As I was saying before I was interrupted… — Jack Paar
Not quite. Yes, there were interruptions aplenty, but I don’t know that they were necessarily rude, and some actually made me some money. Even so, I need to catch my breath and document what’s been going on and why @Fulcrumland has been dark and silent of late. To make a long story short, in the last month or two I’ve been busily learning Other People’s Songs and have had to put both the Arc and the City on the back burner in the pursuit of coin.
To make that short story long again: the vintage rock’n'roll cover band I’m in, Old Man Noises, have identified ten new songs to add to our repertoire, of which we maybe have learned one adequately in the last month and are working on two others which aren’t quite there yet. On top of that, OMN has a big gig coming up as we tear the November calendar page off the wall, and for that particular gig—a Day Of Peace, which was to have taken place on the anniversary of John Lennon’s assassination but which eventually got pushed up a full week—we learned two other songs by John, and I’m in the process of putting together a solo arrangement of a third about John. But for our gig this past Monday—a benefit for the opening of the first low-cost animal neutering clinic in the Bridgeport area (the show was called Spay It Forward)—we debuted the one new song we had up our sleeves.
But I think I’ll mostly remember hanging around outside in between sets with my own thoughts. It was probably the last warmish night Fairfield County is likely to see for quite a while, and with the club as close as it is to the shore, the humidity rolling in from the Sound reminded me of certain pleasant nights from a now-distant past on the Jersey shore. And I found myself looking back on that era without also looking through the lens of how that whole thing died, and I could honestly say that while it lasted, we helped one another. That it is dead now, irrevocably and finally dead, was at least for that moment secondary to the fact that it was alive once, and that part of it was not the charade it later became.
SUBTOTAL: 10
I had also been asked to take part in the first live performance of a duo project, Tipsy In Chelsea, fronted by Dean, a guitarist friend from the New Haven area, and Trish, a vocalist friend from Atlanta. That involved learning six originals (theirs) and two rearranged cover songs. The gig took place this past Wednesday at Pianos in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and I think it came off rather well. At least I don’t think I blew any cues, although a rather critical guitar cable finally died on me in the middle of the first song and held a tenuous grasp on audio for the duration of the performance.
SUBTOTAL: 16
The next night was residency night at the One-Eyed Pig in Newtown. I guess I’ve become sort of an adjunct member of the Wagon Wheel Band—two guitarists, bass, drums, female vocals, and me—but it’s a good gig with top-flight musicians and of late it’s been getting a little unpredictable in a good way. Certain song choices, and certain segues between songs, keep all the musicians on their toes.
If that lineup sounds like it could almost be a wedding band, well, it is, now. I was asked to join that project a couple of weeks ago, whereby the band would continue to perform the Pig residency as the Wagon Wheel Band and do (hopefully lucrative) weddings and corporate gigs under a different name. I don’t think anyone’s put together a definitive set list yet, but I can’t imagine it would be less than fifty songs.
SUBTOTAL: 66
And coming up on Thanksgiving is the annual Vomitorium show put on by Dean, the aforementioned friend from New Haven. If I am understanding the setup correctly, he takes advantage of the fact that a good portion of the congeries of his musician friends scattered hither and yon across the Eastern seaboard will actually be back in town with their families for the holiday, and so he gathers them all together, asks them what songs they want to play at the show, and the whole lot of us set ourselves down and learn them. I did that gig last year, and it was a lot of work then, and it’ll be a lot now, too: I have about thirty songs to find keyboard parts for by Thursday, two of which I’m singing lead on.
ESTIMATED GRAND TOTAL: 96
Oh, and I just took a gig for New Years Eve with Slowpoke, another cover band of which I’m an adjunct member. This wouldn’t ordinarily result in my having to learn more new music, except that this is a private party and I’ve been asked to perform cocktail music with an as-yet unnamed bassist an hour or two before the rocking and rolling commences. Song selection will apparently come from The Great American Songbook. That pushes the total up to well over a hundred songs crammed into my tiny little brain in the space of two months-plus. But 96 sounds like a nice, round number at which to leave the grand total, because otherwise I’d have to change the title of this post.
And I honestly hope it doesn’t sound as though I’m complaining. This is what it is to be a full-time working musician, and I’m grateful that I get my chance to make a living out of it now. It is truly following the dream.
The only downside being that there hasn’t been a whole lot of time to devote to @Fulcrum-related matters, like finishing up the Luminous City remaster and the first Describing An Arc album. But I expect I’ll have a bit of time after we tear the December calendar page off the wall: an astrologer tells me that mid-March will be a very good time to release both, and I think that they both should be done by then, so that’s the deadline I’m imposing on both albums.
Wow, I guess I had some @Fulcrum-related business to relate after all.