beautiful, funny, sad & true

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.

Was today frickin’ Christmas and nobody told me?  I got so many random gifts, it was absolutely unreal.

At work, my friend LC sent me an e-mail that said, “Are you here?” and then showed up with a bag full of CD cases.  There must have been twenty-five or thirty cases, and in each case was three CD’s!  I mean. . .oh my GOD that’s a lot of CD’s.  And best of all?  They’re all 80’s metal.  (Except for maybe a handful, like the New York Dolls and At The Drive In.  But otherwise. . .)  Seriously.  I was shaking, I was so excited to start listening to them.  After listening to the inauguration speech and a little bit of the commentary, I got through two Dio’s, a Mötley Crüe, and At The Drive In.

So then I called my mom while I was on my lunch break, and she happened to be over at her friend’s house.  This friend is my adopted aunt, by the way, who recently tracked us down on the net after we’d all been out of contact for almost thirty years.  Turns out that she lives about two blocks from my mom, so she wrote to my mom a few weeks ago and they’ve been reconnecting and spending incredible amounts of time together, which is mind-boggling and also makes perfect sense at the same time.  Naturally, my mom passed the phone to her, so I got to talk to her too.  In fact, here’s a picture of us together, which was taken when I was about a year old.

It was. . .I mean, I was practically speechless by then.

But there’s more.  My friend VL-W sent me a message which said, “Come in and see me when you can.  I have something for you.”  We were super busy, so it took me about an hour and a half, but when I was finally able to make it in there, I found that she had a super-cool black bowler hat waiting for me, which was the same one she let me borrow the other night at the IrishBand show.  She said that I could borrow it until I got one, but then wrote back right afterwards to say, “You know what?  I always think I look like a dyke in that hat, and you totally rock it.  It’s yours.”  Again. . .oh my GOD.

So I got home and there were two copies of the new Susie Blue CD waiting on my doorstep for me.  I’m in her band, and on this CD, which looks great and sounds great.  The other copy is for GuitaristDavid, my neighbor and friend, who also played on the CD.

Oh yeah.  The Susie Blue CD’s were resting on top of a box from my mom, which I didn’t even know that she’d mailed!  It  was full of new towels and kitchen stuff that she just randomly got just because she’s nice that way.

So. . .between the 75 new 80’s metal CD’s, the Susie Blue CD that I’m on, the hat, the box of housewares, the fact that Barack Obama is president now, AND I have an IrishBand show-slash-Obama-celebration tonight which is gonna frickin’ RULE. . . could today be any better?

I suppose that if I didn’t have to work (and work overtime at that) it would’ve been better.  But then again, if I hadn’t gone to work, I wouldn’t have the 75 CD’s or the hat.  So there you go.  Pretty damn good day, if I do say so myself, and it ain’t even close to being over yet.

Wednesday night I was invited to see Ray LaMontagne with my friend Jeannie, who had an extra ticket.  I’m not super familiar with Ray’s music, but I do have one of his CD’s, and I enjoy it, and I’m certainly not going to pass up a chance to see him live.

We started the night by going to dinner.  We had a few choices for happy hour places, one of which was Kenny & Zuke’s.  We started there, and a quick perusal of the menu revealed that it was a total meat-a-thon.  We asked the waitress what their vegetarian choices were, and she checked over the menu and replied, “Well, there’s. . .an egg-salad sandwich. . .and, uhhh. . .tuna fish. . .?”  We thanked her and decided to go elsewhere.  We walked around the corner to Saucebox, which neither of us had been to before, but we both now agree that for happy hour it’s one of the best deals in town.  We’ll definitely be going back.

The show was awesome.  Leona Naess was the opening act, and she and her band were multi-talented and excellent.  She still seems fairly new to the game, but it’ll be interesting to see where she goes from here, and how she progresses.

Ray and his band took the stage and absolutely owned the audience the entire time, despite hardly saying a word until about three-quarters of the way through the show, when he talked about the sense of relief he felt after the election, and how he felt like partying and celebrating instead of singing his quiet, introspective, sad songs.  It was very endearing and funny.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with his band, though.  They were each good players individually, but it seemed to me that they just sort of plodded through every song, without many dynamic changes.  I would have liked to hear much more from the piano player especially, and the two or three times he finally got to take a solo, the audience really appreciated him.  The guitarist was unexciting (as are the overwhelming majority of rock guitarists), but he was absolutely stellar when he sat down to play the pedal steel.  Don’t know what a pedal steel is?  You’ll recognize the sound, for sure.  Here’s a video.  (No, this isn’t the guy from the show.  I couldn’t find a video of him.)  See if you can figure out what song he’s playing:

I will say, to be fair to Ray’s band, that they are phenomenal at playing quietly and keeping the energy level high while ‘holding back’, if you see what I mean.  A standout song for me was “Shelter”, which I was able to find a video of from his show in NYC a month ago.  Notice the awesome pedal steel solo, too.

