ramshackle mess. But the fun is slightly dampened by my guitar cable giving up the ghost entirely at the second chorus—it literally falls out of the guitar's body. Am I deterred? Reader, I am not; I lean hard into the instrument mic and saw the bastard through. Over the long vamp, I call out, "Everybody, look at the person to your left... now the person to your right... See, I told you I was gonna introduce you to the band!"

At the set break I assess the damage: the cord's okay, but the CC67's own jack assembly—which is held inside the hollow body by a nut and washer around the jackhole—is coming loose, as it has a tendency to do. Now, I've had the nut fall off the outside of the guitar, and the jack assembly fall inside the soundbox, and it is a bitch to get back in place—you've got to unstring the whole thing and fish around trying to get the plug lined up with the drill-hole—and that's assuming you haven't lost the little nut in the first place when it fell onto the floor and under your fridge... I've no desire to repeat this, so I finger-tighten the nut as best I can, and soldier on.

The second set begins with The Dessert Challenge, a trick I swiped from Dan: I pledge to buy the dessert of choice for anyone who can identify artist who originally recorded the song in question (in this case "Winter Song"). The challenge, tonight, goes unanswered.

"Might As Well Be Spring" redeems me for "Don't Get Around," I think. It's a lively little bossa nova (my version owes a lot to Astrud Gilberto's, from the Carnegie Hall concert with Stan Getz; knowing that Getz was having an affair with Astrud at the time makes some of that record's spoken interludes downright creepy, as when Getz introduces Astrud as "the wife of the great artist")—played breakneck but deft; it lilts—and it's the best "jazz" moment of the night.

It's got the best spoken intro of the night, too. See, at the turnaround the lyric uses the word gay, in its original sense—I feel so gay, in a melancholy way—and for a while I felt kind of strange singing it. I knew, intellectually, there was no real reason that should be so, but there it was. And rather than try to gloss over it, or push those feelings aside, I turn it into a riff on language and sexual stereotyping, starting with an affectionate crack at Queer Eye For The Straight Guy (with its dodgy premise that basic life-skills—grooming oneself, cooking, dressing, keeping a home, and handling oneself socially—are somehow gay-specific, rather than simply prerequisites for grown-ups of all orientations), into the familiar linguistic culture shock we experience in high school when we read a 19th Century novel (sample sentence: "The fading light revealed a queer figure, bent, as he was, beneath a bundle of faggots..."), and at last into the admission that Here I am, straight, married with kids, and singing show tunes—all bets are off, folks. The crowd, God bless 'em, keys right into it; sometimes, you just dial the right wavelength.

Some guy makes the mistake of asking me why "Downtown" is the greatest song ever written. I don't think he's quite expecting the answer I give him.

I've been playing "Walking The Long Miles Home" at or near the end of my sets for some months now. It's one of my favorite Richard Thompson songs, successfully blending several modes of songwriting—and it's Richard's songwriting that I value far more than his much-vaunted guitar-playing. He's a fascinating case for tracking a songwriter's progress; he's been performing and writing for so long (35 years!), and so prolifically, that you can chart his growth by decades. He's never produced an album that didn't show some flash of brilliance, but he's always suffered from inconsistency. 1986's Daring Adventures was a nadir of sorts; 1999's Mock Tudor (from which "Walking" is drawn) may have been a peak—all killer, and, for once, no filler.

Richard's always been a great character writer, and he's always been capable of great humor, and he's always had an ear for a great tune—but he hasn't always been able to bring the three strains together. The lighter moments on his earlier records tended toward cheap laughs, whimsy, even outright inanity; not so "Walking The Long Miles Home." Though it's a funny song, there aren't any boffo punchlines—it's more of a wry, affectionate character sketch.

And it's a joy to play—loping country-blues rhythm; tasty double-stop licks that let me show off a little, but which never outstay their welcome; drop D fingerpicking with alternating bass in a loose, lazy groove. As always, I end with a smile on my face.

What I Learned
Goodwill does not translate into cash all by itself. In gigging as in busking as in real estate; location, location, location.

Take five minutes to take an actual, honest-to-Allah soundcheck. Check your equipment thoroughly before you go on.

Self-deprecation is only an effective defense if you don't actually suck.

An audience likes it when you talk to them, but they like it even more when you listen.

Gig Diary: Hazy Shades

2003-11-14T10:14:00.000-05:00

Another back-to-back weekend of gigs. With any luck, last week's workmanlike tromp at Jitters has blown out the cobwebs for a stellar night at the Leaf. It's Greatest Hits, plus a plentiful smattering of jazz...

SET I

Sweet Thing (Van Morrison)
Don't Get Around Much Any More (E.K. Ellington)
My Baby Just Cares For Me (Nina Simone)
Night & Day (Cole Porter)
The Walking Song (J. Fear)
What Is Life (Geo. Harrison)
Werewolves Of London (Zevon)
The Whole Of The Moon (Waterboys)
Tracks Of My Tears (Smokey Robinson)
Every Little Kiss (Hornsby)
Earn Enough For Us (XTC)
Join Together (The Who)

SET II

Winter Song (Lindisfarne)
These Days (Browne)
It Might As Well Be Spring (Rodgers & Hammerstein)
Purple Jesus (J. Fear)
My Favorite Things (Rodgers & Hammerstein)
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young)
Downtown (Petula)
I Wish I Were In Love Again (Rodgers & Hart)
After The Axe (J. Fear)
God Bless' The Child (Lady)
Angel Of Harlem (U2)
Walking The Long Miles Home (Thompson)
Ring Of Fire (Cash)
Lullaby Of London (MacGowan)

Like I said, not a huge number of surprises, here, and only a couple of new songs. I always feel like there's a lot riding on a Leaf & Bean gig; it's a step up from Jitters, with a better scene and a more appreciative clientele—so in planning these sets I lean on (a) solid, proven material, and (b) more pop standards. Some gigs are good for screwing around and experimenting, but I don't feel as comfortable doing that at Leaf & Bean—if people are coming out specifically for a good night of music, and not just for a cup o' joe, then I feel obliged to deliver.

So I'm feeling pretty good: I've been working out my banter in a sort of index-card kind of way—I'm not married to any particular phrasing, but I know where I'm going with it—and I think this set list takes you on a journey such that you know you've been someplace, and taken a few twists and turns, but it all makes sense in the end. It's The Usual Suspects, rather than a David Lynch movie—or, worse yet, Audition (in any sense).

These Boots Were Made For

2003-11-10T10:09:00.000-05:00

I've no huge natural affinity for country music, any more than for the blues, so it surprises me to have written a handful of honkytonk-style songs. The storyteller in me gravitates toward the genre's narrative tradition, I suppose, as well as its religiosity. And I dig the tensions that arise where country and rock rub up against each other—that's where the mythology of the American West can be played out with appropriate epic sweep, where the standard oater becomes the Spaghetti Western.

This song owes something to Cash, of course, who worked those tensions so beautifully for so many years; and, obviously to "Ghost Riders In The Sky"—but also to Leonard Cohen (whose "Hallelujah" isn't a million miles from this, musically), to Nick Cave (especially his record The Good Son), and even to Alan Moore, for his classic Phantom Stranger story "Footsteps."

Is this a "serious" song? It's hard for me to say, even though I'm the one who wrote it. Because C&W is not my native tongue, it's easy to treat it as a joke—and indeed, on the page "The Walking Song" looks like an outsider's parody of genre conventions. It's a fragile thing; if I played it a little louder, sang it a little harder, added just a hint more of a drawl, it would fall apart and end up just a comedy number. When I'm playing it, though, voice barely rising past a murmur, I'm completely in the moment—telling campfire tales.

