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Showing posts from August, 2008

#100

Last post was kinda down, so for the hundredth, since I'm home and dry for a moment, we'll lighten up some. Old Hundredth is also known as the Doxology in the Episcopal Hymnal. It's a song of praise with a lovely melody written in 1551 which has been used for other hymns as well. We used to sing it when the ushers would bring the collection plates up to the altar. Here's a cool shed called the MD100 that you can build. Tito Puente named his one hundredth album El #100 . Not sure you could come up with a better name. There's Apollo 100 and Haircut 100 . And Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings ' "100 Days, 100 Nights" too, not to forget "Somebody's Been Sleeping in My Bed" by 100 Proof (Aged in Soul) . Thanks for reading the blog. Sorry I got so morose on the last entry, but I hope some of this makes up for it.

Anniversary

Yesterday was a weird, hard day. I had done my first gig subbing for Brandon Bush in Sugarland in front of forty thousand Harley owners in Milwaukee without a soundcheck the day before, and I'd neatly butchered a lot of what should have been perfect unfortunately. Everyone was very understanding and comforting about it, but I wanted to sit in my bunk on the bus and weep, I was so distraught about it. I'd also chosen my first day with a new band to quit smoking cigarettes again. The master of good timing strikes again... I sure hadn't planned on being a smoker again, after having been quit for ten years. But for the past three years, it's been on-again, off-again, with the last four months having been pretty much 'on' nearly to the point of chain-smoking. The last Hootie night was where I tried to smoke as much as I could to sicken myself, and I guess it's worked as this is my third smoke-free day. Impending unemployment has been riding heavily on my sh

Penultimate

San Diego, even before Will Ferrell changed the pronunciation and translation in Anchorman , has always been a stop on the tours I've been on with Hootie. Tonight, we are playing the gig we do annually at Humphrey's By the Bay on Shelter Island . It's a great venue, with a harbor full of yachts bobbing beside the stage. It's a nicely planned, planted amphitheater. We usually have rooms near the front-of-house soundboard location, and they have balconies overlooking the stage. On our night off, we listened to Bill Maher do his BIll Maher thing. It was the first time I'd been to a show at Humphrey's that I wasn't playing. I also love to walk around the area, up to Rosecrans Street. There are ship chandlers, funky restaurants and lots of interesting old California cars. The Toyota LE Minivan, circa 1986, is one of my very favorite vehicles and there is a surfeit of them here. At the end of the day, we get back on the bus, driving now to Agoura Hills and d

Firefly

We have in our backyard one firefly, so far as I can tell. He lazily wanders around among the foliage, illuminating his heinie periodically, unconcerned with his solitary existence. I try to visit him every night, at least for a few minutes. He doesn't understand my apprehension. When I was a kid, back in the Sixties, I remember our evening yard being full of fireflies in Old Greenwich . Like most idiot children of the time, I captured them in a mayonnaise jar. We punctured holes in the lid with a flathead screwdriver so the bugs could 'breathe' for whatever time in captivity they had left. It was usually not very long, and we'd have a jar bottom carpeted in dead fireflies in a couple hours. (Some of my evil little friends used to take the insect and smear their luminescent hindquarters on their shirts, and as cool as they thought they were, that kind of wholesale bug torture never appealed to me.) I also remember sitting on the mayor's porch in Oxford, Missi

Springsteen in Charleston

I was lucky enough to get tickets for Smart Wife and myself to see Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in Charleston last night. She'd never seen Bruce play, and we had an opportunity to leave the young'uns with her cousins, so I lobbied hard for two tickets and was able to get them. SW and I don't get a lot of one-on-one time these days, with me being on the road for the last two months. Suffice it to say, she was very excited for this chance to go out for some music with me. We got to our seats, which were about twenty feet from stage left and set about watching the people around us. Obviously a high concentration of every vintage Springsteen tour shirts on folks in the crowd were evident, along with some interesting homemade ones (a pink tank top on an older woman proclaiming incompletely "Tramps Like Us"--or maybe the thought was complete at that). The average age was probably around forty; lots of greying balding guys and their wives, with a few fa

NY Times blog part three is up

I know, I know. You haven't heard from me lately, and I'm sorry. The future's looming large, and distractions have been keeping me away from DTBMMLF. Meanwhile, the Times songwriting blog is up so you can go read that for the moment. I'll be back soon, I promise. Thank you for your patience.