beautiful, funny, sad & true

I went to see Flogging Molly last night, for the first time, and I have to say that it was the most fun show I’ve ever been to.  I’ve never danced so much, or sweated so much before.  I was wearing three layers of shirts (undershirt and the T-shirt I was wearing, plus the FM T-shirt I bought last night) and they were all drenched by my own sweat and that of a myriad of other people.  Even my jeans were soaked clear through.  It was a total blast.  My friends and I were about four or five rows from the front, just to the left of center, and just on the edge of the mosh pit.  It was the perfect spot.

A different friend who came on her own (we weren’t able to find each other at the show) was brave enough to bring her camera and take a couple of pictures, and here they are.

She was to the right of me, and a tiny bit further back, but it seems like she had a better view.

She must have walked around a bit, because this was about what my view was like.   After I told her where I was, she sent me this picture and said there’s a decent chance I may be in it, based on my description.  So I like to think I’m in there somewhere.  :)

Man, I really smell horrible today, after the sweat-a-thon show last night.  I can smell myself as I’m sitting here.  I need to go take a shower now.  Yeesh.

IrishBand is playing a show down in StateCapitol tonight, for the first time, and we’re very much looking forward to it.

In other news, i may be getting a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder this weekend, for all of the archiving of Iron Horse (my first band) songs on my computer.  Very exciting!  How 1989 of me.  Hey, if it’s good enough for DJ Shadow, it’s certainly good enough for Iron Horse.

Last night, IrishBand had a great show at a venue called the Virgo and Pisces, and one of my friends drove up from his home on the coast to come see us.  He drove to town, got himself situated in his hotel room, and then called a cab to come pick him up.  He got a Russian cab driver, with a thick Russian accent.

Driver:  “Where you want to go?”

Friend:  “Virgo and Pisces.”

Driver:  “I do not know these streets.”

Friend:  “(takes a beat)  Oh, jeez, of course.  That’s the venue. THE Virgo and Pisces.  (laughs)  Twenty-first and Glisan is the intersection.”

Driver:  “Oh yes.  I know these streets.”

Funny how something so linguistically simple can be completely overlooked and misconstrued sometimes.  It’s all about context, which can be found somewhere near the intersection of Virgo and Pisces.

Just got home from a gig in Whitefish, Montana.  First time I’ve ever been there, and I have to start by saying that it’s a supremely beautiful little town.  It was my first gig with ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer, and despite the fact that it was very loose and unrehearsed (I’d never even met the drummer before, let alone played with him before), AND despite the fact that Southwest Airlines’ baggage handlers banged up my accordion enough that it needs to be repaired now, AND despite the fact that the stage was a truck trailer which bounced around so much that my acoustic guitar fell off it and got a nice big war wound on it, AND despite the fact that we got up at 5:30 a.m. (Mountain Time, which felt like 4:30 Pacific Time!) this morning to drive back to the airport at Spokane, AND despite the fact that I got stung by a bee (how random is that?) at the rental car place in Spokane. . .it was a triumphant show.

No pictures to speak of, unfortunately, because we were on such a tight schedule the entire time, and we were always either in the car, at the gig, or in the hotel room.  Okay, well, here’s what I mean.  This is Mount St. Helens from the airplane. . .

. . .and here’s ModeratelyFamousBanjoPlayer in his solo set.

After he was done, we all ate dinner (of delicious fish tacos!) and then set up the rest of the equipment for the full-band evening show.  I have to give extra-special thanks to SoundGuyToby, who came through with an accordion for me after I found that mine had been damaged by Southwest Airlines’ rough handling during the flight over.  He absolutely saved the gig for me.  The show would have been accordion-free without Toby.