Tunewise, the main points of interest are the I-VIm vamp and the shuffling country-waltz rhythm; this particular walking song has a gimp leg, for reasons made clear below. Verses have a straightforward sixteen-bar structure, sticking to I-IV-V with occasional dips to the relative minor: the bridge centers on the minor VI, avoiding the tonic entirely, which adds a little drama to the return of the verse.

Here's the spoken intro I gave it at Jitters:

When I was a bit younger, I used to participate in the occasional amateur athletic event for charity. One year I was doing a distance walk—it was the last year I did it, actually—and at the seven-mile mark of a twenty-mile course, I started to feel this odd... grinding sensation in my left hip.
I thought, "Uh-oh."
That's not what this song is about.
But I started writing it right about then, in my head, and by the time I got across the finish line, I knew it pretty well.

The Walking Song

Long have I been a-walking
and sorely my feet have bled
There's miles of bad road behind me now
and many more miles ahead
No horse have I to carry me on
nor have I wings to fly
so I'll just keep on a-walking
watching the miles pass by

Long have I been a-walking
walking for many a day
and the Cuban heels of my gaucho boots
have long been worn away
My steps raise dust on the open plains
and sparks on the cobbled streets
but I'll just keep on a-walking
with no rest for my weary feet

And I've crossed the burning deserts
and I've slogged on in the pouring rain
and I'll walk despite the weariness
and the darkness and the pain
I'll walk to spite the hardship
though my legs have grown stiff and sore
Tracking the cloven footsteps
of the one who's gone before

I ain't walking for no dirty money
I ain't walking for to prove no point
and I'll walk despite my blistered feet
and the aching in my joints
And I will walk to spite the hunger
and I neither will crawl nor ride
for I'm tracking down the Devil
for to pay for my sin of pride

The Pink Moon Eclipse-O-Rama Cabaret (Gig Diary, cont'd)

2003-11-09T10:09:00.000-05:00

Date: Saturday 8 November 2003
Venue: Jitters Café, N. Chili, NY
Duration: two and a half hours (7:00 PM - 9:30 PM)
Proceeds: $11.00

Wore
skinny black jeans
black shoes & belt
dark blue geometric paisley shirt / green T-shirt
wolf-hammer-cross pendant

The Crowd
Sparse, but that's not bothersome: I knew what to expect going in. Gary's not in attendance, either, which makes me feel a bit of an ass for so front-loading the evening with Da Blooze.

The Rundown
Loose. Good mood, good time. Tonight's more or less for me—a rehearsal, really.

Highlights
I nearly start the show with an off-the-cuff version of Nick Drake's "Pink Moon," in honor of the lunar event this evening, but in the end decide against it: whimsy and good intentions will only take you so far, if you don't actually know the damned song.

From the more recent (post-1960) pages of the Great American Songbook, it's Nina Simone's "My Baby Just Cares For Me," in a modified claw-hammer ragtime style with three fingers plucking chords. It's a great groove, when you lock into it—right wrist a limping metronome while the bass skips merrily along. The on-the-fly gender-reassignments on the lyric are great fun, too: Mel Gibson is not her style / and even Tom Cruise's million-dollar smile... This'n's a keeper.

Also nail "Wish I Were In Love." Nail it. Good and hard. Finally. Thought that fucker was gonna be the death of me.

On the other hand, "Tangled Up In Blue" gets away from me. Blindsided: I've sung this song about a hundred times! Wha'hoppen? I'm so rattled I completely skip "Can't Help Falling."

End of the year always makes me think about mortality, which led to me casting an eye over this year's obituaries for potential songs. Robert Palmer left us this year, of course, and though I liked him well enough, I'd never actually learned any of the songs. As it turns out, there's a funny thing about "Addicted To Love": it's a blues song. It doesn't sound like it, but when you isolate the guitar riff, it's a whisker away from something Willie Dixon might've written. Take the tempo down a notch, and there's a slow, grinding roadhouse number inside.

However, this revelation is in itself useless—a clever conceit is not enough to produce a good performance. It would help, for instance, if I actually knew the words, or could come up with a decent spoken introduction. But I don't and can't, so the end result is a mess.

So was "Poison Girl." That Big Stoopid Riff is more subtle and complex than it sounds (as with much of Chris Whitley's stuff), but the real dealbreaker was that my heart just isn't in it.

I've known "Whole Of The Moon" since an old hometown friend turned me on to The Waterboys in our freshman year of college—but I've never played it live before, because I could never work out a solo arrangement that pleased me: I tried a jaunty ragtime thing, but it never had the requisite drama. Recently, though, I heard Mandy Moore's cover, and whatever you think of the effect Moore's big, brassy voice has on the lyric, the backing track is just dynamite—there's a sunny, strummy, almost worldbeat feel to it, and something just clicked.

I've built my arrangement around a strum pattern not unlike that to Filter's "Take A Picture," which lets me play lots of different three-string inversions against open A and D strings: it's only three chords, really, but played about a dozen different ways. The drama comes not so much from the changes in the chord progression, which stays static, but from the change in the voicings. Thus do I refute those who proclaim in their ignorance that 1st vs. 3rd position for a Dmaj7 is an unimportant distinction.

On a good night my voice has three octaves, and while I don't feel compelled to use every note that's in there, I do like hitting the Big Notes, just cos I can. Now, when Thom Yorke sings "High & Dry," he goes to a weedy falsetto for the high notes on the chorus. Most of the song I sing quite softly, right up on the mic—but when the chorus comes up I step back about four feet and just roar it out, full throat. It occurs to me now that I might be missing the point.

"Now Be Thankful" would have been my sardonic/sincere version of a seasonal song, but it's really, really not good tonight. The guitar part has to be both flawless and offhand in order to work properly, and I'm criminally underrehearsed. And the tessitura of the thing is a killer: I'm at capo 5 (playing in G, for a vocal key of C), and the bottom notes are still too low for me. Damned if I'm taking it to capo 7, though: more intonation problems than it's worth, and for all the punch the sound will have I might as well play a goddam ukulele.

At the set break, I step outside into the old and look at the moon, a half-extinguished, red-rimmed coal on God's barbecue, and wish for the millionth time that I hadn't quit smoking.

Step back in for the second set, strap up, and launch into "Winter Song." It takes me a few moments of shapeless noodling in four-four to realize that I have, for whatever reason, started the song in the wrong meter. Getting back to six-eight is more difficult than it should be. Lindisfarne's original recording of this, BTW, really is remarkably beautiful—no drums, pristine acoustic guitars, a splash of mandolin and warm, melodic bass guitar—which makes its mystical hippie-Christian sentiments endearing, rather than cloying.

Ironically, the first time I heard these folk-rock also-rans, they scared me half to death. I must have been seven or eight. At the time, I liked to tape songs off the radio (literally—placing my portable cassette player in front of the radio speaker), and record my own comments in between, pretending I was a DJ. One day I left the recorder running while I left the room for a few minutes—the radio was in my parents' room—and when I listened to the playback I was spooked as hell by the song I heard; what I hear now is a mildly creepy ghost ballad in the quasi-Child tradition, but I was an imaginative kid. I never even found out who sang the song—I threw the tape away and avoided the radio for about a month. It was only last year that I ran a Google search on the phrase that had so rattled me —which I had never forgotten—and so discovered Lindisfarne and, eventually, "Winter Song."

