UNDERTOW #93

9/12/25

GIGS! GIGS! GIGS!

Yeah, so… sorry for not putting Monday at Elaine’s in here last week. In posting all our shifting Thursdays, Fridays and Saturday, that lone Monday all the way over on the left side of the calendar kind of fell through the cracks. But it was a corker of a gig as Sandy & Ralph Mannik can attest! We (Terry & Jerry) weren’t sure what to expect, it being our first Elaine’s gig (played one in… April? With Dave. So this was the first T&J show) and things were looking dicey after our first set when there were about 6 people on the deck, but the crowd slowly trickled in and started inundating us with requests and the sun went down and the vibes went up and it was just a whole lot of fun, akin to the amazing (few) La Mer gigs we’ve played. Many of you know my long, tortured history with Elaine’s (if you don’t, and you have 3 spare hours, I’ll be happy to tell you…) but I don’t give a shit about any of that anymore. I just like a good gig and for the check to clear. Those are my very strict rules when it comes to booking a gig. (Keep an eye out for a possible vertical at Elaine’s in 2026. For the uninitiated, a “vertical” means every week on the same night, or vertical as it appears on a calendar. A snooty person might also call this a “residency.”)

Side note: How fucking stupid is it that we can’t get Cape May gigs, gigs we’ve played and absolutely crushed before, because we don’t go through a booking agent? Every, and I mean every, marginally talented plunker you hear in every, and I mean every, Cape May bar, is there because the demand for good artists has exceeded the supply and instead of the agent saying, “sorry, I don’t have anyone available” they say, “sure! I’ll send in Johnny Rock & Roll! He’s amazing!” and scrounge up anyone with a guitar and a PA. We’ve been over this, but it just makes my appreciation for the team at Morey’s Piers and Congress Hall grow exponentially. If not for Kyle, Jordan (MP) and Myra (CH) I’d be working another $18/hr. job at night instead of singing, which has been my absolute privilege, 4 nights a week. (Also, thanks to Zach and Will Morey for their recent compliments. It’s been unreal reconnecting with the company I used to work for.)

Anyway…

THURSDAYS UNTIL 9/25: Terry & Jerry at Jersey Girl Kitchen, 5-9. *Time change

FRIDAYS UNTIL 10/3: Terry & Jerry at Brown Room ay Congress Hall, 7-11.

SATURDAYS UNTIL 9/26: Terry & Jerry at PigDog, 1-5. *Time change

SATURDAY 9/13: Terry & Jay Laboy at Anglesea Pub, 9-12. This will be my first gig with Jay, who is bravely stepping in to cover this gig for Dave Hughes (but more on that later) sight unseen. We will literally be meeting for the first time about an hour before the gig, so if you’ve ever wanted to see first hand what two really nervous musicians look like, get a front row seat at the Pub on Saturday! But Jay is a total pro, we know a lot of the same songs and I’m a gifted fake-it-til-you-make-it bullshitter, so what could possibly go wrong? (To find out, come to Anglesea Pub Saturday night.)

SATURDAY 9/20: Terry & Jerry at Carney’s, 6-9. You read that right. After several years of extended phone tag and missed social media messages (plus a little arm-twisting from Joe Carney), I’ll be back at this iconic Cape May venue. Longtime followers will recall not only the amazing Terry O’Brien Band, which was the Beatles/ Billy Joel/ Bruce Springsteen/ Prince tribute that absolutely socked that place, but if you reach back even further, I did lots of acoustic duo work there with Will Knapp (Acoustic Mayhem!), Mike O’Brien and Bill Caterini. We’ll be playing a few Carney’s gigs over the next couple of months with the hopes of adding even more as schedules fall into place. But I’m very much looking forward to playing this room again.

SATURDAY 9/27: Terry & Jerry at Anglesea Pub, 9-12. Well now this just kind of feels boring. A normal, non-dramatic, stress-free Terry & Jerry gig at our N. Wildwood off-season home. We love the Pub, you love the Pub, come see us at the Pub.

DAVE HUGHES’ ABSENCE EXPLAINED:

The Terry & Sugar Dave era has, unfortunately, come to a sad end. If you saw the young man play at any of our gigs over the last 5 years you know how insanely talented he is, but talent, though a great deoderant, doesn’t cover every shortcoming. I won’t go into details, Dave’s private life is just that; private. But he’s undergone a great deal of upheaval lately, rendering his personal life chaotic. That chaos started bleeding over into our professional life and I made the difficult decision to part ways. Guitarists of Dave’s caliber are few and far between and I wish him nothing but the best moving forward. He just won’t be doing it with me.

(IN SCARY JACOB MARLEY VOICE) SCROOOOOOOOOOOOGE!:

The Christmas Carol I’m directing for Riddlesbrood Touring Theater Co. got off to a rousing start this week with a very well-attended audition session on Sunday afternoon. Some old faces (Kevin Ebner, Chris Nagle) as well as many news ones and it feels like we’ve got a really good group. The shows are November 29th and 30th at the shops at Smithville. I’ll give more details as the dates approach, but it’s great family fun and a good day out.

NO, I AM NOT A BILLIONAIRE. YET.:

I got my Power Ball tickets at Erma Deli. The Pantry One, 100 feet up the road, sold a big winner. I’ll just have to get tickets at both next time. (For the record: I buy lottery tickets about… once every 3 years or so? When it gets up to $1,000,000,000? And yes, I get mad when I don’t win.)

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE OF THE WEEK:

I’m scrolling Facebook the other day and a lovely instrumental version of The Beatles’ “And I Love Her” starts to play over a porn ad.

A DIFFICULT THING TO TALK ABOUT BUT I FEEL LIKE I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT:

I lost and regained a Facebook friend and Undertow subscriber yesterday. Why? Because in the wake of the assassination of conservative podcaster and influencer Charlie Kirk, I posted “You’re not going to like what comes next” on my Facebook. Almost immediately, and predictably, the comments went off the rails. It’s a “threat”, Kirk was a “Nazi”, “Free Palestine”, all the same old tired bullshit that people are fed on network news and social media all day every day ad nauseum. My friend and subscriber Patricia Sain read these comments, took them to mean I was encouraging political violence and that I hate liberals, and immediately unfriended me and canceled her Undertow. I reached out personally to explain the following;

“You’re not going to like what comes next” means; I’ve always believed that Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump were the moderate version of what’s coming if the lunatic Left fringe didn’t dial it down. Well, they didn’t dial it down. They twice tried to kill the president and have successfully murdered the one significant figure on the Right who was willing to sit down and talk to them. You should not underestimate how Kirk’s murder is going to harden his millions of young, male followers against anything liberals and the media have to say about anything from this point forward. All their rhetoric over the years has led to this. You cannot spend a decade calling someone a threat to democracy, a fascist, a racist, a sexist, a Nazi, etc. etc. ad nauseum and then feign disbelief when someone puts a bullet through their neck in front of the wife and young children. You cannot then claim that it is Republicans and conservatives who need to “lower the temperature.” You cannot go on TV, claim he had it coming becuase of words he spoke that you may not like, and then get mad because conservatives notice.

You know me. I’m a slightly right-of-center fiscal conservative, social liberal. Translation: I want a thundering military, a 100-ft. high, 50-ft. thick wall along our border, but I don’t give two shits if a couple of guys want to get married. I think a lot of people probably fell under this description. Until Wednesday afternoon around 3 o’clock.