The Title of This Post is "No Title"

So guess who's anal-retentive enough to go through three years' worth of posts, cleaning up funky line and paragraph breaks?

Erm. Yeah.

It's, ah, been a slow couple of days here in the Heart of Empire.

Now, in all fairness, I've done this kind of thing twice before: When this blog moved to Blogspot from the Barbelith domain, I fixed all the inter-post links, and later, when I lost my free AOL webspace and moved all my pics to VillagePhotos, I corrected all the image links—but those instances were both addressing matters of functionality. This trawl-through was strictly for vanity, the equivalent of Yeats going back and rewriting all his earlier poems to conform to his later aesthetic standards. Which he did.

Still.

Anyway—while you're here, have a browse through the archives! They've never looked better, I promise.

Music Of The Youth

The boy is seventeen months old, sitting in the backseat, pounding his tiny fist on the car seat in perfect time, crooning delightedly as he beats out the crude stomp of "Seven Nation Army."

He's going to outlive us all.
The music is in good hands.

Making a Case for a Neo-Logorrhea

Fraction called my prose style "florid" today, in a way that suggested that this is a Bad Thing.

(He called me "creepy," too, but I remain unconvinced of that.)

Fraction, of course, is a Man Of ACTION!, and thus heir to the terse, jagged music of Papa Hemingway, whose influence has held a slightly improbable sway on several generations of "cutting-edge" writers (Coupland, close the door on your way out: Chuck, enjoy it while it lasts). The Man of Action (as opposed to the Man of Letters) rejects the ornamental, impeccably-turned sentences of the Victorians in favor of a sparse, highly-fraught staccato. The Man of Action takes prose out of the salon and into the streets, the coffeehouse, the savannah, the battlefield literal or metaphorical. His work is reportage, spare and pithy and closely-observed. His constructions are simple, his words few.

It's still a valid model: but it is not the only model.

And it is, I would argue, an outdated model. To wit, that Every generation gets the prose style it can afford. That is, an era's prose is influenced, consciously or no, by that era's dominant medium for communication. For Hemingway, that was the telegram: the prohibitive cost-per-word pared his line down to its shapely nakedness, and legions followed his lead.

But that's really no longer necessary, is it? Cost is hardly a driving factor for brevity in Web-based prose: images are bandwidth-hogs, yeah, but text? A pittance among pittances.

So why not a return to the looping, recursive constructions of De Quincey and his ilk? Studies suggest that reading and writing complex prose strengthen neural pathways in the brain and can help to stave off Alzheimer's disease.

The time is now.
Your brain is at stake.

Long live the New Fop!

In Other News

Water "Wet," Say Scientists

The Buddha on the Road

What kind of world are we living in when the Dalai Lama—the Dalai fucking Lama—does a flip-flop on the moral justifiability of violence in the War on Terrorism?

From a statement on the first anniversary of the 9-11 attacks:

We should explore the use of non-violence as a long-term measure to control terrorism of every kind. We need a well-thought-out, coordinated long-term strategy. ...

In today's reality the only way of resolving differences is through dialogue and compromise, through human understanding and humility. We need to appreciate that genuine peace comes about through mutual understanding, respect and trust. Problems within human society should be solved in a humanitarian way, for which non-violence provides the proper approach.

...and from a New York Times article one year later (found via the International Herald Tribune)...

The Dalai Lama, a Nobel Peace Prize winner and one of the world's leading advocates of nonviolence, said in an interview that it might be necessary to fight terrorists with violence, and that it was "too early to say" whether the Iraq war is a mistake.

"I feel only history will tell," he said Wednesday. "Terrorism is the worst kind of violence, so we have to check it, we have to take countermeasures." ...

At a time when many political and religious leaders are saying that the US antiterrorism campaign and the war in Iraq are only fueling additional terrorism, the Dalai Lama refused to pass judgment.

What the hell's going on here? This is the sort of thing one might expect from, say, Jesus of Nazareth, who was a bit of a nail-pounding ‘ard man as we all know and not above bringing the pain as required (ask the money-changers in the Temple about Mr. Meek-and-Mild, and they’ll show you His sandal-prints on their arses): but from the Buddha Of Compassion hisself? I feel a pit opening at my feet.