Debuted another original tonight, a country waltz called "The Walking Song." The nod to Nick Cave is tongue-in-cheek, but the song itself—well, it's all a joke, until it isn't. Sparse, but pretty. My sister-in-law is at the show: she tells me later that this is her favorite moment of the night.

It feels risky, even slightly foolish, to take such a huge, overproduced rock classic as "What Is Life" and arrange it as a fingerpicked folk song, swapping electricity for nuance. I'm still undecided about it.

I've got a couple of minutes, so I throw in "Man Of Constant Sorrow" in a drop D, staying close to the spirit of Dan Tyminski's version, though (obviously) without his virtuosic chops. Fun nonetheless.

Ended with "Lullaby Of London," another song I've played a million times, and it's ghastly—an utter trainwreck. Amazing, to be tripped up by something I thought I knew so well.

Afterwards, a man in the parking lot compliments me on my playing, which I can't help but find ironic.

What I Learned
Falsetto would not be an admission of weakness: and even if it were, sometimes weakness is what a song needs.

Torquing the energy level down to a constant simmer (with a few carefully-placed explosions) is a viable strategy for getting through the night.

It's not always the tricky new songs that will kill you—sometimes it's the one you've played a skidillion times, the one's you think you know so well that you don't need to practice them. Jerk.

You're reaching a point where you can, for long stretches, churn out songs with efficient-if-not-soulless predictability. This is called professionalism; and though it is less memorable than either ecstatic flights or operatic fuck-ups, it is probably a good middle path to pursue.

Gig Diary: Grind It Out

2003-11-07T10:11:00.000-05:00

And grind it is. The second of what's going to be three gigs in four weeks—it's almost like having a regular job...

Another show at Jitters. Not a lot to say about this one: I figure it'll be sparesely attended, useful mainly for keeping me on my toes and exposing the weaknesses of my set list, setting up my return to Leaf & Bean next week.

SET I

Sweet Thing (Van Morrison)
My Baby Just Cares For Me (Nina Simone)
I Wish I Were In Love Again (Rodgers & Hart)
Tangled Up In Blue (Bob Dylan)
Can't Help Falling In Love (Elvis Presley)
Autumn Leaves (English lyric by Johnny Mercer)
Purple Jesus (J. Fear)
Addicted To Love (Robert Palmer)
Poison Girl (Chris Whitley)
She Caught The Katy (Taj Mahal)
Spoonful (Howlin' Wolf)
Werewolves Of London (Warren Zevon)
Every Little Kiss (Bruce Hornsby)
Earn Enough For Us (XTC)
Whole Of The Moon (The Waterboys)
High & Dry (Radiohead)
Now Be Thankful (Fairport Convention)
Join Together (The Who)

SET II

Winter Song (Lindisfarne)
These Days (Jackson Browne)
Suspicious Minds (Elvis Presley)
The Walking Song (J. Fear)
Behind Blue Eyes (The Who)
Lovers In A Dangerous Time (Bruce Cockburn)
What Is Life (George Harrison)
Downtown (Petula Clark)
After The Axe Has Fallen (J. Fear)
Tracks Of My Tears (Smokey Robinson)
God Bless' The Child (Billie Holiday)
Angel Of Harlem (U2)
Ring Of Fire (Cash)
Lullaby Of London (The Pogues)

Mixing it up a little here. I like to vary my lists from show to show: in any two consecutive shows, at least a quarter of the songs will be different. In this case, about a quarter of them are actually brand new, never played before played to an audience.

A set within a set: as a bone for Gary, a blues mini-set within the first set ("Purple J" through "Werewolves"). Feel the love, man: see what I do for you?

Introducing another original into the set, too, bringing it up to three.

Finally: the sets are uneven, time to allow me to take my break when the lunar eclipse will be at its most spectacular. A man's got to have his priorities straight.

Furies Of The Guillotine

2003-10-29T10:12:00.000-05:00

Hey, I bow to no one in my love for Richard Thompson's music, and I won't deny that this song, which received its live debut the other night, has his fingerprints all over it. If you're gonna steal, steal from the best, right? But I do like the lyric, as dour and portentous as it is: the title phrase had been rattling around in my head for a good ten years before I did anything with it, and I ended up using the metaphor (the twinned metaphors, really, of the execution and the end of the love affair) as a way to work out some of my anger and disbelief over the We Saw The Wolf debacle...

Minor key: verse stays pretty close to the tonic, dropping down to the VII for the tagline, while the refrain goes from the VI to the minor IV, with the release ("didn't have the time to cry") a III-VII resolving to the I on "down." There's a little partial-chord riff after verse 3 and the first chorus.

This is a song about that feeling that you get when you wake up on a hot night and turn your pillow over to get the cool spot, and when you lay your head down down you get this shiver because you feel like there's this cold clammy hand REACHING OUT TO GRAB YOU BY THE NECK...

...it's just me, isn't it...

After The Axe Has Fallen
when the axe bites into the chopping block
there's the sigh of relief and the state of shock
after the axe has fallen
it's all over but the shouting now
the church bells ring and the crowd thins out
after the axe has fallen
no Christian burial no funeral Mass
just a message in lipstick on the mirror glass
after the axe has fallen
any trace will wash away with the next good rain
get some sawdust now to cover those stains
after the axe has fallen
I had my face to the ground
wrong way around
thinking that I had it made
then I felt the cold touch
on the back of my neck
of the edge of a heavy blade
and I didn't have time to cry before it all came down
hands up behind the back
fall to your knees and the sky turns black
after the axe has fallen
an unkindness of ravens is a-drawing near
looking for something for a souvenir
after the axe has fallen
I had my face to the ground
wrong way around
and they forced me to the killing floor
then I felt the cold touch
on the back of my neck
like I'd felt it my dreams before
and I didn't have time to cry before it all came down

As originally conceived in the full-band arrangement, there's an epic guitar solo at the coda that builds from a few scattered notes to a full-on string-bending frenzy. It's virtuosic and emotionally devastating and allows me to throw all kinds of heroic shapes and poses and make all my best guitar faces. It'd be very cool—you'll just have to trust me on that.

Post-Mortem: Elvis Autopsy (Gig Diary, cont'd)

2003-10-27T10:12:00.000-05:00

Date: Saturday 25 October 2003
Venue: Jitters Café, 4357 Buffalo Road, Chili, NY
Duration: two-and-a-half hours (two sets, one ten-minute break)
Proceeds: $16.75 (tips)

Wore
black jeans (with cuffs)
white socks
black lace-up shoes
black leather belt
cranberry-red button-down shirt over navy blue T-shirt
"wolf cross" pendant on black thong (borrowed from D)

Instrument: Ovation CC67
Amplification: Crate PA 4 (60 watts) with two 12" speaker cabs

The Crowd
Nearly nonexistent, again. The combination of heavy rain, the final World Series game, and zero promotion by the venue meant the room was mostly empty—just as when I played it last time. I figured on this going in, really—this was primarily for me, to keep myself limber and work out some new material.

The Rundown
Pretty much as originally listed: moved "Werewolves Of London" up to the first set to accommodate a request, shuffled second set slightly so as not to play "Purple Jesus" and "After the Axe" back-to-back.

Highlights

When Dan and I worked as a duo, "Couldn't Have Come" was our opener for about five years. It's a comfortable old shoe of a song. I'll admit, I do miss the vocal harmonies, but I'm very pleased with myself for working out a solo arrangement that allows me to play the refrain's mandolin melody in the bass strings while keeping the driving strum going on top. It really needs that countermelody to make it skip along.

