There are some emotions that only a child can experience. They are the same ones we occasionally are lucky enough to catch remembered glimpses of as adults. I can best describe the one that poked me in the side a few minutes ago as rapture/wonder. It's the one where you are swept away and transported to another world in which you are simultaneously the ultimate ruler and most indistinguishable speck of dust which can only float in awe of its own power or absolute lack thereof. Sometimes it comes from a hyper-specific place, like the sense/memory of listening to "Sgt. Pepper's" on 8 track in my dad's car (van?). Sometimes it's a feeling you don't even know you have inside you. I felt one of those just now.
I haven't read "Where the Wild Things Are" since I was a kid. I couldn't tell you what it's about; and while I can remember what the pages look like as clearly as the day I saw them first, I recall little else. While I have walked by copies in the kids' section at many a bookstore while Melissa and I have been last-minute shopping, and have often flashed back to a specific page while standing in the guest room in my sister's house (as it corresponds to "my" room in the similarly designed "Cape Cod" we grew up in), I have never picked it up or read it since I was a little little kid. I have almost avoided it because it is a truly perfect memory which a revisit could only destroy.
I have read a ton about the clusterf*ck that is/has been/will be the Spike Jones live action film adaptation of this book. I secretly even hoped it would never see the light of day. It would surely only serve to either kill one of my few remaining "perfect" and intense memories and/or would raise the most presumptuous bullshit ire in the hipster indie-retro-fuckbag community. Both of those propositions scare the shit out of me. The memory one is obvious, but if you think that Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" flickers brought the crazies (sorry, guys) out of the woodwork, wait 'til we are subjected to one man's vision (revision?) of a book that I am almost positive most of the 20 and 30 somethings around would attach similar sentiments to my own. So I clicked on the trailer skeptically.
Maybe it was my already too-sentimental attachment to the Arcade Fire song used in the trailer (I had a particularly special choir sing it a few years ago). Maybe the weather has me confused on the inside. Either way: I felt that feeling. For 20 seconds in the middle of the trailer I was a child. I was reminded that there are beautiful places and things and indescribable feelings in this world and the worlds that only exist inside our heads. So, while I hate to be the guy who just posts videos on his blog every other day, this one made me feel special. Maybe it will do the same for you.
I am having some vid problems. If it won't load, just try here.
25 March 2009
The Garden King (Part I)
I didn't have the most traditional college experience. Sure, I gained weight, grew facial hair, and tooled around in my parents' absence, but I wasn't into drinking, drugging, being overly promiscuous, or staying up all night to participate in any of the preceding vices. That all being said, I did go to college in a "college town" (Princeton), so I got to mingle, for better or worse, with local merchants, students from other colleges nearby, and, most important to this story, "townies". For those of you who went to college in a big city or didn't go to college at all, a "townie" is, quite simply, a resident of a college town whose day to day existence has nothing to do with the university or college with which that town is associated. In light of its usual negative connotation, townies have been portrayed as stoners, dullards, or curmudgeonly types in most movies and television shows in which they have appeared, but those who I chose to spend my time with were nothing of the sort. (as a matter of fact, the aforementioned connotation makes me feel bad for even using the term, but other words like "locals" or "natives" just don't have the same pizazz) It might have been because Princeton was a fairly well-off, artistically-minded, and liberal town, but all of the locals I befriended were incredibly kind and interesting. I guess that's why, to my wife's continual confusion, I knew so many and actually maintained active friendships with those who were often considered personas non grata to the other students at the surrounding colleges.
My ability to meet my townie friends was, in no small part, thanks to my friend CJ. Performative, charming, and gregarious - nay - socially fearless, he allowed me to essentially be his sidekick and eventually "partner in crime" on our adventures "into town" at the dawn of our college experience. With the Princeton Coffee House, probably the least hip coffee house in town in retrospect, as our homebase, we would essentially hold court for fellow Westminster students on their way into town or back to campus, all the while improvising the rules to backgammon and flirting with Donna behind the counter. We used an evening hang there as an informal and unwritten social litmus test for anyone who wished to become part of our little crew. These having been the days before cell phones were widely owned, it was tough to keep tabs on people or make last-minute plans, but if you wanted to find or make plans with me or CJ, you could simply head to the Princeton Coffee House and we'd start from there. This was the place I learned to enjoy coffee (starting off with kiwi lattes - I KNOW!), would come to wash dishes for free as a way to clear my head, and, due to its somewhat odd location and the number of other more popular cafes in Princeton, our own little hangout. It's where we met, and befriended a large number townies. I count the evenings spent there among my most dear college-era memories.