Oh yeah, and the guitar.  The stage was a truck trailer, which bounced around like crazy while we were playing.  My acoustic guitar was sitting next to the edge of the stage, and and one point it tipped right off and landed directly on the metal bar that connects to the hitch.  So it has a huge wound on it, right on the front corner, in one of the most visible places it could possibly have a wound.  I hope to gawd that it can be fixed.  I’ll never be able to sell it for anything close to what I paid for it now.  SUCKS.  It still plays fine, though, and that’s what counts, but that just sucks.  Combine that with the accordion repair and this one gig is really gonna set me back.

I also need to mention the people we met.  They were sweet, accommodating, friendly, drunken, and a metric ton of fun.  After the show, we got a lot of handshakes and “Oh MAN you guys were great.  Thanks so much for coming all the way out here!  We had a blast. . .”, etc.  We also got invited to quite a few parties afterwards (“There are bikes enough for everyone!”) which we had to respectfully decline, unfortunately.  It seems like a great town, especially if you’re an outdoorsy person.

We got to our hotel rooms around 10:30 p.m., then I took a shower and spent the next four hours watching a TV show I’d never seen before called Ice Road Truckers.  You’d think it would be the most boring show in the world, and maybe it was just my mental and physical state at the time, but I was riveted to that crazy show.  It was surprisingly suspenseful.

Oh yeah.  In the four hours during which I actually slept, I had a horrible dream in which three different friends (each of whom I know in real life) told me either to fuck off or “Y’know what?  Go fuck yourself,” and gave me some very specific reasons why they thought I should do that.  One even went so far as to add, “God, it feels so good to say that!”   It wasn’t the best dream I’ve ever had.

So I napped in the car, and then we flew home.  A very nice couple from Spokane sat next to me on the plane, and the guy was actually from Whitefish, so that was a nice coincidence.  They even gave me a copy of Rolling Stone magazine (“Would you like this?  It’s a good one. . .”) just before we landed.  It’s one of the issues with Barack Obama on the cover.

So that was pretty cool.

I’m just glad to be home.  Usually when I’m traveling, I’m much more ‘in the moment’ than I was this weekend, but it was busy enough, and with all the instrument issues it was stressful enough, that I was emotionally done last night.  I wasn’t bummed out or anything, I just wanted to be home so that I could take care of these things that need to be taken care of, and now I can do just that.

I’m going to start with myself.  First a nap, then a shower, then I’m going to a dinner party with a couple of friends.  I’ll worry about the accordion tomorrow.

Neil Finn is a genius.  If you weren’t already aware of that, go seek out his albums from his time as the leader of Crowded House, as well as his two solo albums.  I can’t recommend them highly enough.

He’s also a consummate performer (his concert in 2001 was one of the best and most memorable I’ve ever seen to this day) and a very genuine person as well.  In fact, the word ‘truth’ appears in more of his songs than any other word I can think of.  Important words, I mean, not like ‘the’ or something.  You know what I’m saying.  Anyway, here’s an interview I came across that really captures his spirit well, I think.  It’s from a dopey Australian comedy show, and the host plays him a dopey song that he’s been working on, and he asks for Neil’s opinion and some advice on how to improve it.  The ‘money shots’, at least for my money, are of the slightly uncomfortable look on Neil’s face as he’s listening and trying to figure out what in the world to say.  But the bits about ‘being in the moment’ are just so dead-on and earnest.  It just shows how real, how funny, and how intelligent (not to mention talented) Neil is, even in a ludicrous setting like this.  He appears about two minutes into this clip, so you can feel free to snooze through the rest of it until then.

In a more serious mini-documentary/interview called “A Good Tune Is Always In Short Supply,” he goes into great detail about his process of songwriting, and even lets us in on his secret formula.  I’ll post Part One here, and if you’re interested, Part Two is easy enough to come by.

I’d like to take a minute to tell you a story in the long string of heart-warming online tales that illustrates the power of the internet to connect people who have been estranged for decades.  It also illustrates the power of music, and the power of a certain kind of mental pathology, too.  You’ll see what I mean.

