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 singalong chorus that's a hit in my book.
I got called up during their encore to play on covers of "Teenage Head", "Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White" and "Ballad of John and Yoko" on Pete's Eastwood Mosrite-esque electric guitar (he was running bass for most of the night except when he picked up a solid-body Rickenbacker 12-string for songs like "Medicine Show".) It was great fun to play with those folks. Steve, Linda and Peter and I have a lot of history together over the years, and I'm glad I share a little of the modern-day Baseball Project vibe onstage with them.
PS: I borrowed the picture from So It Goes, hope they don't mind but they can let me know if they do, and I'll take it down.
Comments
If only every Saturday night could be as overstuffed with awesome as the last one was...