We often stayed until Steve, the owner, closed up shop - a signal that it was either bedtime or, depending on the amount of caffeine we'd imbibed, a starting point for any number of real or imaginary collegiate adventures. On one evening in particular, we met and befriended a townie named Nam. I had (and still have) the strong sense that we knew him prior to the evening in question, but as that's the first specific memory I have of Nam, and since I am telling the stories here, we'll just go ahead and say that's when we met. We had obviously become acquainted shortly before closing as I vaguely remember still doing introductions as we ambled out of the shop as Steve locked the door and settled on the floor right outside. One (or more) of us had a guitar and we immediately started swapping songs as it was apparent that everyone in our crew was a musician. Lucas (who was along for the evening), CJ, and I were already generally familiar with songs that one of us had written and/or were comfortable playing in public and it appeared that Nam, his friend Steve (not the same Steve who owned the coffee shop, but this guy did play a mean guitar and sitar and worked at the record exchange. Whereas Nam had shorter hair and a seemed to be, at root, of a very "suburban" type, Steve reeked of the stereotypical "townie"), and another friend or two of theirs seemed to have something of a collective songboook as well. To this day, I always come off foolish in these situations as I never feel as though my serious songs are up to snuff with the stuff others present (the continual manifestation of this complex has recently led me to believe that my songs are, indeed, not as good as I think they are) and, thus, resort to the comical. I played "The Squirrel Song" (a spoof lament for a dead decapitated squirrel I had written with my then band, The Gravity) and some other silly little tunes in an effort to keep my ego and newly forming reputation afloat, but the death knell continued to toll with each song my new friend Nam played. Fingerpicking with a precision and rhythmic fluidity I still can only aspire to, he rolled off whimiscal songs in a beautiful baritone about the posters on his wall and a "slow motion" girl. While only a few minutes prior, these new friends seemed to be roughly our age, perhaps a year older, as their collective and intimate knowledge and ties to a town which were only then becoming a part of emerged and, more importantly, as Nam unfurled his brilliant songbook, I suddenly felt childish - not young - but juvenile in my understanding of community, musical narrative, and lack of earnesty. While the floor we sat on was grey cement, the walls and ceiling were made of 12" brown matte ceramic tile. Coupled with the odd design of the building (a multi-business, split-level-like affair wherein it was all open and mall-like - as in you would enter the confines of the physical structure but still be in the open air, and would need to either go up a few steps or downstairs - still outside - to enter individual businesses like our coffee house upstairs or the 24 hr. Kinko's downstairs), these tiles made for a particularly pleasant reverb. His beautiful and simple performances and inherit warmth of his songs rang out in a way that made them seem simultaneously intimate and gigantic in that space. After stumbling upon the one song we all knew well enough to sing along to (The Beach Boys' "Vegetables"), I retreated - not only returning to campus, but also sticking my guitar in a case and not touching it for a few days.
Despite my laying low in fear of bumping into my new idol-cum-nemesis, one of the songs that Nam had played that night stuck with me for weeks. It was a cute number (though faaar more clever than any of my "cute" tunes) sang from the perspective of a "Super Villain" to a girl he's holding captive. "...And you and I will rule the world, a Super Villain and his girl", went the chorus. While not very harmonically or melodically inventive in retrospect, the almost vaudevillian chord progression and melody coupled with the lilting rhythm was incredibly appealing to me. Having only begun to break out of the pop/rock formula I was compositionally tied to, the song seemed like something of a breakthrough. I almost resented its freedom. I honestly thought that my going to fancy-schmancy conservatory and studying Mozart and the boys would somehow (be it through intense scholarship or osmosis) inject a new level of quality into my budding catalogue of songs, yet here was some townie! (with none of the musical pedigree I had recently bestowed upon myself and seemingly little of the training to which I was beginning) who could write me under the table. I was simultaneously presumptuously furious with my own inflated sense of ego and lack of songwriting chops and curious as to how I could write on that level. I had to go to the source.
So rather than avoid town all together, I decided I was better off just befriending the guy. He was sweet as hell and didn't intend to make me feel "small". After all, I was in college and I wanted "experience life" or something. Reading back over those sentences, it sounds as though I aspired to some sort of usury. That really wasn't the case, but I truly did put this cat on a pedestal and always did hope that he I could glean some info on his creative process. So over the next several months I spent time with Nam in dribs and drabs, often playing music or talking about music and art and whathaveyou. I found him to be infinitely interesting and incredibly curious and sincere. He always wanted explanations and he always seemed to want you to go deeper. In turn, he was always incredibly philosophical in his own ideas and explanations of them. His speech was always slow and measured (not to be confused with sounding rehearsed) and his aforementioned silky baritone made each statement he made seem some how important or "true" in a larger sense. His curiosity was also astounding. If I or one of my choir college chronies made some reference to a composer or piece of music that he knew nothing about, Nam, still quiet and contemplative, wanted to know everything we could tell him about the subject. I found his aura of absolute wisdom/authority and his lack of shame about his childlike enthusiasm to understand all the things he didn't know created a larger picture of coolness. There were even times that I thought one of the two sides of this juxtaposition was some sort of put-on, but his intense sincerity continually reminded me that this was the real Nam I was dealing with. I honestly cherished every moment we shared.