One of my cohorts from Iron Horse received an out-of-the-blue message on Facebook yesterday, at 1:30 in the morning, from someone he didn’t know, that said, “Are you [misspelled his last name] from [our high school]?  I remember you; we wrote a song in detention.’  He named the song, and correctly wrote out the chorus.  No, I’m not going to quote it here, because then it would be searchable, but he totally nailed it.

His profile was private, there was no picture, and he had a very unusual first name, but my friend didn’t recognize him in any way.  He had eleven online friends, all of whom shared his surname.  My friend responded, “Yeah, that was me.  I kinda remember writing that in detention. . .I changed the lyrics around, and my old band used to play that song.  Do you have a picture or something to jump-start my memory?  What years were you at [our high school]?”

The guy wrote back that he moved away from Yakima in 1987, and that he’s living in California now.  He’s of a certain nationality, and “try to get sum pic’s.”  (I took the liberty of cleaning up his grammar and punctuation before, but it was all typed lower-case, with slightly awkward punctuation.)  My friend accepted his friend request, and we’ll see where the story goes from here.  The two of us can’t help but wonder what the guy’s life is like, since he’s writing to someone he met only one time, in high school detention, twenty two years ago (!), and seems to be hoping to rekindle a friendship where it left off.   I mean, sure,  my friend is a great guy, and we were a pretty good band, but this guy doesn’t even know about the band, because he left town before my friend and I even started it.  Oh, AND.  I should mention that my friend was neither a miscreant nor a ne’er-do-well (I love those two terms, and I love it when I get the opportunity to use them), he was only in detention that one day, and never saw this guy ever again.  He’s not anyone I knew, either then or now, but I haven’t been able to find my yearbooks to investigate him.

Incidentally, speaking of the band, the community access TV station still plays our videos to this day, which completely mystifies my friend and me.  These are not new videos I’m referring to, either.  They were filmed and originally aired during that same time period, from 1987 to ’89, which is when the band was in existence.   We were just a bunch of high school kids, playing some songs that we wrote ourselves, and I can’t imagine why anyone watching now would even enjoy the songs these days, let alone find a bunch of kids from twenty years ago compelling.

Be all that as at may, I admit that it’s gratifying (in a weird way) that they do still play that stuff.  We had a good time making the videos, and like I said, we were a pretty decent band, but we had no delusions about our abilities or chances for stardom, either.  We were just a bunch of kids who had a band, like a million other kids in a million other bands.

Just for fun, here’s a picture from our very first show.  In fact, it could well be of the song in question, too, because I just now remembered that I actually sang the whole second verse of it (and I didn’t sing lead very often), so it seems very likely that this picture was taken during that song.

I just love the oversize mirrored sunglasses, and you can see that I was working hard on Mullet Number One as well.  Gee, I wonder if this was the 80’s?

Meanwhile, back to the topic at hand.

In the interest of full disclosure, and the interest of fairness to this guy, I’ve spent the better part of this month reconnecting with friends from years ago, one of whom had also been twenty years ago (she reads this blog, too, by the way), and it’s been really great for everyone involved.  You probably already knew that if you’re reading this, though, since I’ve written a bit about it lately.  More than once but fewer than three times, in fact, just in case you were counting.   So I have no business knocking the guy for trying.  As human beings, we all are basically social animals (some of us more than others) who are looking for connections wherever we can find them.  But the people I’m talking with are people with whom I had actual relationships and friendships.  They’re based on more than just a one-time meeting, in detention, more than half a lifetime ago.

The title of this entry, incidentally, comes from a book that our high school’s choir director had on the bookshelf in his office, and it seemed apropos to use it here.  Iron Horse shortened it to ‘Mental Game’ and we used it as the title of our album.  I mean cassette.  Oh, how dearly I wish I had a copy of that.  I have a lot of old videos, and tapes, and pictures, and notebooks, but I’m not sure I have that cassette cover floating around anywhere.  I’ll have to do some digging.

I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds.