I SURVIVED A FOUR-GIG WEEKEND AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY T-SHIRT (JUST KIDDING I DIDN’T REALLY GET A T-SHIRT):
I’m just about recovered from an exhausting and enjoyable (exhjoyable?) four-gig Easter weekend. It started as a two-gig weekend (Friday Brown Room, Saturday Anglesea Pub), but then Sean MacMullan, as he does every year, forgot to book someone for Easter night, and Kyle Morey and Jersey Girl decided to hold an Easter morning brunch and voila!
Friday at the Brown Room brought our first Sandy & Ralph Mannik sighting of the spring, always an adventure. It was a Sugar Dave Hughes weekend as my regular partner, Jerry Kolber, is and remains on the first of his 11 vacations this year. The gig was solid, Brown Room always is. But for the first time ever I didn’t wear my usual black slacks/ black t-shirt/ black blazer combo (I opted for black jeans and black linen button-down) and the next day we got an email about the Brown Room dress code. Granted, it was sent to every Brown Room musician, but the timing felt verrrrrrry curious.
Saturday at Anglesea Pub brought out Lynn & Alex Sosik for the first time in a while. It was a sedate evening and even looked like the band might get to go home early on Easter Eve… then the drinkers showed up and hoo boy… let’s just say the band did not get to go home early.
Sunday morning at Jersey Girl was when it started to get a little rough. Generally my gigs go; Set 1, warm-up and strecth out. Set 2, peak performance. Sets 3, a little ragged but generally loose and free. Set 4, just make it through the gig. Sunday morning I started in the Set 4 zone and just kind of never got out of it. Every note was a struggle. Of ocurse, I never let an audience know this; I’ve learned to cover my shortcomings, but it was weird and disconcerting that I never got loose and had a gig looming later that night. (Also, Jersey Girl was bangin’, the food looked delicious and everybody looked content. Cant wait til we start our residency there… in two weeks!) Speaking of which…
GREAT-SMELLING MEN’S ROOM OF THE WEEK:
Taking a break at Jersey Girl was like walking into an Alpine forest…
Sunday night at Anglesea was very similar to Saturday, quiet early, rowdy later. The Anglesea is always a good time. My voice held up enough as we played our mellower material, which, fortunately, fit the vibe of the evening. Dave and I actually added new material for the weekend, including these two gems which I love and made him play at least twice per gig…
Cole’s Corner by Richard Hawley has been in my heavy rotation since discovering it over the winter. And while I don’t love Pearl Jam (they’re fine) I do find Eddie Vedder’s voice interesting when he’s bot being too Eddie Vedder. I love his version of this 1982 English Beat song.
Also, if you’re ever going to Mt. Everest and need a sherpa, Dave Hughes is a fucking pack rat. PA load-in in one trip or die trying…
PAID SUBSCRIBER PERK OF THE WEEK:
For the three (probably two) of you reading it, I’ve posted the final chapters of The Boat, a short story I wrote and had published in 2008 in Exit Zero magazine. It is one of my favorite original stories as it required quite a bit of research and, in my opinion, is quite cinematic. It’s probably in my top three originals, along with TIME STREAM and Zmas. TIME STREAM you’ve read, or at least have access to if you’re a paid subscriber. Zmas (published, against my wishes, as A Very Zombie Christmas) will probably go up this holiday season. Point being, if/ when you decide to cough up the $5/ mo. for this whack-ass column, you, too, can gain access to an incredible library of (15) original short fiction!
Listen, if Geoff Rogers managed to get a crow bar in his wallet and pay for this thing, literally anyone can.