Here's the interesting thing: I never made plans with Nam in all the years that I hung around with him. I never knew his address, or his phone number, or his email address. We always just sorta found one another. Now: this has nothing to do with fate or anything "bigger" - or does it?! ; ) - it actually speaks more the community of young, non-Princeton University students who bummed around downtown Princeton in those days. I don't want to paint it as though it was like Haight-Ashbury in 1967, but there were plenty of late high school/early college aged kids who wandered aimlessly and harmlessly around town in their thrift shop clothes with books of poetry in their hand or guitars on their backs. Nam and I were both cut of that cloth, so we often bumped into each other (usually me with CJ and him with a friend or two as well), and would spend the rest of the day "experiencing life" together. Some days we would head back to my campus and play around on pianos and organs in the basement practice rooms. Some days we would just sit in the coffee house and chat. I vaguely remember some more adventurous trips into the the $1 bins at the Princeton Record Exchange or out to "the battlefield", an old, uh... battlefield-cum-park where people would laze about, drink wine, and play music... or frisbee.
At some point it stopped being about my idolizing and wanting to learn from the guy, but the days I ran into him and got to spend time with him still exist in my most exciting (the kind of exciting only freshmen in college can understand) and exquisite watercolor meories that tell me it was always spring when I hung around with Nam.
At some later point during my freshman year, Nam recorded a four-song demo and either sold or gave me a cassette copy. While it was long ago swallowed by the sarlac bit that was my best friend Luke's then-girlfriend Wendy's dorm room (she loved this tape almost as much as I did), I remember the black and white, grainy, photocopied insert/cover featuring my friend Nam (using the pseudonym William Ether) holding a mirror up to a mirror so that the cover image itself was blasted into infinity. It might have been the folky leanings of the songs or the added "record player" effect on my aforementioned fave, "Super Villain", but it surely sounded not only old, but instantly timeless. While I knew people that had recorded stuff in studios and given me copies before, this was not only the most professional looking and sounding independent music project I'd yet come into close contact with, but this was certainly the most artistically sturdy. To be quite honest, I don't remember all four tracks on the tape, but I know that in addition to "Super Villain", it also closed with (I think it was last) an absolutely haunting track that I had not heard Nam play before. Beginning with an ostinato almost baroque in its conception and ending with a sound collage made up of a rain storm and electronic effects, "The Garden King" was a revelation to me. "Come out creatures of the night. The Garden King is in the clearing...", is an opening lyric that I count among my all-time faves.
These two songs alone were enough to change my life and direction as a musician. Not only had they been produced independent of pie-in-the-sky dreams like record companies and whatnot, but they had been done so without so much as an ounce lost in artistic weight and quality. The very fact that I had a physical artifact representing Nam's artistic vision - one that I could pour over and suck dry of musical marrow - was priceless to me. Suddenly, Nam, like the Beatles, Weezer, and Elvis Costello before him was emulable.
To be continued... stay tuned for "The Garden King (Part 2)"!
(I intended to include an mp3 to accompany this blog, but I gotta get me some hosting and then I can start doing so. In the meantime, you can check out some of Nam's stuff here.)
My ability to meet my townie friends was, in no small part, thanks to my friend CJ. Performative, charming, and gregarious - nay - socially fearless, he allowed me to essentially be his sidekick and eventually "partner in crime" on our adventures "into town" at the dawn of our college experience. With the Princeton Coffee House, probably the least hip coffee house in town in retrospect, as our homebase, we would essentially hold court for fellow Westminster students on their way into town or back to campus, all the while improvising the rules to backgammon and flirting with Donna behind the counter. We used an evening hang there as an informal and unwritten social litmus test for anyone who wished to become part of our little crew. These having been the days before cell phones were widely owned, it was tough to keep tabs on people or make last-minute plans, but if you wanted to find or make plans with me or CJ, you could simply head to the Princeton Coffee House and we'd start from there. This was the place I learned to enjoy coffee (starting off with kiwi lattes - I KNOW!), would come to wash dishes for free as a way to clear my head, and, due to its somewhat odd location and the number of other more popular cafes in Princeton, our own little hangout. It's where we met, and befriended a large number townies. I count the evenings spent there among my most dear college-era memories.
