Archive for the ‘Music’ Category

Friday night was my first gig since October, and only the second time we’ve played in front of an audience. It was a pre-4/20 party at a medical marijuana dispensary. For those of you not hip to the reefer lingo, April 20th is like St. Patrick’s day for stoners. (Here’s more info on that.) And what better way for a cannabis club to celebrate than by having a progressive psychedelic jammy band like us come play for its patients? We loaded in the gear as the dispensary closed down and rolled the displays behind screens. Our host finally arrived with trays of food, the room filled up with people, the room filled up with smoke, and we started playing.

We had a projector set up to show things behind us. For the first set, we had Reefer Madness playing. For the rest of the night, we had a loop that I put together of random public domain oddities. I also tried to set up my flip camera to shoot us, but it was really difficult to get a good angle without really being able to see the screen. So the videos I have show people sitting around in a dark room listening to us play.

A few songs into the first set, two friends of mine from back East who I haven’t seen in over 5 years walked in. They had just flown in from Baltimore that morning and fought the jetlag to hear me play. I also had a couple of other friends there, one of whom brought my former boss (the one who laid me off right before the holidays) who was rather complimentary but wound up bailing shortly into the second set. Everyone was really complimentary. The audience really liked what we were doing, and we kept them well engaged.

This being only our second show, and our first in many months, we debuted a few songs which we’ve never played live before and that we’d been working on for months. We had two solid hour-long sets prepared. After the second set, we took a break and Breakfast, one of the guys who runs the club, hopped onto his keyboard and started regaling us with some ragtime standards, Tom Leher tunes, and an interesting take on Girls Just Want to Have Fun. Then we got back on for a third set of completely improvised stuff, mostly in E. To conserve space, our drummer brought his electronic kit which comes with a lot more sounds than just your standard drums, and this really ads to the jam in new and exciting ways. And then just as we’re really hitting our groove, I hear a sax. I looked at my keyboard player wondering if he had that realistic of a sax sound, and then in walks Breakfast blowing a sax. A sax always kicks things up a notch, and this time was no exception.

We wrapped up around midnight, and as we were tearing down the gear and cleaning up the room, Breakfast was playing Beatles songs on an acoustic as our singer and a friend of ours sang them in perfect harmony. It was an incredible evening and I can hardly wait just a few weeks until our next gig.

Below is some YouTube from the second set. Like I said, the video is just people sitting on the couch and walking by, but you can at least hear what we sounded like.

No Quarter:

Child in Time:

It’s been almost a year since I started my current band. We originally had a dads and kids jam/playgroup at the fieldhouse of our parents’ group. We’d bring the kids and acoustic instruments and order pizza and just play as much as our kids would let us. One of the dads has been writing songs for decades and had just gotten himself a spot in our summer music festival, but he didn’t have a band. I offered to play bass, more because I really wanted to play music in front of my whole town than because I was that into his music, which was kind of Americana/bluegrass infused.

At that point, we had procured ourselves a large jam room downtown. It used to be a yoga studio and was not being used and we were lucky enough to get to use it for free. We had a small PA and sometimes a loaner drumset. At this point the Tuesday playgroup/jam was becoming more of a practice where our kids were distracting us. Then there was a Thursday night jam which was getting to the point where there were 5 guitars and 3 basses all playing at once and it was very straight ahead and bluesy.

As the festival was getting to be 2 months away, my friend told me that he didn’t think I’d be able to learn his songs in time for the festival and he had found a guy with a real upright who also plays in an orchestra, and I was really bummed for a bit, but I realized that playing a gig just for the spotlight rather than for love of the music was not really the right motivation.

So, I was without a band and not really loving what was happening with the open jam and I decided I needed to organize my own thing. I put out an ad on craigslist looking for people into progressive rock. I heard back from a guitarist, a sax player, and a guy who plays pretty much everything.  We jammed a bunch of King Crimson songs, a little bit of Pink Floyd, and some improv stuff. The following week the sax player did not return, but the three of us left formed the core of what is now our band. A few weeks later we took out an ad looking for a drummer. We had one respond who has his own warehouse jam space in Oakland and a wife who sings and also plays bass. After playing with him in our jam room once, we moved it all to his place and the band was formed in August of ’09. Shortly thereafter, the jam room got rented out and was no longer available for anyone. We made it all happen at the right time and it was meant to be.

Shortly thereafter, it was announced that my town was having a fall festival and all the bands in town were invited to play, so we had our very first gig. That was last October and the last time we played live. After such a long wait, we’ve got 3 gigs lined up now, and the first one is this Friday!

The venue is a medical marijuana clinic, so it’s going to be an unusual show. Since it’s not a bar zoned for live music, we’re going to keep the volume low. We’re bringing electric drums and small amps. We’ve added a few tunes to our repertoire since the October gig, and we’re also going to do a lot of spacey improv jams. It’s going to be a lot of fun. For more info, to see some videos from our last gig, and to get onto our mailing list, click here.

Well, there goes another week without any posts. How did I ever used to blog daily, sometimes multiple times? Oh, that’s right, I had a job that was very often not particularly busy and a 10 minute commute. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way complaining about my new job. I really love it. But it definitely has a lot more moving parts for me to be on top of than my last one. And it’s a hell of a lot more rewarding.