Truncated "These Days" (F major, capo 3) from four verses to three when I realized there was no way I was going to make it through verse 3.

"Wish I Were In Love" was better than it had ever been: all the woodshedding's been paying off. I stumbled where I always stumble, though—coming out of the first refrain. This is one of Hart's funniest lyrics, and it's a struggle to keep from breaking up as I sing it; I can get through the bit about "the faint aroma of performing seals," but there's something about the word "ga-ga" that always causes me to snort.

"Spoonful" (drop D, slide) still needs some work. Oddly enough, I think part of the problem is that I sit when I practice at home, but stand when I play out; the change in the angle of the instrument throws my fingering and articulation out of whack, especially when I'm playing bottleneck. I'm shooting for something between the swagger of the classic Howlin' Wolf version and the spooked angularity of Chris Whitley's, but it's just not there yet.

"It's nearly Hallowe'en, and it wouldn't be Hallowe'en if I didn't play a sixteen-bar blues about vampires..." A friend of mine, upon hearing I was to play "Bloodletting," begged me not to. I couldn't imagine why—until I remembered that during the time of its original release he'd been going through a college Goth phase of his own. The song is probably tainted for him by horrible memories of dorm rooms full of clove smoke, and skinny kids in black all nodding earnestly; "So true, man. You were a vampire, and now I am the walking dead. . ."

After "Bloodletting," I'd announced offhandedly that I'd be singing one about werewolves later in the night. At the front table a little girl, no more'n a year or two older than Claire, sat with her parents: she begged me to play "the werewolf song" right away. Hell, I was cool with that. This one's always great fun to tear through, and it's even better when there's an eight-year-old bopping in her chair and singing Ahhh-wooooo along with you. She asked for it again about twenty minutes later, and again I was happy to oblige: I like to mess with the words, sometimes interpolating bits of the Black Velvet Band's version (especially the bit about Oscar Wilde), and enjoyed the opportunity.

"God Bless' The Child" into "Angel Of Harlem" looks unlikely on paper, but it worked really well—played them in the same key, fingerplucked swingin' it lightly into the last chord of the former, and with that Cma7 still ringing grab the plectrum and start a-stomping my foot: gone from cool to hot inside of ten seconds.

"Ring Of Fire" killed. It always does, through sheer force—I play in an open G, with a heavy strum, and it's a big, big, BIG sound.

The second set: Now I know this is a real rock'n'roll gig, because it's at this point that the cops walk in.

Not to answer a noise complaint, mind you, but simply for a cup of joe. After the close of the first set, the lovely child and her parents left, taking the good vibes with them—and now the funk of bacon. Cops at a corner table, sipping Americanos and talking into their radios, doesn't do much for the mood, I'll tell you; it's tough to rock out when The Man is all up in your grille. Sucked the air right outta the room.

So it was downhill from there. That said, it felt good to sing "Behind Blue Eyes" again. I'm not usually one to carp about crappy cover versions, but I saw the video for Limp Bizkit's version of this, and was just appalled; der Durst and Co. have omitted the bridge section, a.k.a. "the prayer"—that is, the emotional core of the song—and have added an impossibly self-pitying new verse in its place. I mean, really—why sing us a song about wearing a mask if you're not going to give us a glimpse behind it, and tell us why it's so important t in the first place? So there was a little extra venom in my voice when I started singing When my fist clenches, crack it open...

"Every Little Kiss" into "Earn Enough": same concept as the Billie Holiday / U2 segue in the first set, but didn't come off quite as well—I think because I started "Kiss" too fast. It's a gorgeous chord progression, but a dense one, so it needs a little room to breathe. I may slow the groove down radically next time. And there will be a next time: the results were promising enough to warrant that. "Earn Enough" was great fun, as always. They're the same song, essentially, just written from different angles, one by a band with massive street cred and one by a band with none. That's instructive, I think.

Funnily enough, I found myself running short of material in this set—mostly because I'd dispensed with between-songs patter entirely, and was just banging through the songs bam-bam-bam, too fast, too nervous. To fill time, I did both "Let It Out" and "Tangled Up," as well as two instrumentals: Scott Skinner's pibroch tune "Dargai" (which I learned from the playing of Richard Thompson), and a fingerstyle piece that Dan and I cobbled together that I call "The Nunnery Rag."

Add to that "Purple Jesus" and "After the Axe" and it's the most of my own songs I've ever played in a single night. "Purple Jesus" has been a barn-burner lately, and did not disappoint on Saturday. "Axe" is much more somber, but I had reason to be pleased, as this was the first time I'd played it live, and, even with its complex arrangement (it was conceived as a band song, with multiple guitar parts), it hung together nicely.

A note on "John Barleycorn." Most people are familiar with Traffic's version, which Chris Wood learned from the singing of the Watersons (by way of Ralph Vaughan-Williams); but, this being a true folk song, it's a polymorphous beast. Researcher Peter Kennedy recorded dozens of variants—even Robert Burns turned his hand to the theme, and the story remains a source of inspiration. My version is a composite, stitched together from bits of many versions. It's the same basic tune as the familiar Traffic version, but with a bluesy, bottleneck guitar accompaniment; the idea is to bridge the gap between Blind Willie Johnson-style gospel and English folksong, but listening to myself playing it the other night, it just sounded drony and dull. And slightly forced. And, at six verses, too goddamned long. It sounded like a surefire room-clearer, to be honest.

I've got more to say about the song and my take on it in a future post, but for now, suffice to say that its inclusion in the set requires a rethink, at the least.

Finally: There are times, playing Aimee Mann's astonishing pop-rock nugget "Maybe Monday" (drop D) when the progression just sweeps me away and I feel myself leaving my body, levitating, speaking in tongues. This wasn't one of those nights, but dammit, the song is just that good.

What I Learned
Sometimes, like it or not, you're going to be wallpaper.
You can fight that, or you can learn to embrace it.

Elvis has left the building.

After

2003-10-26T10:14:00.000-05:00

A grisly morning. Sleepdrunk and blear-eyed, with a marathon runner's full-body ache and hands that felt flayed—I swear, even rolled in FBI ink I would have left no fingerprints. I hear D calling from downstairs, stagger to the window, and look out on the backyard.

There's a thin, miserable light, and fog so thick I cannot see St. Christopher's steeple fifty yards away; but three sleek deer, antlerless and smoky gray, are feeding at the bushes by the property-line, clustered around the sprays of tiny red berries, jostling each other. The largest shoots an occasional dirty look at the house, but mostly they just go about their business, ignoring us. Their velvety flanks steam in the fine morning rain, and I can imagine their warm breath, smelling of green, and the sound of their grinding teeth.

I watch them for a long time, then turn away and go back to bed.

Gig Diary: Gearing Up for the Fallowe'en Spectacular

2003-10-24T10:15:00.000-04:00

At length, knocked together a final set-list for tomorrow night's gig. Two sets, two-and-a-half-hours, mostly covers, all performed with acoustic guitar and voice.

(Apologies for tiny pic: my image-hosting service are dicks about filesize.)