We often stayed until Steve, the owner, closed up shop - a signal that it was either bedtime or, depending on the amount of caffeine we'd imbibed, a starting point for any number of real or imaginary collegiate adventures. On one evening in particular, we met and befriended a townie named Nam. I had (and still have) the strong sense that we knew him prior to the evening in question, but as that's the first specific memory I have of Nam, and since I am telling the stories here, we'll just go ahead and say that's when we met. We had obviously become acquainted shortly before closing as I vaguely remember still doing introductions as we ambled out of the shop as Steve locked the door and settled on the floor right outside. One (or more) of us had a guitar and we immediately started swapping songs as it was apparent that everyone in our crew was a musician. Lucas (who was along for the evening), CJ, and I were already generally familiar with songs that one of us had written and/or were comfortable playing in public and it appeared that Nam, his friend Steve (not the same Steve who owned the coffee shop, but this guy did play a mean guitar and sitar and worked at the record exchange. Whereas Nam had shorter hair and a seemed to be, at root, of a very "suburban" type, Steve reeked of the stereotypical "townie"), and another friend or two of theirs seemed to have something of a collective songboook as well. To this day, I always come off foolish in these situations as I never feel as though my serious songs are up to snuff with the stuff others present (the continual manifestation of this complex has recently led me to believe that my songs are, indeed, not as good as I think they are) and, thus, resort to the comical. I played "The Squirrel Song" (a spoof lament for a dead decapitated squirrel I had written with my then band, The Gravity) and some other silly little tunes in an effort to keep my ego and newly forming reputation afloat, but the death knell continued to toll with each song my new friend Nam played. Fingerpicking with a precision and rhythmic fluidity I still can only aspire to, he rolled off whimiscal songs in a beautiful baritone about the posters on his wall and a "slow motion" girl. While only a few minutes prior, these new friends seemed to be roughly our age, perhaps a year older, as their collective and intimate knowledge and ties to a town which were only then becoming a part of emerged and, more importantly, as Nam unfurled his brilliant songbook, I suddenly felt childish - not young - but juvenile in my understanding of community, musical narrative, and lack of earnesty. While the floor we sat on was grey cement, the walls and ceiling were made of 12" brown matte ceramic tile. Coupled with the odd design of the building (a multi-business, split-level-like affair wherein it was all open and mall-like - as in you would enter the confines of the physical structure but still be in the open air, and would need to either go up a few steps or downstairs - still outside - to enter individual businesses like our coffee house upstairs or the 24 hr. Kinko's downstairs), these tiles made for a particularly pleasant reverb. His beautiful and simple performances and inherit warmth of his songs rang out in a way that made them seem simultaneously intimate and gigantic in that space. After stumbling upon the one song we all knew well enough to sing along to (The Beach Boys' "Vegetables"), I retreated - not only returning to campus, but also sticking my guitar in a case and not touching it for a few days.
Despite my laying low in fear of bumping into my new idol-cum-nemesis, one of the songs that Nam had played that night stuck with me for weeks. It was a cute number (though faaar more clever than any of my "cute" tunes) sang from the perspective of a "Super Villain" to a girl he's holding captive. "...And you and I will rule the world, a Super Villain and his girl", went the chorus. While not very harmonically or melodically inventive in retrospect, the almost vaudevillian chord progression and melody coupled with the lilting rhythm was incredibly appealing to me. Having only begun to break out of the pop/rock formula I was compositionally tied to, the song seemed like something of a breakthrough. I almost resented its freedom. I honestly thought that my going to fancy-schmancy conservatory and studying Mozart and the boys would somehow (be it through intense scholarship or osmosis) inject a new level of quality into my budding catalogue of songs, yet here was some townie! (with none of the musical pedigree I had recently bestowed upon myself and seemingly little of the training to which I was beginning) who could write me under the table. I was simultaneously presumptuously furious with my own inflated sense of ego and lack of songwriting chops and curious as to how I could write on that level. I had to go to the source.
So rather than avoid town all together, I decided I was better off just befriending the guy. He was sweet as hell and didn't intend to make me feel "small". After all, I was in college and I wanted "experience life" or something. Reading back over those sentences, it sounds as though I aspired to some sort of usury. That really wasn't the case, but I truly did put this cat on a pedestal and always did hope that he I could glean some info on his creative process. So over the next several months I spent time with Nam in dribs and drabs, often playing music or talking about music and art and whathaveyou. I found him to be infinitely interesting and incredibly curious and sincere. He always wanted explanations and he always seemed to want you to go deeper. In turn, he was always incredibly philosophical in his own ideas and explanations of them. His speech was always slow and measured (not to be confused with sounding rehearsed) and his aforementioned silky baritone made each statement he made seem some how important or "true" in a larger sense. His curiosity was also astounding. If I or one of my choir college chronies made some reference to a composer or piece of music that he knew nothing about, Nam, still quiet and contemplative, wanted to know everything we could tell him about the subject. I found his aura of absolute wisdom/authority and his lack of shame about his childlike enthusiasm to understand all the things he didn't know created a larger picture of coolness. There were even times that I thought one of the two sides of this juxtaposition was some sort of put-on, but his intense sincerity continually reminded me that this was the real Nam I was dealing with. I honestly cherished every moment we shared.
Here's the interesting thing: I never made plans with Nam in all the years that I hung around with him. I never knew his address, or his phone number, or his email address. We always just sorta found one another. Now: this has nothing to do with fate or anything "bigger" - or does it?! ; ) - it actually speaks more the community of young, non-Princeton University students who bummed around downtown Princeton in those days. I don't want to paint it as though it was like Haight-Ashbury in 1967, but there were plenty of late high school/early college aged kids who wandered aimlessly and harmlessly around town in their thrift shop clothes with books of poetry in their hand or guitars on their backs. Nam and I were both cut of that cloth, so we often bumped into each other (usually me with CJ and him with a friend or two as well), and would spend the rest of the day "experiencing life" together. Some days we would head back to my campus and play around on pianos and organs in the basement practice rooms. Some days we would just sit in the coffee house and chat. I vaguely remember some more adventurous trips into the the $1 bins at the Princeton Record Exchange or out to "the battlefield", an old, uh... battlefield-cum-park where people would laze about, drink wine, and play music... or frisbee.
