Archive for the ‘Video’ Category

But don’t take their word for it. See the video evidence…

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:

One of the cool things about starting my blog fresh after many years is that I can re-run some of my favorite old content. A few weeks ago I was talking with a video production company about being a second camera at some wedding shoots for her, and I sent some of my favorite videos to check out. While going through some of my stuff, I remembered how much I really liked this one and how much fun it was to shoot, mostly in a single take with lots of great improv.

During the TV writers strike a few years ago, I was inspired to do a short about it under the premise that the producers of The Office would hire some bad fan fiction writers as scabs and I shot this in a couple of hours with some friends. YouTube pulled it due to a copyright complaint from Sony which I cannot for the life of me figure out since there is no music and the characters talk about characters on other shows which is well within any kind of fair use. Corporate types, go figure! I think they didn’t like how they were portrayed.

So, without further ado, The Writers Room…

So yesterday afternoon Stella’s preschool put on a play. It was called Caps for Sale. Some hat peddlers fell asleep in a park and a whole bunch of monkeys came and took their hats. Stella was one of the monkeys. I took a long lunch break from work so I could see her theatrical debut, and Anne suggested I bring my professional camcorder rather than the little flip cam to record this momentous occasion. So while I was tucked away in a corner trying (less than successfully) to get a good shot, one of the teachers asked Anne to bring Stella to the bathroom. Stella didn’t really have to go and was very upset at the prospect of missing the play. She missed the beginning, but got in right in time for the action. She was sort of tucked between a teacher and some of the other monkeys and with my limited range of motion, I was really unable to get any good shots of her.

She is a natural performer, and we are encouraging this with theater camp, rock and roll camp, and possibly circus arts camp this summer. I figure in a year or two, she’ll be ready to tackle more serious theatrical roles like this one…