Intro Music
"Colossus," performed by the Afro-Celt Sound System

SET I

You Couldn't Have Come At A Better Time (Luka Bloom)
Lovers In A Dangerous Time (Bruce Cockburn)
These Days (Jackson Browne, who wrote it for Nico)
There She Goes (The La's)
I Wish I Were In Love Again (Rodgers & Hart)
High & Dry (Radiohead)
Bloodletting (The Vampire Song) (Concrete Blonde)
Spoonful (Willie Dixon wrote it for Howlin' Wolf)
She Caught The Katy (Taj Mahal)
Purple Jesus (one of mine)
Tracks Of My Tears (Smokey Robinson)
God Bless' The Child (Billie Holiday)
Angel Of Harlem (U2)
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young)
Lullaby Of London (The Pogues)
Ring Of Fire (June Carter wrote it for Johnny Cash)

Interstitial Music (ten-minute break)
"Hipalong Hop," performed by Luke Vibert & BJ Cole
into "The Egg And I," from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack

SET II

Sweet Thing (Van Morrison)—may segue into This Is The Sea
Suspicious Minds (Elvis Presley)
This Time (INXS)
Downtown (Petula Clark)
Night & Day (Cole Porter)
Behind Blue Eyes (The Who)
Werewolves Of London (Warren Zevon)
After The Axe Has Fallen (another one of mine)
Every Little Kiss (Bruce Hornsby & the Range)
Earn Enough For Us (XTC)
Let It All Hang Out (The Hombres)
John Barleycorn (traditional) with an option for Dylan's Tangled Up In Blue
Autumn Leaves (English version written by Johnny Mercer)
Maybe Monday ('til Tuesday)
Peace, Love, & Understanding (Nick Lowe for Elvis Costello)
Walking The Long Miles Home (Richard Thompson)

Outro Music
"Yo Pumpkin Head," Cowboy Bebop, into "Whirl-Y Reel," Afro Celts

The greatest challenge to constructing a set list, for me, is trying to make sense of the multifarious nature of it: of putting together these different musics I so love in a way that's not just a dog's breakfast, but in a coherent—even a narrative—fashion. Of maintaining a flow, a build—ebbing and rising, each time to greater peaks. This one's not perfect, but I think it's not bad.

I realize, by the way, that providing and specifying the recorded music for my into, set break, and outro reveals a certain . . . neurotic desire to control the proceedings. Please note, however, that I am getting better: for my first Rochester gig, in early September, I actually wrote out my between-songs patter—which I then was left to speak to an empty house, if I was going to speak it at all.

If that happens again tomorrow night, I'll at least be able to listen to some music I enjoy.

Notes on the songs and the performance over the coming days, after it all goes down.

The Greatest Record Ever Made

2003-10-18T10:16:00.000-04:00

This is adapted from something I posted on the Underground ages ago. I'm thinking about it again because I've got a gig coming up, and have decided to play this song.

Petula Clark singing "Downtown," that is, and for the last eight months I have been unable to listen to it without weeping. Tears of worry, tears of joy at the promise of hope renewed, that life is good and love is real and all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well.

I mean, it's fundamentally an optimistic song, but it's a hard-won optimism—reaching for the light while never denying the dark, saying Yes, there is hope, but it is fragile and must be nurtured.

There's this struggle even in the music—you've got these brassy builds, and then the reassurances come—"How can you lose?"—but the music decresendos and Petula's voice drops down, husky, almost breaking, as it shifts to the minor key, belying the blithe sentiment... and then from almost nothing the music fights its way back up, as Petula ascends the melody back up the high point.

"Downtown"'s promise of happiness is meaningless without the fear of loneliness to drive it. That it manages to suggest both (and the happiness it promises isn't specifically sexual—it's the promise of a kindred spirit: "You may find somebody kind to help and understand you, someone who is just like you and needs a helping hand to guide them along...") is what makes this the Greatest Record Ever Made (no disrespect to "River Deep, Mountain High").

When we consider that Petula Clark first became a star in 1943, a plucky eleven-year-old with her own radio show (Pet's Parlor), singing songs of hope and glory for British audiences deep in the daily terror of the Blitz, the arc that led her to "Downtown" seems clear: from the lump-in-the-throat reassurances of "When The Lights Go On Again All Over the World" and "(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs Of Dover" to the gentle nudge of "You're gonna be all right now," only the battleground has changed—from the smoking ruins of a world at war to an inner wasteland of tenage angst. And it's still Petula you want on your side.

Trench optimism. Hope in hell. There's nothing as joyous or as heartbreaking as someone putting on a brave face, reaching for love in a cruel world.

I hope to do it justice.

Known

2003-10-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

Walking out of the grocery store 'tother day, this geezer sidles up to me and murmurs, "...and you're the fellow that plays at those coffeehouses."

"Uh, yes," I reply, quite frankly flabbergasted.

"I seen you over at Jitters, and then at the Leaf & Bean," he says. "You do a nice job."

"Thank you," I say. "Thanks a lot. Um, I've got a another show at Leaf & Bean in November. Keep an eye out—I'll get a poster up..."

"I'll do that," he says, and walks off.

Now, here's the thing: to date, since moving to the Heart of Empire, I have played out exactly twice.

Freakish coincidence. I mean, this isn't a huge city—but I played in a much smaller town's most heavily-attended church very Sunday for four years before a stranger greeted me (also in a supermarket), rounding the corner with his grocery cart and letting out a cartoon-mafiosi drawl of "He-e-e-e-ey—Gui-tar Guy!"

But here I've got two shows under my belt, and this guy was at both of 'em.

Including the disastrous first show, where I spent 70% of the evening literally playing to an empty room.

Strangely validating, that, but also a bit bracing: I've got a fan base now. The next show had better be really good. I can't let Tha Kidz down, after all.

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines (Gig Diary, cont'd)

2003-09-14T10:18:00.000-04:00

Date: Saturday 13 September 2003
Venue: Leaf & Bean Coffee Company, Chili NY
Duration: two hours (8:00 PM - 10:00 PM)
Proceeds: $28.00

Wore
black jeans
black shoes & belt
long-sleeved ultrasuede shirt, gold
red T-shirt

The Crowd
Excellent. Leaf & Bean seats 20-25 people, and the place is full or nearly so all night—full of folks who are generally knowledgable, engaged, and appreciative. A tremendous lift. Demographic skew to the older side of things (40+), which surprises me, in this town full of colleges.

The Rundown
A good night overall. A good house, a better set list (though far from perfect), and a much more congenial vibe. The second set is especially good—relaxed, confident, and expansive. Not the best show I've ever played musically, but the tops in personal satisfaction; I feel like I dared much, and accomplished much.

Highlights
The whole "sophistication" bit gets shot to hell early on, as I hit a rocky stretch right in the middle of the first set. I've worked out a routine stringing together the three "If I Only Had..." songs from The Wizard Of Oz, using them as a springboard for comic asides. At various times, the bit has included dry recitations of movie trivia, goofy celebrity impersonations (Buddy Ebsen, Groucho Marx, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello, and Dr. John among them), speculations on the Cowardly Lion's ethnicity, and winks to the Friends of Dorothy. Tonight, though, I can't seem to find my groove; it's an odd bit, and requires an attentive and sympathetic audience to make it work. This crowd might've done, but I should have slotted it later in the evening. They're still warming up to me, and the time is not yet right for freeform conceptual rambling. And the bit itself needs to be tightened and honed.

Been looking forward to playing "My Favorite Things"—I've worked up arrangement built around fast, intricate fingerpicking and ringing open strings. It's supposed to sound dreamlike—clouds of notes, hushed, constantly shifting, driven by a steady six-beat pulse but still somehow fragile—sharing the John Coltrane version's intensity of feeling, but approaching it with a certain stillness.