So, what’s been going on, you ask? Oh who am I kidding? Nobody is asking. The only comments I seem to get around here are spam. And the comment spammers seem to have gotten a bit more advanced since my last forray into the blogosphere. I do get a little chuckle every time I get these vague comments about how intriguing my subject matter is and how they would like to know more about it. But it’s my own damn fault for taking such a long hiatus from blogging and not really doing a whole lot to let people know I’m back.

So where was I? Oh right, general life updates and whatnot. So last Sunday there was a going away party for a friend of mine who is on a plane bound for Boston O’Hare as I type. It was an open jam session on the back deck of a restaurant in town and it was a great deal of fun. I brought Stella (my 4 year old daughter for those who don’t know) and a bunch of my other friends brought their kids too. The kids played their kid games while we played rock and roll for a solid six hours! We had a great group of players, many of us dropping out sometimes mid-song to tend to the little ones and many songs drummed softly with a child in the lap. At one point, Stella picked up a harmonica and played right in tune and on time. Did I mention she’s only 4?

After a long cold rainy winter, spring has definitely sprung and there’s a lot of music happening! Besides this fun jam, I now have 3 gigs lined up! The first two are only a couple of days apart. On April 16th, we’re going to be doing a loose, stripped down set at the Pacific Alternative Health Center in Point Richmond. Then that following Tuesday, we’re playing at an as of yet to be determined venue in San Rafael. Why a Tuesday night gig? because that Tuesday is 4/20. What St. Patrick’s Day is to drinkers, 4/20 is to pot smokers, and both of these gigs are being put on by medical marijuana dispensaries. Since we are purveyors of heavy progressive and psychedelic rock, it’s the perfect audience! The third gig is at the historic Toot’s Tavern in Crocket on Fri, May 7th.  For all info on my band, I’ve got a page with dates, clips and a way for you to join our mailing list here.

And last but not least, I’d like to make a quick shout out to some friends of mine who have blogs. I haven’t seen Karen since a few Christmases ago. We were friends in DC and she produced my first film. She was halfway across the country, and now she’s halfway across the world and blogging about being an expat mom. And my old buddy Sam has a great blog which covers the full spectrum of pop culture that you should really check out. OK, that’s it. Comment spammers, have at it!

Wow, just out of the gate with the new blog and I’m sure not doing much with it, am I? Well there’s been a lot going on in my life lately so writing this blog that barely anyone reads has not exactly been at the top of my to-do list. I still don’t even know what the focus of this blog is yet. I’m not sure if I really have any kind of passion for writing reviews of shows that I watch. I have gotten some very positive comments, vaguely praising my brilliant commentary on various vaguely mentioned subject matter from people running sites about online poker and viagra. Yet there’s some kind of je ne sais quoi that rings hollow with that.

I should probably blog about myself because who wouldn’t want to read all the exciting exploits of a late 30′s guy with a wife and a kid and a job and a band that may or may not be a midlife crisis?  So at least for this post, here goes…

For one, I’m getting extremely musically frustrated. It’s been almost a month since I’ve been to band practice. We’ve had to cancel or I’ve had to bail for a while, then I went on vacation (more on that vacation later), then my drummer and singer went on vacation. My keyboardist is having all sorts of trouble with his living situation (leaving an apartment with a spun out meth dealing neighbor who keeps him up at all hours – and then couch surfing until he can find something more stable) which may lead to him missing more practices which really sucks because he’s the musical genius glue that holds us all together.

When I don’t have the outlet of playing music, I get a little nuts. I’ve had this disastrous trip home where various parts of my family did not get along and I got stuck in the middle of all the high drama. There was very little time to recover from this trip as I had to get right back to work and caught up on a bunch of things that needed to be done there while my wife did the same at home… until she fell down in the parking lot of her doctor’s office and was all sorts of out of commission for almost a week. Add a kid who rages against sleep almost every night on top of all this and a supporting cast of wacky neighbors and their wackier pets and you’ve got a situation without a whole lot of enjoyable moments to offset the stress. Ordinarily knowing that I’d have at least a few hours in the week to play some loud rock and roll will get me through times like these. Having a new job that I don’t dread going into every day certainly helps, but it does not scratch the itch like music does.

The other negative effect of not having my usual creative outlet is that I start thinking about politics. I am a recovering political blogger. No good can come from blogging about politics. It just made me angrier and angrier. Today’s political landscape is making angry people take it to the next level. You’ve got Americans flying planes into IRS buildings, shooting at guards at the Pentagon, hanging nooses around college campuses, going to these “tea parties” and engaging in all sorts of asshattery, douchebaggery and wingnuttery. You’ve got blogs, talk radio and a certain ideologically driven cable network masquerading as news stoking the fires of the crazy and I am not going to be part of that anymore. I once believed that there could be good done through politics. I no longer believe that. I’m probably going to stop voting. Why bother? There is no point participating in this system that is broken beyond repair.

So what do you do when your county is circling the bowl and there’s not a damn thing you or anyone else can do about it? You make music and try to enjoy yourself. Play the fiddle while Rome burns. It’s the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine!

Well, there hasn’t been much blog activity here in the last week. I’ve been on the road. But I thought I’d check in with a new Music Monday post, this one packed with a whole lot o’ Shatner-riffic-ness!

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