Well, no. The Christ comparison is both facile and facetious: that is to say, it won’t hold water. Jesus was never a head of state, as such—when He talked about the Kingdom of Heaven, it was never to rally support for His government-in-exile—and thus never had to deal with the sorts of political realities that plague the DL Quatorze. As recounted in Orville Schell’s excellent Virtual Tibet, among other places, His Holiness has always trod lightly with regard to international politics. He will, if possible, avoid pissing off the governments of either the US—the only power with a shot at influencing China on the Tibet question—or his host for 44 years, India, which has its own problems with terrorism arising from the intersection of religion and politics. There are strong practical reasons for him to do so.

And HH is nothing if not practical. A closer look at his position on the War on Terror—indeed, on non-violence generally—shows that the flip-flop is an illusion: his recent remarks are a corollary to, not a refutation of, his earlier position.

The Dalai Lama is interesting among religious figures in that his opposition to violent solutions comes not only from an aversion to violence on moral or humanitarian grounds—but also (and this seems to be the angle he emphasizes, at least for Western audiences) from the simple fact that violence is a staggeringly ineffective tool for solving problems. The communiqué at the first link continues:

I believe there will always be conflicts and clash of ideas as long as human beings exist. This is natural. Therefore, we need an active method or approach to overcome such contradictions. ...

Terrorism cannot be overcome by the use of force because it does not address the complex underlying problems. In fact the use of force may not only fail to solve the problems, it may exacerbate them and frequently leaves destruction and suffering in its wake. .... Violence undoubtedly breeds more violence. If we instinctively retaliate when violence is done to us, what can we expect other than that our opponent to also feel justified retaliating. This is how violence escalates. ...

In today's world expectations of war have changed. It is no longer realistic to expect that our enemy will be completely destroyed, or that victory will be total for us. Or for that matter, can an enemy be considered absolute. We have seen many times that today's enemies are often tomorrow's allies, a clear indication that things are relative and very interrelated and interdependent. Our survival, our success, our progress, are very much related to others' well being. Therefore, we as well as our enemies are still very much interdependent. Whether we regard them as economic, ideological or political enemies makes no difference to this. Their destruction has a destructive effect upon us. Thus, the very concept of war ... is no longer relevant.

Realpolitik as an expression of compassion: globalization as a model for peace: a quiet acceptance that all you can do is try your best in an imperfect world (a quintessentially Buddhist idea, that, and diametrically opposed to the Christian notion of making this a perfect world—of building the Kingdom of God on Earth). He's a smart man, and a sly one, that DL XIV: in a world where absolutists argue that even admitting the inevitability of violence is morally equivalent to advocating it, he walks his fine line, without stumbling on his slippery slope.

It's a hard road, that, and one we're all walking with him. We may as well admit that we're not all going to make it to the end of the road, and that the ones who fall along the way will be the ones who try to walk a straight line along a winding path.

Lizard Elegy

On Heaven’s flat rocks
she basks among crickets in
Everlasting Light

for Melissa,
whose time with us was but threescore days and ten:
a summertime companion, who passed with the passing of Summer

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

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

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

Y'know, if I'm gonna write 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)

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

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.

Jack In

Begin with a dead line and the droning tritone bleat of a dial tone. Cut to the squeal and crackle of data-packets over fiber-lines. Fragmented bursts of information, ones and zeroes, resolve into code. Language.

STATUS: NORMAL
ALL SYSTEMS OPTIMAL

A soft pop as a switch flicks and a circuit closes: the sudden 60Hz hum of a live mic, then vox humana:

Welcome back. Welcome to the Heart of Empire.

Communications have been restored here at the all-new House of Fear—have been for some weeks now—but I’ve been too intimidated by the scale of our recent changes to even think of writing.

Am just starting now to get an idea (albeit a piecemeal, kaleidoscopic one) of my life’s new shape: entries over the next few days will begin to map out relevant impressions of that life. Fragmented bursts of information resolve into language. Into pictures. Into categorizable experience.

I am now available for contact at the new address in the sidebar.

I’ll be in touch.