So Ray and the band finished up their set and left the stage.  After a couple of minutes, he and the bass player came back out to do a heartbreaking version of the song “Jolene”, which an audience member had been loudly and drunkenly requesting before almost every other song of the night.  Incidentally, he didn’t even yell ‘THANK YOU’ after Ray finally played it, by which I think we were all a bit surprised and disappointed.

After he finished that song, the audience gave him a standing ovation, and then stayed on their feet to put their coats on and leave.  Probably a third of the audience started streaming out of the theater.  I told Jeannie, “That can’t be it.  The house lights aren’t even on yet.”   After a wait of almost ten minutes, the lights came back up and the band walked back out onstage.  The remaining crowd roared, and Jeannie and I took the opportunity to run down to the front.  We sat down in the aisle as he and the piano player started the introductory chords to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”  It was breathtaking, and those were the best two encore songs I’ve ever seen.

Great show, and just another great night in an incredibly full week.  More to come.

OneYearAgo

I won’t spend too much time dwelling on this here, because this not normally a political blog in any way, but suffice it to say that Tuesday’s election made me feel, quite possibly for the first time in my life, proud to call myself an American citizen.

A small group of us (Allanah, Lucy, Mike, Scotty and I) went to a huge radio show/election event at Grand Central Bowl over in southeast Portland, and had the time of our lives.  Every time a new state went Democratic, everyone in the place clapped and cheered.  John McCain’s speech was eloquent and gracious, and everyone was impressed.  That speech, incidentally, was the first time in which I felt I was again watching the John McCain who I actually used to like and respect, who I even considered voting for in previous elections.  It seems to me that he lost his personal focus this time, and he spent the last few months trying to pass himself off as a conservative, which he’s not.  But that’s neither here nor there.

Barack Obama appeared on the screen to wild applause.  Every one of his pauses was punctuated by our cheers and hands raised into the air.  We were surprised to see Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey in the crowd, as spectators.  I think everyone felt a huge sense of relief.  It took me until the next day at work to realize how anxious I’d been lately, because I was able to juxtapose my relaxed feeling with the tension of the previous day.

At the end of the night, our little group of friends did a collective high-five to commemorate the historic moment in our own small way.

Yay.  Here’s to a new country, and to a new world.

OneYearAgo

Today is Election Day here in the U.S., and this is one of the only times I will ever use this blog to write about politics.

I was old enough to vote in 1988, just barely, but I wasn’t politically aware enough yet to make any kind of educated decision, so I declined to vote. 1992 was the first election in which I participated somewhat actively. 1996 and 1998 were the first ones in which I was really old enough (and informed enough) to have my own opinions, and we also had some very important ballot measures here in Oregon (such as physician-assisted suicide) that I felt the need to weigh in on.

2000 was another milestone election, in so many ways. We had no way of knowing at the time, but it was full of many historical lessons and pitfalls that have been documented at great length, not to mention greater eloquence and erudition, elsewhere.

In 2004, I did my part, albeit somewhat grudgingly, but this is the first time that I’ve been very engaged in the entire process, from the earliest candidates’ nominations clear through to the end of the election process.  I feel that this is the most important election our country has seen in at least fifty years, and that we would be remiss if we let it pass without taking part in it.

I’ve never felt an adrenaline rush as I filled in the little oval on the ballot with my pencil before. I’ve never felt an adrenaline rush as I dropped my ballot into the mailbox before. I’ve never listened to every single newscast while biting at my fingernails before. This is the most important political time I’ve ever lived through.

Many people seem to be of the opinion that it “doesn’t matter who you vote for, it just matters that you DO vote.”  I’m not one of those people.  The Bush administration and their cronies have run roughshod, pretty much unchecked and without serious opposition, for too long over the country and the world, and destroyed our country’s status and reputation in the eyes of the world, and they need to be stopped. Those of us who consider ourselves progressives need to do everything we can to promote change.

Here ends the diatribe.

We now return you to the witty and insightful (and non-political!) blog you’ve come to expect and love, already in progress.