Pop And Me

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?

When The Lights Go On Again All Over The World

"Can you hear me now? Good."

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

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

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).

Silence Update

And I was doing so well, too...

Updates will be minimal for a while, due to a horrendous confluence of factors, most notably a recently-dead hard drive and a lack of ready cash to replace same, and an unreliable 'net connection on the borrowed laptop from which I type this.

Am actually considering something so crass as a PayPal whip-round. Will keep you posted.

When I return: more gig journal, including last week's Pink Moon Eclipse-O-Rama Cabaret; more heady thoughts on politics, faith, and the War; more bizarre search referrals; and more trolling the Web for weird, random junk so you don't have to.

Over and out.

These Boots Were Made For

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)

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

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.

Your Moment Of Creepy Zen

From today's search referrals:

"behind blues eyes" "who wrote it"

One of those questions that contains its own answer (see also "Who's on first").

Somewhat more worryingly, my site also shows up on a search for fist fucking free pics.

A note to search engine punters: as you may have noticed, this site contains no free pics of fist-fucking: it does, however, contain the individual words fist, fucking, free, and pics—scattered among hundreds of other words, and in radically different contexts. Putting quotation marks around complete phrases will narrow your search to sites containing that exact phrase: otherwise, your engine will kick up all sites containing the individual words, leaving you with hundreds upon hundreds of unrelated sites to trawl through before you find what you're looking for.

This has been a public service announcement.
Now go away: you're creeping me out.

Everybody Loves Jack Fear (And Vice-Versa)

A real day-brightener, this. Our far-flung correspondent Neville Young writes to tell us...

I came across your excellent blog while searching for news of my old friend Jack Fear, the one who (see 30 April 2003) did the Colston Hall, Bristol gig in 1953 and who had just retired from teaching in 2001.

So:

(a) thanks very much—I had fallen out of touch with Jack and wanted to contact him, and your mention of the school was a very useful pointer, and,

(b) I just wanted to let you know what a terrific guy your namesake in the SW of England is. As a teenager I played in a student big band that he ran and he was a fabulous bloke to have running it—dedicated, great with kids, and a wonderful musician.

Thanks and all good wishes

Neville Young

Neville also enclosed a photograph of the big man in action, "conducting a big band for a TV broadcast in the 70s"...

A harbinger of my future? Constant Reader, I should be so lucky.

(Neville Young, by the bye, is a pretty fabulous bloke in his own right: he's behind a fundraising effort for the Siyakhula Project, a music program based in Umlazi Township, near Durban, South Africa, that fuses jazz brass with traditional drumming, singing, and dance—just the kind of joyous pan-cultural mash-up we loves here in the House of Fear, and surely a worthy cause. Cheers, Neville!)