Think of it as praying. Trane is in full-on Pentecostal mode, possessed by the Holy Ghost, speaking in tongues of flame, shrieking Hosannahs; set against that the simple, winding line of Gregorian chant, echoing in the vast space of a Spanish cloister. That's what I'm shooting for.

Unfortunately, I can never seem to make it fly; it's adequate, and competently played, yes, but never, ever quite as good, quite as spiritual as I think it should be. Angling for Coltrane, and somehow I end up with José Feliciano.

Then another set of songs linked by commentary, this time a treatise on Tin Pan Alley attitudes towards love; "Night And Day" (which I've been playing for years) begs the question, "Does the word torment really belong in a love song?" Segue then into "I Wish I Were In Love Again," which is funny as hell, but naked in its fear of love. Here my problems begin: I'm underrehearsed, and the song falls apart several times on its way to its conclusion. From there it only gets worse; "Masochism Tango," the ne plus ultra of pathological relationship songs, I barely know at all. Adding it was a last-minute idea, and though I've got cheat sheets, ultimately they're just another distraction. I'm flubbing words and chords all over the place. I still think the idea is a good one, but again, it needs extensive rehearsal and structuring.

Trying to shed the stink of flop sweat, I plunge into "Autumn Leaves." It has its moments, but the bridge is a struggle—I'm still shaky. A soft, fingerpicked "Veronica" finds me on auto-pilot; it feels like filler, but lets me find my feet again, anyway.

Then into "When The Spell Is Broken," one of the darkest, dourest songs in Richard Thompson's dark and dour catalog. It's a kick to play, mind you—it's easy to sound good noodling around in drop-D—but it's a pretty dissonant shift in the mood. I've still got a lot to learn about building a set that flows not only musically, but emotionally.

Working the crowd at the set break, doing the meet-and-greet that I've always loathed so much. (This, too, is a part of my efforts to stretch myself.) I'm gratified by their interest, their knowledge, their warmth.

I spend much of the break talking to an older gentleman, himself a guitarist, who compliments me on my playing and expresses a mild amazement at the way I'm sticking to the lower reaches of the neck while playing the jazz tunes. He's right; while many of the weirder jazz chords call for barreing high up the neck, I'm avoiding full barre chords as much as possible and using inversions, muting, partial chords, and cheat fingerings to keep things almost entirely below the seventh fret.

There's something to this, I think. Writing earlier about filtering various musics through my aesthetic and sensibilities, I couldn't precisely define just what that aesthetic might be. I'm a little nearer now; my style is defined by its limitations. I'm working what is in its essence keyboard music (both jazz and, earlier, hymns) and arranging for—not just guitar, but solo guitar. A pianist can carry all registers at once; a jazz guitarist working with bass and drums might well comp all over the neck; but I've got to hold down the bottom, play the changes, keep the beat and keep it simple enough that I've got a few brain cells left over for remembering the words. All else follows from that—whether I'm singing folk songs, hymns, rock'n'roll, or standards, whether I'm working from sheet music or memory.

Anyway. Hand out a few business cards, shake a few hands, down a glass of water, and...

...it's straight into the second set. Technical glitches strike instantly: I break a string on the first song, and simultaneously realize that my volume has been creeping upwards all night. Take a break, restring, turn down, back into the fray with "There She Goes." Such a pretty song—and such a complex exercise, one guitarist doing the work of two, keeping that chiming riff ringing out while the chords chug along behind. I think it was okay; I really can't recall, though I was still rattled by the disaster of the previous song. I took it in the key of F, by the way, transposing to D from the original G (the resulting chord shapes allowed me to play the melodic figure against the chords) and capo'd to 3.

This was a week that saw the deaths of both Johnny Cash and Warren Zevon. I'd had songs by both in my set already, but this week added "Johnny Strikes Up The Band," all fingerpicked and bittersweet, in a kind of a shared tribute to both. I changed some of the words: They'll be rockin' down in Folsom... It's my favorite song from Excitable Boy—but as an utter obscurity, it really couldn't raise the kind of emotional response I'd hoped for. When I played "Werewolves" a few minutes later, though, the joint went nuts.

Dropped my low E to a C for "See The Lights." It's a gorgeous lyric, and I've enjoyed playing the song before, but somehow, in this company of tightly-structured pop songs, it sounded weak—too shapeless to make an impression. Again, it's all about placement and mood.

What I Learned
Sophistication's all well and good: but maybe rockin' out is your great strength, after all.

It's lovely, lovely people that come to your gigs, but you can't take them for granted. What you play and what you attempt constitutes a series of promises to the audience: and, as in all things, you should not make promises that you can't be rock-solid sure of keeping.

Do not trust in the "magic" of live performance to make a song that sounds mediocre in your living room, sound transcendent. "Rising to the occasion" is largely a myth; if anything, the adrenaline oflive performance makes you play worse.

Likewise, you cannot count on audience goodwill to carry a half-baked conceit. You have to earn your laughs and gasps, with hard work and preparation.

Gig Diary: Sophisticated Gentleman

2003-09-12T10:19:00.000-04:00

The Leaf & Bean Coffee Co., across town, has only been open for a few months but is already a Saturday-night music destination. The owner, Will, seems to have a real grasp on a coffeehouse's place in the community—it always ends up becoming a de facto community cultural center, whether the owner wills it or no—and he's running with that. Not ostentatiously so, though; he's letting the buzz build of its own accord, simply by providing an excellent atmosphere in which to hear and play music.

Leaf & Bean has a more sophisticated aura than Jitters, so I'm leaning more towards the jazz/American songbook end of my repertoire. Here's the list...

SET I

You Couldn't Have Come At A Better Time (Luka Bloom)
These Days (Jackson Browne)
Living With The Law (Chris Whitley)
If I Only Had A Brain medley(Harold Arlen/Yip Harburg)
My Favorite Things (Rodgers & Hammerstein)
Night And Day (Cole Porter)
I Wish I Were In Love Again (Rodgers & Hart)
The Masochism Tango (Tom Lehrer)
Autumn Leaves (Johnny Mercer)
Veronica (Elvis Costello)
When The Spell Is Broken (Richard Thompson)
Lullaby Of London (The Pogues)
Ring Of Fire (Johnny Cash)

SET II

Sweet Thing (Van Morrison)
There She Goes (The La's)
Lovers In A Dangerous Time (Bruce Cockburn)
Purple Jesus
Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young)
Earn Enough For Us (XTC)
Johnny Strikes Up The Band (Warren Zevon)
Tangled Up In Blue (Bob Dylan)
Werewolves Of London (Warren Zevon)
Maybe Monday (Aimee Mann / 'til tuesday)
(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love, and Understanding (Nick Lowe)
See The Lights (Simple Minds)
Walking The Long Miles Home (Richard Thompson)

I've been giving myself a crash course in the standards, or pre-rock pop music, trying to stretch myself—making a study of it, as I once studied folk and folk-derived musics; making a list of sixty or so songs, representative moments in the canon, and gathering around me recordings and sheet music.

It's a similar approach, actually, and yielding similar results. When I listen to, say, Tony Bennett singing "The Very Thought Of You," rather than be overawed because it's Tony Frickin' Bennett, I'm trying to listen dispassionately—listen to the song, not the singer—as if this were a sort of field recording, and ol' Tony was one of the folks keeping this oral tradition of music alive, out in the hinterlands.