At some point it stopped being about my idolizing and wanting to learn from the guy, but the days I ran into him and got to spend time with him still exist in my most exciting (the kind of exciting only freshmen in college can understand) and exquisite watercolor meories that tell me it was always spring when I hung around with Nam.
At some later point during my freshman year, Nam recorded a four-song demo and either sold or gave me a cassette copy. While it was long ago swallowed by the sarlac bit that was my best friend Luke's then-girlfriend Wendy's dorm room (she loved this tape almost as much as I did), I remember the black and white, grainy, photocopied insert/cover featuring my friend Nam (using the pseudonym William Ether) holding a mirror up to a mirror so that the cover image itself was blasted into infinity. It might have been the folky leanings of the songs or the added "record player" effect on my aforementioned fave, "Super Villain", but it surely sounded not only old, but instantly timeless. While I knew people that had recorded stuff in studios and given me copies before, this was not only the most professional looking and sounding independent music project I'd yet come into close contact with, but this was certainly the most artistically sturdy. To be quite honest, I don't remember all four tracks on the tape, but I know that in addition to "Super Villain", it also closed with (I think it was last) an absolutely haunting track that I had not heard Nam play before. Beginning with an ostinato almost baroque in its conception and ending with a sound collage made up of a rain storm and electronic effects, "The Garden King" was a revelation to me. "Come out creatures of the night. The Garden King is in the clearing...", is an opening lyric that I count among my all-time faves.
These two songs alone were enough to change my life and direction as a musician. Not only had they been produced independent of pie-in-the-sky dreams like record companies and whatnot, but they had been done so without so much as an ounce lost in artistic weight and quality. The very fact that I had a physical artifact representing Nam's artistic vision - one that I could pour over and suck dry of musical marrow - was priceless to me. Suddenly, Nam, like the Beatles, Weezer, and Elvis Costello before him was emulable.
To be continued... stay tuned for "The Garden King (Part 2)"!
(I intended to include an mp3 to accompany this blog, but I gotta get me some hosting and then I can start doing so. In the meantime, you can check out some of Nam's stuff here.)
20 March 2009
This makes me very happy...
It's been a while since we've heard anything new from one of my FAVOURITE (yes, that's all caps and bold) bands - and composers of Oklahoma's new "official state rock song" - The Flaming Lips.
If for some reason, the embedded vid won't play, try here.
If for some reason, the embedded vid won't play, try here.
18 March 2009
Go Me!!!
I am in the middle of putting together two massive posts complete with mp3's and tall tales of my college days, but seeing as both are wrought with storm und drang and self-effacement, I figured I would drop a tidbit of a pleasant experience while it's fresh on the brain.
As I am sure friends and readers have come to find out, I am highly confident in matters of musical conception, often having excellent arrangement ideas or good instincts on album or setlist continuity and the like, but often stall out of the gate when it comes to execution. Be it due to my lack of commitment to one instrument, lack of serious practice time on any instrument, or even my favourite new excuse, my lack of innate fine motor skills (apparently because I never crawled as a child), I am not an exceptionally deft technician on any of the tools on which I portend to be an "official" user. Upright bass is certainly my weakest suit by far. The other folks in The Whistlin' Wolves seem immensely patient with my lack of technical facility and I make up for it with my other skills and ideas, but every now and again I find myself in a place where those other things aren't enough to save me from winding up with proverbial gunslinger egg on my face.
Last night, The Whistlin Wolves played our first radio appearance. We played as part of a sort of radio hoedown on WKCR, wherein the house band sorta hosted us as special guests to the show. Like so many of the musicians on the traditional scene in NYC, the core members of this house band were incredibly kind and gracious and laid back - so laid back that they shared another trait with the rest of the scene: a general lack of rehearsal. Now let's be clear: I am not dogging anyone who can do a performance at their level (that level being "very high") without much rehearsal, but this laissez faire attitude leaves a lot to chance; like who will actually be in the band that night, for example. The show was due to start at 10 PM, and as of 9:15 they were still unsure as to whether or not their up-til-then-unnamed bassist was going to show, so I started learning a few tunes in the event thay I would need to sit in.
