I shot this one in October of 2002. Billy Bragg was in DC to play the 9:30 Club, and the next day he did a short set in the lobby of the AFL-CIO building which was right around the corner from were I was working. Joining him on stage was Britannia the Cheerleader, a friend of mine and a fixture on the local protest scene, who was kind enough to introduce me to Billy before the set. Also appearing that day (but not in this video) was the president of the Screen Actors Guild at the time, Melissa Gilbert, of Little House on the Prairie fame.

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

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:

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…

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…