To maintain this state of mind, I'm finding it helpful to listen to radically different versions of the same song back-to-back: Edith Piaf's "La Vie En Rose" followed by Jacky Terrasson's cubist-samba take on same, f'rinstance, or Chet Baker's "September Song" into Willie Nelson's into Lou Reed's—reinforcing the idea that this is a common cultural/musical heritage, and that no one (not even Sinatra!) "owns" any of these songs. From there, I'm defining and refining my arrangements—literally making my own versions—of these tunes, just as Fairport Convention or Steeleye Span used the Anglo-Scottish folk tradition as raw material for rock songs that fit their own sensibilities and aesthetic.

That's what I'm doing here, I think, as I did also with the sacred music I played for so many years: finding new colors to paint with, finding more stuff that I can work through my sensibilities and approach, more songs that I can turn into Jack Fear Music™.

Or maybe I'm just trying, like so many others, to extend my shelf-life by reinventing myself from aging rock'n'roll animal to cabaret crooner. After all, I may be an old man next to the teen-poppers ruling the charts, but I'm hell of a lot younger than Tony Bennett...

Oh What A Friend We Have

2003-09-08T10:19:00.000-04:00

Y'know, if I'm gonna talk about these songs I've written, I suppose I ought to give you some idea of what they sound like...

So: for all that I hate roadhouse-style blues, I've written a pretty good one in this song. The chord progression on the riff is basically the same as "Werewolves Of London," but it actually starts on the tonic—so it's I-VII-IV-IV, with a bassline that's a kissing cousin to "My City Was Gone." (It sounds horrible and derivative described in those terms, but it's shit-hot in practice.) You do that for six bars, then a two-bar turnaround of VII-IV, two bars chugging on the V, and a two-bar tacit on the tonic.

The introduction I used at Jitters went something like this...

First time I played this song I was down a church basement. I used to do a lot of open mic nights—y'all know what an open mic is, yeah? It's a sort of a self-esteem workshop for musicians. You're in this little space, like a church basement, and you're playing for an audience composed exclusively of other musicians. Everybody gets ten minutes, and as each person plays, you're sitting there thinking, 'Hell, I'm better than him..." That's where the self-esteem comes into it, see.

So I'm down this church basement, and things are kind of dull, and I get up and I start singing this song. And the guy running the thing, he cuts me off in mid-song. I sez,"What's going on?" He sez, "You idiot—this is an A.A. meeting."

Oh. Well.

So I start to play another song, and the guy sez, "What the hell d'you think you're doing?" And I sez, "Hey, my ten minutes aren't up yet..."

Purple Jesus
Welcome to the show boy
Here it's service not a smile
The tips ain't much but the volume's gonna
make it worth your while
The least expensive liquor
and domestic beer on tap
Let me show you 'round behind the bar
Some things ain't on the map
Keep it on the highest shelf
in a rusty Mason jar
so pour me a Purple Jesus boy
and step up to the bar
I been tending bar for thirty years
To me it's all the same
Guys telling me their problems
and I can't recall their names
I've learned the value of a buck
and where the money goes
How else do you think I got all these
blossoms on my nose?
Now do these shaking hands a favor
reach up on the shelf
and pour me a Purple Jesus boy
and one more for yourself
Purple Jesus, Purple Jesus
Won't you save my soul
Won't you save my soul
Won't you save my soul
With all the folks I see here
and the people that I meet
not one of them would know me
if they passed me on the street
Behind this bar from noon
until the sun begins to rise
with stains all down my apron
and blood in my eyes
And I ain't got time for family
and all that other stuff
Now pour me a Purple Jesus
I'm not dying fast enough

Pure-D juke-joint stompology. Went down a storm, I'll tell you.

Back In The Saddle (Gig Diary, cont'd)

2003-09-07T10:20:00.000-04:00

Date: Saturday 6 September 2003
Venue: Jitters Café, North Chili NY
Duration: two-and-a-half hours (7:00 PM - 9:30 PM)
Proceeds: $10 (tips)

Wore
blue Levi's 550s
white socks
black Rockports & belt
dark blue geometric paisley long-sleeved shirt, 100% cotton
green T-shirt

SET I

Let It All Hang Out (The Hombres by way of The Nails)
Save Tonight (Eagle-Eye Cherry)
Living With The Law
She Caught The Katy
Positively 4th Street
Purple Jesus (mine)
Ticket To Ride / There She Goes Again medley
Soul Man (Sam & Dave)
Spoonful
Industrial Disease (Dire Straits)
When The Spell Is Broken (Richard Thompson)
Ring Of Fire
Cinnamon Girl *

SET II

Sweet Thing
Werewolves Of London
Prairie Rose (Roxy Music)
Squeeze Box (The Who)
Sweet Jane
Save It For Later (The Beat)
Lovers In A Dangerous Time *
Portland County Jail (traditional)
My Favorite Things *
Expresso Love (Dire Straits)
Tuxedo Junction
Veronica * (Elvis Costello)
Tangled Up In Blue
(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love, And Understanding
Lullaby Of London (The Pogues)
Walking The Long Miles Home (Richard Thompson)

* = added to the set at the last minute, when I discovered I was running short

The Crowd
House empty or near-so all night; a table of Roberts kids upfront feeds me energy early on, but when they leave all the good vibes go with them. Owner a constant and sympathetic presence throughout, though.

The Rundown
"It's a blues crowd, mostly," Gary (the owner) told me when we booked the show. Well... No, it's not. In fact it's no crowd at all, and it soon becomes apparent that the blues is in fact Gary's preference. Fairy nuf; he's about my only customer, in any case. And I am, as previously noted, a professional. Honest.

Highlights
Time to play Da Blooze, baby—my idiosyncratic take on it, anywise. Early in the first set, it's Chris Whitley's "Living With The Law," for my money a stone-cold modern roadhouse classic, with all the swagger and desperation of Muddy or Wolf. I've been playing it for years—my signature song, I guess—but tonight it just doesn't take off. My hands seem clumsy; my voice isn't doing what I want.

"Poz 4th St" is probably the finest in Dylan's litany of Fuck You Songs. On a night like this I'm feeling it. I'd been told what a great room this was; now it's empty, and I'm getting angry—and playing too hard: break my high E during the fifth verse, and must vamp a while to recover my wits. I get through the song, but the flow is broken—plus it necessitates a long break, only four songs in, to restring and retune.

"Purple Jesus" puts me back on a good footing. It's a big stonking riff and a joy to play, and more importantly it's mine. I've written well on a hundred songs over the years (of which about ten are actually any good) and barely played any of them in public—another of the compromises. I've made a conscious decision to start regularly working into my sets such originals as are adaptable to the solo treatment (most of them were conceived for a full band) and, more importantly, to start writing some new songs. Playing "Purple J," and having this much fun with it, convinces me I've made the right decision.

The medley of "Ticket To Ride" and "There She Goes Again" was meant to bring together the two most important bands of the Sixties on the common ground of Amaj+9. For all that Lou Reed talks about the VU as the anti-Beatles, these two are essentially the same song seen from different angles, lyrically and musically. Which makes this intermingling sound like a good idea. It isn't. In fact—in retrospect—it's a bad, bad idea. The ending never comes together, for one thing.

I don't know what possessed me to try "Soul Man." Perhaps it is that I am a Red Sox fan, and understand the allure of a great lost cause; and if one white guy with one acoustic guitar attempting to recreate the excitement of the Stax house band isn't the very definition of a lost cause, I don't know what is—no matter how florid the guitar part is.