At some point during said rehearsal, the band's just-arrived fiddler asked the leader who I was - not in a "who's THIS guy?!" kinda way, more like a "hey, who's our new friend sitting in on bass?" kinda way. The leader looked up from his beautiful old Martin guitar and said something to the effect of, "This is Trip's bassist. These guys might sit in (referring to me and Spiff, mandolin in hand). Skip Ward was supposed to be here..." I use the ellipses here not because the rest of what he said was unimportant, but the fact that I even heard the five words after "Skip Ward" is miracle in and of itself. "Why?", you ask. Well... go ahead and Google "Skip Ward", or maybe even plug it into YouTube. For those of you without the time or interest in doing so, I'll just go ahead and tell you that Skip is one of the go-to bassists in New York. He's played with some heavyweights like Belá Fleck and Tony Trishcka. He studied with Jaco Pastorius for chrissakes! The first time I heard of Skip was when I found out he would be sitting in with us at a Woody Guthrie tribute we played a few months ago. Prior to said gig, I emailed Trip just making sure that our sit-in bassist would be able to learn our tunes on the fly. He simply responded with a couple of links to video clips of Skip playing on Letterman and Conan. Yeah. So I was basically shitting my pants. Here I am: Captain Butterfingers on the double bass, already nervous about playing on the radio and in front of people who know a lot more about "this music" than I do, and now you're telling me that I may have to do so in front of one of the best bassists in town. While I was nervous about sitting in with this other band, I was even more nervous about the prospect of their bassist actually showing up, because then I would have to play my set in front of him - almost surely to the embarrassment of me and the rest of The Whistlin' Wolves.
Well... as luck would (or would not depending on perspective) have it... Skip did show up, and here I was without a change of clean underwear. To be clear: while an absolute monster player, Skip is also the nicest dude in the world. We checked out one another's moods and instruments like two dog's circling and sniffing ass and silently established that we were both cool with two bassist being there. Despite the fact that I was in the middle of learning a song, I quickly deferred to him and put my bass in the corner so they could run a few more tunes before the show started. I spent the next hour (with a short break to work out our setlist and watch Trip play doctor on a harmonica) pacing the hallway strumming a ukulele and wondering how I was going to play in front of this guy.
Our set rolled 'round and we set up to play. While I would love to spin off all the details of the show (which went quite well), for this story's purpose the important thing is this: I didn't suck. While our tempos were generally a little rushed, I was fairly effective in holding back an all out stampede; and while I didn't play too conservatively, my cautious attempts to not embarrass myself in front of one of the best bassists around lead to my being more focused and making better choices. Let's be reasonable: I didn't rewrite the book on bass playing last night, but when the other band came back in the room to share the last third of the show with us all hootenanny-like, Skip actually suggested we both play bass. He might have just been polite, but it felt like a nod of approval. Nonetheless, I opted to grab Emily's guitar as, in my mind, I had just dodged an ego bullet and didn't want to push my luck.
It might not have been my best gig ever, but I was beaming inside as we packed up because I ussually wilt in situations like the one from last night. I was thrilled to have held my own. I confessed to Spiff as we got into the car to head home to Brooklyn that I hadn't thought much about how our band sounded as I had spent too much time mentally patting myself on the back for a job fairly well done. He was happy for me too and said as much, contextualizing it within how I feel after all of our other gigs (with all the bands): bad. I am blessed to work with three great bands and, more often than not, am pleased with our shows, but it's rare that I come home from a gig so pleased with how I played personally. Considering the odds, this one felt extra special. Mornings after nights like that lead me to want to play more and, perhaps more importantly, play better. Maybe I should call Skip and take a few lessons.
As I am sure friends and readers have come to find out, I am highly confident in matters of musical conception, often having excellent arrangement ideas or good instincts on album or setlist continuity and the like, but often stall out of the gate when it comes to execution. Be it due to my lack of commitment to one instrument, lack of serious practice time on any instrument, or even my favourite new excuse, my lack of innate fine motor skills (apparently because I never crawled as a child), I am not an exceptionally deft technician on any of the tools on which I portend to be an "official" user. Upright bass is certainly my weakest suit by far. The other folks in The Whistlin' Wolves seem immensely patient with my lack of technical facility and I make up for it with my other skills and ideas, but every now and again I find myself in a place where those other things aren't enough to save me from winding up with proverbial gunslinger egg on my face.
Last night, The Whistlin Wolves played our first radio appearance. We played as part of a sort of radio hoedown on WKCR, wherein the house band sorta hosted us as special guests to the show. Like so many of the musicians on the traditional scene in NYC, the core members of this house band were incredibly kind and gracious and laid back - so laid back that they shared another trait with the rest of the scene: a general lack of rehearsal. Now let's be clear: I am not dogging anyone who can do a performance at their level (that level being "very high") without much rehearsal, but this laissez faire attitude leaves a lot to chance; like who will actually be in the band that night, for example. The show was due to start at 10 PM, and as of 9:15 they were still unsure as to whether or not their up-til-then-unnamed bassist was going to show, so I started learning a few tunes in the event thay I would need to sit in.
