Let Me Be Clear

Now, let me be clear. Playing music with my good friends is more fun than anything I've ever done. It is when everything leaves my mind except what is happening that moment. Anyone who has played in bands would probably agree that playing high energy rock music with your friends can often be a cathartic, disencumbering experience. I believe this so much so that I have emotional withdrawals when I don't play gigs for while. I realize that I may be heading into a performance drought when I move in July, but it will hopefully allow me to concentrate on other things that are important to me while giving me a little distance from something that has been a huge priority in my life for nearly 20 years.
While I may have had a harder time relaxing than I may have wished at the D.C. Hoot Night, playing those songs with my bands brought me unparalleled happiness and satisfaction. I will miss that a ton. The music I've been making with Excited States has been extremely fulfilling. As evidenced by our healthy contribution to the hoot night, 90s indie rock is right in our wheelhouse and is my second language. It is the more underground dialect of rock music that helped form my musical vocabulary 20+ years ago. The songs and melodies that Beaty Wilson comes up with are spoken in that dialect and I often know exactly how to respond. Andy Thompson fits perfectly into that three-piece equation by providing a rhythmic stability for our dynamic discourse. No matter what the speed of the dialogue, Andy measures it out and keeps the intensity on a level we can hover around. He is the oxygen atom and to him we are  electrically bonded hydrogen atoms.
That we were able to play Shudder To Think's  "X-French T-Shirt" was huge for me. James Adair introduced me to Pony Express Record in 1994 and that album, and song speciafically, got under my dome in a big way.  On my way to class one rainy winter morning, I remember walking through one of N.C. State's tunnels with the song's outro stuck in my head. It was like that for at least a week. I'm sure songs had been stuck in my head before then, but that was the first time it became a mantra.
"Static" is off of my favorite Jawbox album Novelty. In high school, I learned all of those songs on guitar (to the best of my ability) and it's rhythmic idiosyncrasies and discordant melodies have stuck with me to this day. The song I wrote for my old band eddy entitled "Under The Influence" was directly influenced by Novelty's "Linkwork."
We played eight Fugazi songs which was as cathartic as it gets. At the Holden Beach with my friend Will and his family during the summer of 1990, I remember listening to that album over and over again. It was a true revelation. Having been turned on to heavy, dynamic, powerful rock by Led Zeppelin (and soon thereafter Metallica in my case), Fugazi quickly became a band we fully believed in. There were others we adored like Soul Asylum and Operation Ivy, but Repeater really blew everyone to pieces. The funny thing playing those songs for me was that until we started learning songs for the hoot night, I had never thought to learn any of Joe Lally's incredible basslines. Lally is one of my all time favorite bass players and I had never thought to explore his work. This wasn't weird to me until I learned them all and realized for the 231st time how incredible he and the whole band were. They were such an amazing BAND!! 
The songs Grand Champeen played from Red Medicine were equally as exciting to learn and cover. Grand Champeen has learned a ton of covers over the years but we had never ventured into Fugazi territory, perhaps because it was so daunting. Perhaps because their albums are such masterworks in songwriting, musicianship and performance that it seemed a bit outside our scope. How wrong we were! As Channing intimated the other night at practice, we should have done that years ago.  Of the four songs GC learned, we played two of my favortes from that album, "Target" and "Forensic Scene." I have such strong memories of Red Medicine being in my life in 1995 because I moved to Tennessee by myself three months after the album came out and I know it kept me company and gave me strength when I left friends and family in NC and settled down in the small town Murfreesboro. I rented a room from an ad I saw on a bulletin board near the housing office on MTSU campus and for 8 months I lived with three guys who couldn't have been more dissimilar to each other and myself. When I was home, I stayed in my room a lot and listened to records. For the record, the other album on constant rotation in that rented room was "Tomorrow the Green Grass" by the Jayhawks.
 I gotta go. Grand Champeen is playing with A Giant Dog  at Hotel Vegas April 30th. I'm moving to NC in July so if you want to see Grand Champeen you had better come out.

D.C. Hoot Night a Success

That was fun. Last night's D.C. Hoot Night gave us great performances from six groups of bands or pick-up bands. Dave Norwood from The Gary put together a band with a violinist and played three songs that had a great eerie vibe. Randy Reynolds and Seth Gibbs formed Doctor Club and played a few Television-esque covers. Nick Pelliciotto and friends played a couple Lungfish songs and a great cover of the opening track to Trans Am's debut. Three-fourths of Rainbow Dragon played Shudder To Think and Bad Brains! My sets with Excited States and Grand Champeen included the following songs:

Bed For The Scraping
Forensic Scene
Target
Do You Like Me?
Motr
What About Blighty?
Turnover
Repeater
Brendan #1
Merchandise
Blueprint
Styrofoam
X-French T-Shirt
Static
Make Out Club
Sweet & Low
Smallpox Champion

I have a hard time having "fun" when I play gigs where I work because I'm at work. I find myself being the common thread between everything happening at the bar. The business, employees, concertgoers, and performers require enough little bits of direction and attention to keep me from relaxing. It doesn't put me over in the sense that I'm miserable and wish I weren't there.  It's a unique position to be in and one that probably only happens to a bar manager who is in a band that plays at the bar they run.
An example of this is a night like last night. All six bands were planning on using my band's gear as backline and I ended up being the hub of info. I'm not pissed about it because I'm an organized person with answers so I'm perfect for the job. But it doesn't leave a lot of room for "fun" in the most commonly used sense of the word. 
Fun is a particularly strange notion because it is both treated as if it's a tangible commodity and revered like it's an actual feeling. But when people discuss their feelings, "fun" isn't included along with sadness, anger, happiness, fear, and regret. Perhaps my version of fun has changed over the years. Perhaps I care to much about my job. Perhaps the kinda of fun I'm looking for is sitting under an umbrella on a beach with a cold beer surrounded by loved ones, zoning out to the mesmerizing pulse of the waves rolling over on each other. 

Gonna Get in a Better Habit of Writing

I'd like to start ruminating on my life in Austin as my final days here unfold. It's been a while since I've written in earnest and I'd like to write as often as I can, especially when particularly relevant or poignant feelings enter my head. If I want to actually get them posted, I'll have to sacrifice editing them for sake of time. I'm not getting paid for it so what does it matter? I'm not trying to get the James Beard award for blogging.

An easy thing to do would be to start a laundry list of things I'll miss. Perhaps an even easier thing to do would be to list all of the things I won't miss about Austin. The most difficult thing to do will be to write about how I feel about the future because it's so open. I think I'll do all of these things and it may end up being a jumbled mess but so is my mind, heart, and body right now.

It's gonna be difficult to capture my thoughts as they come because I'm usually driving to work, or at work, or at band practice, or trying to sleep. Unlike a lot of my peers, I'm not in front of a computer all day. It's difficult for me to write as much as I want because life doesn't let me sit still for that long. Nor do I have the luxury of working from home and picking up the guitar every time I feel a tinge of creativity. I'd love to have a little more free time with which to be creative. At this point in my life, I accept that I need to create things or else I'm unhappy.  Lately, I've found peace in learning how to make Texas style BBQ. I feel like each brisket or rack of ribs that goes on that smoker is a blank canvas upon which I try to paint the best picture I can. It's hardly writing a prose or a new song, but it"s satisfies something in there. 

I'd really like to cook BBQ for the rest of my life. Now, I realize that is completely possible and not too large of a goal. But if I want to cook BBQ for other people and have it be something that helps brings people in a community together, then it is. I also want to make music for the rest of my life. I hope that once I'm near Scott Nurkin again that we will be able to make music based on all that we've learned since we last played together (1999). So many ways to go, so much gonna happen.

Tonight I have a gig with both Excited States and Grand Champeen. We'll be playing songs by Washington D.C. bands from the 1990s and I think it'll be awesome. I'm gonna miss playing music regularly with the fellas in those bands. I'm gonna miss it more than words can express but I'm gonna attempt to express it anyway, from time to time. More on that later.  If you like either of my bands you should come to the show tonight because I'm moving to NC in July and these bands won't be performing but once or twice a year.

Gigs: Feb 11 & 12

Last night I played with Grand Champeen at the Elk's Lodge and then with Excited States at ND. While they were rather different shows, both were fun. The Elk's Lodge gig was a joint birthday celebration which allowed Grand Champeen some room to stretch out and play some fun covers. We also played some originals fairly poorly, but that's ok. Right? From what I can remember...

Wounded Eye

You May Be Right (BJ)

Records & Tapes

And Your Bird Can Sing (Beatles)

Cottonmouth

Get Back To The Quiet

Hey Tonight (CCR)

Winterlong (Neil)

Foreplay/Come On Come On (Boston/Cheap Trick)

Root and Branch

Radio Radio (Declan MacManus)

Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown (Neil)

Can't Hardly Wait (Westerberg)

Paid Vacation

Just Want To Get You Alone

Bottleglass

Another World, Another Planet (Only Ones)

All The Young Dudes (Bowie)

Walk Of Life (Dire S.)

At 10pm I hauled ass over to the ND, found a parking spot right outside the door, and walked into The Decade Show's third to last song. They have really spruced up that venue since the last time I was there. I feels like a real club now. Right on. Excited States went on second and delivered a searing set of catchy, angular, rock gems. That set went a little bit like...

Victories

1983

The 15th (wire)

Found Some Tapes

New Song

Pretty Little Cages

Slow Cooker

Feel The Sting

New Song

Under The Weight

Look What the Wind Blew In (Thin Lizzy)

The next evening, Grand Champeen shared the "middle" stage at the Hole in the Wall with Pink Nasty, and The Mother Hips from California. Jack Wilson played short sets between acts on the front stage and helped make a great night all around. Pink Nasty delivered a solo set that was full of good songs and an endearing, stark honesty. Grand Champeen played second and tore the room apart, leaving a splintered stage for the Mother Hips to repair with a couple of hours of smooth Northern California tunes. Despite the nearly unrecoverable state in which we left the room, they managed to put on a great show. Perhaps it was their creative songwriting that displayed their mastery of mid-song tempo changes. Or it may have been their outstanding musicianship and singing abilities. The loyal and excited crowd was a no doubt a big help. I don't know what happened on the first night of the Hips' two-night stand when Smoke and Feathers and December Boys opened, but I hope for them that it went as well as our night did. We did something like this:

Join Us

Good Slot

Diff Sort

Records &

Get You Alone

Root &

Get Back TTQ

Wounded

Death Of

PGPA

Haste

Ides

One &

Rott

Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown

Rest Of

Fakin' It

Or at least I think that's how it goes. Some fella who flew into town to see/bootleg the Mother Hips recorded us as well. I want to find this guy and get a copy. He said he'd give us one. If the recording turned out, it should be a good snapshot.