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Showing posts from September, 2009

The further adventures of Pete and Pete (and Steve and Scott and Linda)

Smart wife and I got a babysitter last night and hauled our ordinarily sleepy selves over to Cats Cradle for an evening of music from Steve Wynn , Scott McCaughey , Linda Pitmon and Peter Buck . They're travelling around the country in a Sprinter, playing each other's songs and generally having a great time. And there's a wealth of material being performed, too. Steve and Scott have vast and deep catalogs from which to draw. There were Young Fresh Fellows and Dream Syndicate classics roaring through the set, along with music from this band's latest CD The Baseball Project: Volume One, Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails . I'm not a baseball guy, to say the least (hell, anyone who knows me knows that sports are not very important in my life, outside of Tarheel basketball), but the songs on Volume One are great and enthusiastic paeans to the Great American Pastime. "Ted Fucking Williams" may not get a lot of commercial radio airplay, but it's got a sing

Meet Me at the Station, Don't Be Late

(No pictures yet, but I'll try to add them if any surface.) Part of our trip to New Orleans was the aforementioned birthday for the Sweet Sixteener. Another was to perform a show at my old haunt, Carrollton Station , where the Continental Drifters had reconvened several months before. I assume I don't have to tell my readers that I was a bandmate of the illustrious Susan Cowsill for ten years. We made some great music together, and despite our parting of the ways, we've remained friends. A couple years ago, I wanted to come back to New Orleans to perform Richard and Linda Thompson 's Shoot Out the Lights album as part of Susan's Covered in Vinyl series, in which she and the band learn an entire album end to end. Unfortunately, my schedule got crazy, and I had to bail on the show and Susan's band. Fortunately, we were able to snag a Saturday at the Station that had been the property of the talented Kinky Tuscaderos , whose bassist Mary LaSang also play

Sixteen

Yesterday, my daughter turned sixteen years old. Her stepmom and stepsiblings and I piled into the minivan for the long ride from Durham to New Orleans so we could be there for the celebration. You don't turn sixteen every day. I can clearly recall my own birthday back in 1972. The night before, I was supposed to rendezvous with my friends at a golf course shelter we would inhabit and drink Mickey' s in after midnight, so that we could all trip on some new LSD in town. (Yes, I know... but that was then...) This was to require sneaking out of my parents' house and traveling about half a mile in the newly fallen snow. So sometime after my parents were fast asleep, I made my way to the shelter and dutifully ate my tab of acid as the snow fell silently. I must have waited for at least two hours, but my friends never showed. Psychedelia aside, I was starting to get really cold. The walk home was a little more difficult, to say the least. The crunch of the snow underfoot

Children of all ages

I'm the parent of three children, ages 16, 6 and 2. They're at varying and appropriate stages in their social development, it would seem. They are a source of pride in that their upbringing includes manners which get used a lot. "Thank you" has always been a part of their vocabulary--to hear the six-year-old acknowledge a snack feels really great as his dad. My teen is polite too, and people always comment to me on her abundance of grace, charm and ease. (The two-year-old is learning how to use the potty, and that's plenty for her at the moment.) It's not out of the realm of belief that people reflect their parents' upbringing. And even in cases where the parenting was either neglectful or wanting in quality, people have the ability to see what kind of difference civility makes and try to retrofit it and implement it in their own lives. But nowadays, civility and manners and tact have taken a back seat to shock value and saying what's on your mi

Tuesday

I've been worried lately because I didn't pre-order the Beatles mono box set that's coming out on Tuesday like all the smart kids did months ago. My friend from New Orleans, Joe Adragna , equipped me with mp3s of mono mixes, and that's kept me going and my appetite whetted for months now. But my family has also developed a ravenous taste for the Beatles and would love to be able to simply slip a disc into the player rather than trying to weed through Daddy's iTunes to try to figure out where "Taxman" is (the six-year-old's favorite song, along with "I'm a Loser"). So that just means that I'll be standing at the front door of my local cd store Tuesday morning, like so many folk will be doing that day, in hopes that the people who pre-ordered the mono box will a.) have already found it elsewhere or b.) have forgotten to come and pick it up. The chance of that happening, of course is almost nil. So I may be empty-handed upon my retu

Summer vacation?

Naw, not so much. Probably the world's crummiest blogger, knowing there's no excuse like no excuse to keep from writing. Plus I'm back on Facebook, and that's a big ol' time vampire... if you need to know my status updates.... Actually, I did have a nice summer. I put out a cool album with Chris, do you have it yet? We did some shows, played on the radio a couple times too. (There are more coming up, so if you've missed us so far, you still have more chances to miss us down the line.) Some rock gigs with Luego around town. I started my kids' shows again at the Regulator Bookshop in Durham. Finally got my father's ashes interred in the cemetery in Hudson, NY. Got to play with my little kids a lot. Some of this stuff is unfamiliar to me, having been a touring summer dad for many years. I have good news, though. Thanks to the nice people at Arbor Ridge, I am about to launch my for real website at www.peterholsapple.com in about a week. It lo