At some point during said rehearsal, the band's just-arrived fiddler asked the leader who I was - not in a "who's THIS guy?!" kinda way, more like a "hey, who's our new friend sitting in on bass?" kinda way. The leader looked up from his beautiful old Martin guitar and said something to the effect of, "This is Trip's bassist. These guys might sit in (referring to me and Spiff, mandolin in hand). Skip Ward was supposed to be here..." I use the ellipses here not because the rest of what he said was unimportant, but the fact that I even heard the five words after "Skip Ward" is miracle in and of itself. "Why?", you ask. Well... go ahead and Google "Skip Ward", or maybe even plug it into YouTube. For those of you without the time or interest in doing so, I'll just go ahead and tell you that Skip is one of the go-to bassists in New York. He's played with some heavyweights like Belá Fleck and Tony Trishcka. He studied with Jaco Pastorius for chrissakes! The first time I heard of Skip was when I found out he would be sitting in with us at a Woody Guthrie tribute we played a few months ago. Prior to said gig, I emailed Trip just making sure that our sit-in bassist would be able to learn our tunes on the fly. He simply responded with a couple of links to video clips of Skip playing on Letterman and Conan. Yeah. So I was basically shitting my pants. Here I am: Captain Butterfingers on the double bass, already nervous about playing on the radio and in front of people who know a lot more about "this music" than I do, and now you're telling me that I may have to do so in front of one of the best bassists in town. While I was nervous about sitting in with this other band, I was even more nervous about the prospect of their bassist actually showing up, because then I would have to play my set in front of him - almost surely to the embarrassment of me and the rest of The Whistlin' Wolves.
Well... as luck would (or would not depending on perspective) have it... Skip did show up, and here I was without a change of clean underwear. To be clear: while an absolute monster player, Skip is also the nicest dude in the world. We checked out one another's moods and instruments like two dog's circling and sniffing ass and silently established that we were both cool with two bassist being there. Despite the fact that I was in the middle of learning a song, I quickly deferred to him and put my bass in the corner so they could run a few more tunes before the show started. I spent the next hour (with a short break to work out our setlist and watch Trip play doctor on a harmonica) pacing the hallway strumming a ukulele and wondering how I was going to play in front of this guy.
Our set rolled 'round and we set up to play. While I would love to spin off all the details of the show (which went quite well), for this story's purpose the important thing is this: I didn't suck. While our tempos were generally a little rushed, I was fairly effective in holding back an all out stampede; and while I didn't play too conservatively, my cautious attempts to not embarrass myself in front of one of the best bassists around lead to my being more focused and making better choices. Let's be reasonable: I didn't rewrite the book on bass playing last night, but when the other band came back in the room to share the last third of the show with us all hootenanny-like, Skip actually suggested we both play bass. He might have just been polite, but it felt like a nod of approval. Nonetheless, I opted to grab Emily's guitar as, in my mind, I had just dodged an ego bullet and didn't want to push my luck.
It might not have been my best gig ever, but I was beaming inside as we packed up because I ussually wilt in situations like the one from last night. I was thrilled to have held my own. I confessed to Spiff as we got into the car to head home to Brooklyn that I hadn't thought much about how our band sounded as I had spent too much time mentally patting myself on the back for a job fairly well done. He was happy for me too and said as much, contextualizing it within how I feel after all of our other gigs (with all the bands): bad. I am blessed to work with three great bands and, more often than not, am pleased with our shows, but it's rare that I come home from a gig so pleased with how I played personally. Considering the odds, this one felt extra special. Mornings after nights like that lead me to want to play more and, perhaps more importantly, play better. Maybe I should call Skip and take a few lessons.
06 March 2009
The Whistlin' Wolves?
I will get back to this blogging thing in earnest soon enough, but I thought I should drop a little one here and now.
Since I joined up in June, my band with Emily, Trip, and Spiff has forever waffled about our name. Initially on the fence between Whistling Rufus and The Whistle Pigs, we played our first few gigs unsure of who we were and, thus, unable to further promote ourselves and whatnot. When last fall rolled in and brought with it many many bookings, we decided there and then that we needed an actual name. For reasons still unclear to me (but by no means problematic), we decided to go with Whistling Rufus.
Now listen: Trip knows traditional American music better than just about anyone I know, and he made us fully aware of the racist implications of the old fiddle tune after which we had just named ourselves; but assuming that this would continue to be a very informal band, in addition to the fact that we had gotten the "go-ahead" from one of the foremost African-American interpreters of this style of music, we went ahead and started promoting our gigs as Whistling Rufus. People in the know seemed to let it slide (after all, there are lots of other trad. groups going by that same name) and people who didn't know of its derivation simply thought it sounded cute or funny.
So as the months and gigs flew by we realized that this band is actually pretty good and we should probably start bragging about it. As we all move in a few different musical circles we figured we would have the word out in no time, but we quickly came across a hitch in said plan. Emily realized it first as she began preparing a resumé for her latest round of auditions and grant applications. In an effort to show off her musical abilities in a variety of styles, she prepared a list of projects she is currently a part of. Surveying what she had typed out, and, I am guessing, noting that we had no web presence to speak of, she quickly realized that someone might feel the need to google "Whistling Rufus" in an effort to find out more about us. Therein lay the problem. If you're curious, you can go ahead and do this yourself, but I assure you that if you hit Google up with the same query it will take you less than five hits to come across the word "nigger" more than once. uuuhh... yeah. NOT. COOL.