"Industrial Disease" made the set as an example of late 20th c. machine-age talking blues. I'm pretty proud of the arrangement—though it's hard to make the riff melody (sounded in the recording by the keyboards) stand out amidst the chord voicings—but in the end, after it's over, I find myself asking Why bother?

I bang my head on a swinging overhead lamp and storm off at the entr'acte. (Well, I don't really storm.) I'm in a mild funk of anger and disappointment. Talking to Gary doesn't help matters any. He has, from the beginning of this, seemed vague about the crowd and the scene surrounding Jitters: now he's contradicting himself left and right. First he's telling me that Jitters had to scale back its music nights, as they were presenting bands four or five nights a week and it was just getting out of control, a victim of its own success—then in the next breath he tells me that "the crowd around here just isn't a music crowd." Uh, yeah.

It's depressingly familiar for me, in that Gary seems to be a type I keep running into: a basically nice guy whose thought processes I will never, ever understand. My gut feeling is that he worked for along time to open this little café, and now that he's got it he hasn't the slightest idea of what to do with it. I don't think he's particularly interested in making Jitters a venue for music (he just wants to make gourmet coffee) but he feels it's expected of him to be running —which makes dealing with him constant passive-aggressive dance, and thus a constant frustration.

Sick of the dance, I head into the second set in foul temper. I am no longer a professsional.

First heard "Prairie Rose" in a version by Big Country, on a non-LP B-side. Still one of the best covers ever recorded, I think; it takes the high romance of Ferry's lyric and puts it into an unironically heroic context that's wholly appropriate, but that Roxy, saddled with its inherent archness, could never muster. The result is thrilling: a sly little love song for Jerry Hall becomes a paean to the American West itself, a big-sky swirl of guitars and shouts and giddy-up drums. I'm afraid I let the song down terribly here. I've arranged it for fingerpicked drop-D, but my worsening nerves lead me to fumble the riff, and the tune seems turgid and inappropriate in this set—and again, I've got no ending. Scratched off the list, for now.

I'd reimagined "Squeeze Box" as a Delta blues (bottleneck in open G tuning), but take it a little faster than I should: the result falls between the bluegrass-rock of the original and the greasy back-porch lope I'd imagined. Still, it was better than I'd feared.

For the traditional "Portland Co. Jail," I stay close to the arrangement we used back in the days of We Saw The Wolf. It's still a fun song, but a bad choice for this gig—too frenetic.

"Tuxedo Junction," of course, was a hit before your mother was born, though she was born a long long time ago. A big-band staple as an instrumental—the Glenn Miller Orchestra's version is the most famous—it actually has words, which I sing in a faux-Creole growl. It's also got, in my version, an ambitious guitar part, which sets a thumb-plucked bassline against partial chords in the treble, with the mute-trumpet counter-melody rendered as bluesy bends on the A and the D strings—oh, and the horn cadence of the coda is in there, too... My reach ssssslightly exceeds my grasp, here. Maybe with two more weeks' rehearsal I'd nail it; or maybe not.

What I Learned
Don't play angry. The songs get away from you; you play too fast, you don't talk, you lose control of the pacing, run short of time, and prolong the agony.

A show to an empty house is not a disaster—it's a rehearsal.

Know the tunes cold. Better than cold. When you're out there naked, you can't have a hair out of place.

When choosing the songs, trust your gut.

Don't be a show-off. Don't try to demonstrate your virtuosity unless you're damned sure you can do the trick.

Making yourself out to be something you're not, for the sake of getting a gig, is a losing proposition. Be yourself.

In the end? Blood on the saddle; a pretty lousy show, overall. But if I've gotta crash & burn, better to do it for an empty room.

Gig Diary: Smell The Horse

2003-09-05T10:21:00.000-04:00

Here's the deal: I've been playing music semi-professionally on and off for twenty years, but I have never, until recently, kept a gig diary. I think that's because I never felt primarily responsible for my "career" in music, such as it was. Part of that was due to the context through which I experienced the job—as a member (but never the leader) of a band, or as the junior half of a duo. Since the move, I've started keeping a black-and-white composition book where I note the set-lists; the take; what I wore; how I felt; what worked, what didn't; what I learned. It's been pretty interesting to analyze the process, and I wanted to expand it here, to the blog.

Gearing up now for my first pop gig in a long time, my first solo show in even longer; I spent the last half-decade deeply involved in directing a church choir, which left me without a lot of time to devote to a pop career even as casual as mine had been. With the move to the Heart of Empire, the opportunity arose for me to keep my hand in, and make a little pin-money, with fewer compromises than before.

So I've invested a few hundred bucks in a decent sound system, done up some business cards and brochures (featuring the lovely blue-toned image above, shot by D in our bedroom and tweaked to hell and back), and gone looking for gigs.

They're not hard to come by. Rochester and environs are lousy with coffee-shops, and this particular place is within walking distance of my house—although, in deference to the lateness of the hour and all that expensive equipment, I suppose I'll go by car on Saturday.

So it's been this odd week of hanging out in the sunny backyard, sitting on folding chairs with the neighborhood moms (almost wrote "the other neighborhood moms"), one eye on the kids at play and the other on the yellow legal pad in my lap, writing pages and pages of song titles, scratching them off, paring them down. Late at night, in a corner of the basement laundry room, I'm running sets—every song, every note, every quip, every intro—with a clock running and the microphones set up—though not plugged in; they're there just to re-hone my kinesthetic sense, my awareness of my surroundings, so that in the heat of performance I don't knock my forehead against the vocal mic or smash the face of my guitar into the instrument mic.

You may recognize the voice of experience in all this caution.

How nervous am I? An easy measure: in the margins of my set list, I have written brief notes for every joke and story I will tell between songs. Only space constrictions have prevented me from writing out Good evening and welcome and Thank you, goodnight.

So. It's a blues room, I'm told: the set list, therefore, is heavy on Da Blooze—against my natural proclivities. Because I am professional, goddammit.

I've played a metric fuckload of the twelve-bar I-IV-V, mind you, but the blues was always Dan's bag more than mine; that was one of the compromises. I hate the blues.

Well, strictly speaking that's not true—what turns me off is The Blues As A White Guy's Party Music. Robert Cray, Eric Clapton, B.B. King, Buddy Guy—that junk shits me to tears. What I dig is deep blues, the shivery stuff lurking at the violent, scary edge of the music.

Here I'm defining "blues" not by its bar-structure or chord progressions, but as a feeling—the spiny tingle, the sense of fear-for-the-soul, that shows up in the oddest places. Blind Willies McTell and Johnson just about owned it; Howlin' Wolf, Muddy, Willie Dixon, and more recently Ry Cooder and Cassandra Wilson have worked the terrain—artists who would consciously define themselves as working in the blues tradition.

But I hear that same dread in Cash's best work; and it surfaces in Bruce Cockburn's voice now and then, and in Tracy Chapman's "Crossroads," in Nick Cave's grotesque drawl, in Will Oldham's bleak and beautiful "I See A Darkness," even in the clenched-teeth MPD vox of Jewel's "Who Will Save Your Soul." That's the blues, the real thing. It's not juke-joint stuff—rather it's the stuff that'll get you thrown out of the juke joint, maybe run out of town on a rail, because it makes people nervous.

Want the difference, in a nutshell? Bono's original solo recording of "Silver And Gold" is deep blues, the sound of a man jumping out of his skin, of a genuine dark night of the soul: U2's re-recording of same is all jive and bluster. (Am Ah boogin yew? Ah doon't mean tae boog yeh... Skip James wept.)

Onward to the gig.