What Cheer, Netop?

This show was very random, but I 'm not sure if I can describe its randomness very well. We'll see.

After we set up, and before we went on, a woman yelled a request to us. Her friend came over and said, "My obnoxious friend wants you to play Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues." Chris said, "Sure, we'll do that first." "Oh, that's a real song?" she replied, surprised.

But Chris realized that he had left his harmonica rack in the car, so did the first song solo -- I ended up picking 'Leaving Home', which is a sort of a take on the 'Frankie and Albert'/''Frankie and Johnny' story. Then we did 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues'. Then we actually did a couple of songs from the set list, 'That'll Never Happen No More' and 'Folsom Prison'; after that, the drunk woman asked us if we could do 'From a Buick 6' (another Dylan song, but one we don't know), then asked us if we knew any James Taylor songs (*cough*), then wanted us to do some more Johnny Cash. So I sang 'Sam Hall', which is a song from Johnny Cash's last album which involves telling the audience to go to hell a lot, which is kind of fun. Then we did '"Pumpkin, Mrs. Farnsworth"', which was a request from Kári. While I was singing that song, I glanced over at Chris's girlfriend and noticed that she looked completely mortified. Feeling a little guilty about this, I suggested that we next do 'Tear My Stillhouse Down', which I happen to know she likes a lot, so we did. Then ... I don't even know, except we did an abbreviated version of 'Cabbagehead', which is a song I don't think we've played in over a year, and ended with 'I Believe To My Soul', which drunk woman tried to sing along with.

The thing that struck me about that set is that someone who listened to it would probably not have described our band as a blues band. That's not really what would have come to mind.

The second set was relatively normal and we pretty much stuck to the set list, except that Chris had us do this thing that he sometimes like to do where you start with one song ('Liberty' by the Grateful Dead in this case), get partway through it, then segue to another song (Chris's own 'The Local Expatriate'), then segue back. It's a jam band kind of thing to do. (It's not something we typically try in the Killdevils, because two players doesn't really constitute a jam band.)

saucypunk and Kári came to the show (which is greatly appreciated -- thanks!) and saucypunk asked me if I could play 'Avocados and Beer', since I wrote it for her and yet she had never heard it played live. At the beginning of the third set I was supposed to do three songs solo, so I played that song on piano for the first time ever (making possibly more mistakes even than when I played it live on accordion for the first time), then did 'Milk Cow Blues', and then I couldn't think of anything else to play so I did 'Watching Killer Robots Eat Your Head'. Then Chris came out and we did a bunch of rock & roll songs -- Naked Man, Down By The River, Johnny B. Goode -- and some uptempo blues songs -- Big Road Blues, Caldonia, and Bourgeois Blues. We did the fast songs really fast and it was all really energetic and fun. After Bourgeois Blues (or arguably during it) I was pretty wiped out, so we ended with a couple of slow songs, 'Sin City' and 'Waterbugs', which I felt like I was just the right level of exhausted to do really well -- that might have been the best performance of 'Waterbugs' I've ever done. (What makes a good performance of Waterbugs, you might ask? I think the main thing is to sing it with complete sincerity and resist the urge to speed up.)

It was a good show, although kind of a bewildering one. It is nice to have things shaken up from time to time. I think I will sleep well tonight.

Today for lunch I went to Thai Orchid. Shortly after I sat down Afternoon Delight started playing on the radio. Then, a couple of songs later, I got to hear I Write The Songs. (Later I found out that several of my friends who are just a few years younger than I had no idea what I Write The Songs sounds like, and one of them didn't know the other song either. Ah, blessed ignorance.)

Chris and I decided to go to an open mike at the Narrows Center for the Arts in Fall River. We'd been once before (although it was a while ago) and were impressed by the quality of music that people were playing there.

There were some glitches tonight -- setting up took longer than expected so the music didn't start until 8 pm when it was supposed to start at 7 pm. The quality of music was still pretty good, although I didn't particularly care for the featured artist, who played third. After the featured artist there was a brief break.

During the break I decided to tune up the guitar, and as I was doing so another guy brought his guitar nearby and started tuning it. Except it sounded like the guitar was completely out of tune, and I couldn't quite tell if he was improving matters or making them worse. After a little while the break was over and he was called up to the stage, introduced as (I belive) Cole [although everyone else had been introduced by their full name].