The Boat is a WWII-set spy/ mystery/ thriller that has some good moments and contains some of my best world-building. 2008 was my third season as the resident short storyist at Exit Zero. 2006 saw Murder-Oke burst onto the scene, followed by The Reindeer, the Elf and the Attic Vent for Christmas. 2007 was The 5 Stages of Death in the summer followed by The Celestial for Christmas. In 2008 Exit Zero decided to do full color-glossy issues once a month and wanted each glossy issue to be the cover of a new Terry O’Brien murder mystery, with cover art by Victor Grasso, a very talented local artist. The covers for Murder at the Mug, The Butcher of the Point, Capt. Mey & the Fire From the Sky and The Boat were all exceptional. The stories were… not.
It became something of a running joke between me and my editor, Jack Wright, that I could produce a world class Chapter 1 to any story, it was the chapters that followed that sometimes led me astray. At no point in my life was this more evident than the summer of 2008…
One glossy cover per month meant four weeks between issues which mean four chapters per story. My amazing Chapter 1s set up multiple plotlines and potential suspects and victims, which was really great, until it dawned on me I only had three more chapter to resolve these intricate (to me) mysteries. Murder at the Mug was… fine. The Butcher of the Point is embarrassing and reads more like a semi-detailed plot synopsis than a coherent story. Capt. Mey & the Fire From the Sky is actually pretty good because it’s a fantasy retelling of the early days of Cape May featuring fire-breathing griffins and zeppelin chases and I could just make shit up as I went along. The Boat, however, was the final story, which meant no four-chapter limit which meant it could breathe a little more. It’s loosely based on the old urban legend about Nazi U-Boat sailors being caught with movie tickets in their pockets 13 miles off the coast of Cape May. That part is true, the movie ticket stuff cannot be confirmed but made for an irresistable writing prompt. Throw in the fact that I’d met Anne Hathaway earlier that summer and the movie in my mind had its leading lady.
I may one day re-publish Capt. Mey. I’ve deleted Murder at the Mug and Butcher of the Point from my computer and my mind.
PODCAST OF THE WEEK:
If you listen to one podcast this week make it this one, where I am given the opportunity to drone on endlessly about my early days in theater. Ryan Long is the founder of the Riddlesbrood Touring Theater Co. (I did Scrooge with them last Christmas) and son of my mentor, the late, great Ron Long. It’s always fun to reminisce and offer advice. For theater nerds only.
WILLPOWER OF THE WEEK:
I am on day 115 of my fast food embargo which began in January 1st but there is a Taco Bell grilled cheese burrito in my fridge I’ve been having a staring contest with every time I go in for a Blackberry Dr. Pepper Zero Sugar (review: delicious). I think after three days it transitions from “fast food” to “garbage”, then I can eat it. I can eat garbage, just not fast food…
UNEASY KARAOKE MEMORY OF THE WEEK:
Wednesday morning WXPN played Insane in the Membrane by Cypress Hill, a hip-hop standard. I don’t love or hate the song. It exists and I’m okay with it. But, I had a regular karaoke performer who loved singing it every Friday at Rio Station. The problem? He was a white guy and Insane in the Membrane drops about a half-dozen N-words. This caused a little consternation in the very diverse Rio Station crowd, but he (rightly) asserted, “If they didn’t want me to sing it they shouldn’t have put it in the song and they shouldn’t have put in on karaoke.”
This sort-of opens a whole different conversation with me about this particular word and why we’ve let it have so much power over us. Why some people can say it and other people can’t and when the one group does the other groups that uses it incessantly gets really mad and it’s just really dumb. My hot take? If you want to make this word really taboo (as I believe it should be), my first step would be to levy steep fines and in-game penalties to pro athletes who use it on the field of play. Oh, you think that dude fould you and you’re going to call him that? Okay, three foul shots for him, you’re ejected and get a $100,000 fine. NEXT!
Bob Knight put it best when he said, and I paraphrase, “ass meets bench, bench sends signal to ass, ass gets back in the game.” The only hammer that coaches, who make about 10% of that the players make, have is the ability to curtail playing time, which directly affects a player’s potential to earn. I think players would fall in line pretty quick as ejections and benchings added up.
After that I would fix rap music…
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