It's odd how difficult it was coming up with a new name seeing as we had cared so little about our original collective alias just a few months prior. Nonetheless we discussed and bickered and pandered and waffled. In an effort to highlight Emily's incredible whistling talent (she has won several international championships), we wanted to keep "whistling" or "whistlin" in the name, but, as the rest of us are men, and, thus, always concerned about not being macho enough, we needed the other part of our name to make up for the "cutesiness" of "Whistling...". Now: anyone who has been in a band before knows this, but I will state it here again for those of you not in the know: NAMING A BAND IS FUCKING DIFFICULT. While I fully recognized that my ex-rock/striving-for-the-big-time band, Joanie Loves Trotsky, belabored almost all of our collective decisions, I will never forget the hours we spent in our singer Cliff's living room debating the merits of names such as "Pol Pot Pie", "Ninjavitis", "Gonhorrea Perlman", and another hundred or so pun-tacular names in addition to the silly one we wound up choosing. I mean: this was serious business... and I guess some things never change. To be fair: we never came to strong words or blows over deciding what to rename that artists formerly collectively known as Whistling Rufus, but it took us several weeks to even come up with something we could all tolerate, let alone be truly proud of. So after much hemming and hawing we decided to borrow our new name from an old Rose & The Maddox Brothers tune we had recently added to our repertoire and now call oursevles The Whistlin' Wolves.
I don't know that any of us love it, but we are committed to it - for the time being :) - and have invested a little actual energy into promoting ourselves and whatnot. We have a ton of gigs coming up and have even scored a radio appearance later this month! More immediatley for youse, you can actually see and hear us online! We have stepped boldly into 2004 and set up... wait for it... a MYSPACE PAGE!!! (I know!) So welcome to the world of the Whistlin' Wolves. Check out the tunes online and I hope to see some of you at one of our many upcoming shows!
Since I joined up in June, my band with Emily, Trip, and Spiff has forever waffled about our name. Initially on the fence between Whistling Rufus and The Whistle Pigs, we played our first few gigs unsure of who we were and, thus, unable to further promote ourselves and whatnot. When last fall rolled in and brought with it many many bookings, we decided there and then that we needed an actual name. For reasons still unclear to me (but by no means problematic), we decided to go with Whistling Rufus.
Now listen: Trip knows traditional American music better than just about anyone I know, and he made us fully aware of the racist implications of the old fiddle tune after which we had just named ourselves; but assuming that this would continue to be a very informal band, in addition to the fact that we had gotten the "go-ahead" from one of the foremost African-American interpreters of this style of music, we went ahead and started promoting our gigs as Whistling Rufus. People in the know seemed to let it slide (after all, there are lots of other trad. groups going by that same name) and people who didn't know of its derivation simply thought it sounded cute or funny.
So as the months and gigs flew by we realized that this band is actually pretty good and we should probably start bragging about it. As we all move in a few different musical circles we figured we would have the word out in no time, but we quickly came across a hitch in said plan. Emily realized it first as she began preparing a resumé for her latest round of auditions and grant applications. In an effort to show off her musical abilities in a variety of styles, she prepared a list of projects she is currently a part of. Surveying what she had typed out, and, I am guessing, noting that we had no web presence to speak of, she quickly realized that someone might feel the need to google "Whistling Rufus" in an effort to find out more about us. Therein lay the problem. If you're curious, you can go ahead and do this yourself, but I assure you that if you hit Google up with the same query it will take you less than five hits to come across the word "nigger" more than once. uuuhh... yeah. NOT. COOL.
It's odd how difficult it was coming up with a new name seeing as we had cared so little about our original collective alias just a few months prior. Nonetheless we discussed and bickered and pandered and waffled. In an effort to highlight Emily's incredible whistling talent (she has won several international championships), we wanted to keep "whistling" or "whistlin" in the name, but, as the rest of us are men, and, thus, always concerned about not being macho enough, we needed the other part of our name to make up for the "cutesiness" of "Whistling...". Now: anyone who has been in a band before knows this, but I will state it here again for those of you not in the know: NAMING A BAND IS FUCKING DIFFICULT. While I fully recognized that my ex-rock/striving-for-the-big-time band, Joanie Loves Trotsky, belabored almost all of our collective decisions, I will never forget the hours we spent in our singer Cliff's living room debating the merits of names such as "Pol Pot Pie", "Ninjavitis", "Gonhorrea Perlman", and another hundred or so pun-tacular names in addition to the silly one we wound up choosing. I mean: this was serious business... and I guess some things never change. To be fair: we never came to strong words or blows over deciding what to rename that artists formerly collectively known as Whistling Rufus, but it took us several weeks to even come up with something we could all tolerate, let alone be truly proud of. So after much hemming and hawing we decided to borrow our new name from an old Rose & The Maddox Brothers tune we had recently added to our repertoire and now call oursevles The Whistlin' Wolves.
I don't know that any of us love it, but we are committed to it - for the time being :) - and have invested a little actual energy into promoting ourselves and whatnot. We have a ton of gigs coming up and have even scored a radio appearance later this month! More immediatley for youse, you can actually see and hear us online! We have stepped boldly into 2004 and set up... wait for it... a MYSPACE PAGE!!! (I know!) So welcome to the world of the Whistlin' Wolves. Check out the tunes online and I hope to see some of you at one of our many upcoming shows!
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