Cole played these really weird chords -- I think C and G shapes up and down the neck mostly, but everything was so out of tune it was hard to tell -- and sang a combination of lyrics and stream-of-consciousness ramblings. He was clearly really drunk. But his voice was good and his energy level was really high and somehow the out of tune guitar just sounded right. After he finished the first song he said, "That wasn't close to good at all. Not even close." Then he played another song, cussing and hollering and shouting at the soundman. Then the soundman indicated that he was out of time and he did one final short, slow song that was about thirty seconds long. And that was it; he left. I really liked him a lot, although things could have gotten out of control pretty easily and I would not have liked that. Other people in the audience weren't as happy with him, though, and the soundman certainly was frustrated with him.

Chris had been outside getting some fresh air before all this occurred, and he told me that Cole had actually just been kicked out of a neighboring bar, where he had stormed onto the stage and tried to sing into the mike. It looked like things were going to turn ugly but someone involved in the Narrows center intervened and suggested that Cole come next door and do a couple of songs, and this succeeded in diffusing the situation. Cole's buddies were pretty sure that Cole was going to start a fight, so things turned out pretty well.

Next up on the open mike was a duo (acoustic guitar and electric bass). The singer/guitarist introduced their act by saying, "Well, I guess we're going from a sort of heavy metal music to some heavy mental music." Which seems to me like kind of a stereotypical thing for a certain type of folkie to say; I feel like this line could have been used in A Mighty Wind pretty easily. But anyway.

Chris and I calculated that we probably weren't going to get to play until around 11 pm, so we decided to head over to the Trinity Brewhouse to enjoy the band, which tonight consisted of the quite good guitarist/vocalist Thom Enright and the phenomenal bassist Marty Ballou. They were great as expected.

Tonight was my first night officially performing as a member of The Killdevils (I had performed with Chris in some coffee houses before, but that was before we were officially a band). It was an odd little gig.

The place we played in didn't have an entertainment license, so the owner had insisted that we do nothing to promote the event (no posters, etc.) We were allowed to tell friends and family members to come.

The place was really not set up for music at all; it was essentially a pool hall/bar. Chris and I ended up wedged into one corner of the room behind one of the pool tables, me with my guitar and piano and Chris with his guitar and PA. There was also a hockey fooz ball-type game which played rollicking little tunes (like the William Tell Overture and the Charge song) every ten minutes or so, which we nonetheless managed to forget to unplug between sets. Fortunately it was pretty quiet, although it was pretty audible during one of our quiet songs ('Dear Someone'); I had to move away from the mike so people wouldn't hear me laughing.

Although we weren't allowed to advertise the show, the bar owner did put up a notice saying we would be playing. There was a very small crowd, and he thought people might have been spooked because they saw that there was going to be something new and they weren't sure if they would like it. He was interested in booking us again, though, so Chris told him that maybe he also shouldn't promote the show next time.

Despite all of the above, and some major feedback problems in the first set, things went pretty well, especially as the evening went on. During each of the sets there was at least one really drunk guy who was very enthusiastic about us. The first one told us that he used to play piano himself, but he quit when he got married eighteen years ago and had only started playing again recently. "I'm trying to get my soul back," he said. I wasn't sure what the appropriate response was, but thought it probably wasn't "Good luck with that!", tempting though that was. This same guy remembered seeing Chris at an open mike earlier that week and told Chris that he had been hoping to have some luck with a woman he met there, but it hadn't worked out. "She could have ridden my face all week," he said. We murmured sympathetically.

For the last set, the drunk guy was this young guy wearing a tie-dye shirt, who gave out a whoop and jumped around in joy when we started playing 'Folsom Prison Blues', and who later shouted encouragement at us during our solos in 'Bright Lights, Big City', to the extent that I had trouble hearing what Chris was doing and ended up fumbling around a bit in the middle of one of my solos. After the show, he came over and admired my piano, saying, I want to jam some fuckin' Für Elise on that motherfucker, you know what I mean? I nodded and repeated the phrase to myself in my head until I got a chance to write it down.

Another odd thing: Someone requested a song, and we actually knew the song and how to play it. (It was a Grateful Dead song called 'Dire Wolf' which we started playing about a week and a half ago.)

So as I say everything went pretty well, particularly as we got paid. I'm going to be a wreck tomorrow though.

( The set list, for those who care )