this saturday's show at unity temple in oak park...
...is doing very nicely in advance sales but still room left. If you're thinking of coming -- what's stopping you, neuralgia?? -- please buy your tickets ahead of time (use the link on the posting below). To the literally hundreds who have bought tickets already, many thanks. It is for you that I put on fresh strings nightly and play and sing as if my morphine habit depended on it. All right, this will be a pulse-quickener of a show if the rehearsal yesterday was any sign...and that's the last I'll say about it, scout's honor!
big shew in oak park!
The time has come for me to stump for another one-of-a-kind show, and this one's in an extraordinary venue just west of Chicago. The Unity Temple, a cubist, steeple-less Unitarian churchhouse built in 1905 by Frank Lloyd Wright, has an annual (and very selective) series of concerts. By mistake, they invited me to play there, and without hesitating, I said yes thank you. The roster of artists past is flattering company indeed.
Since this environment will be so far removed form the cathouses and viaducts where I usually hold forth, I thought I would do something different, something that would sound good in the room and highlight the churchy side of my many-hued persona. A set of songs that would keep the angry fist-shaking at heaven to a bare minimum and thereby keep the oaken rafters from crashing onto my head. I envisioned -- now I'm being serious (throat-clearing noises) -- a small group of instruments that would make sounds half pointed (plick!) and half susurrant (rrrmmm). I asked three men to accompany me for the date (Scott Stevenson, Rob Gjersoe, and Beau Sample) that could approximate this balance -- create a pretty steady ambience, but also step out and play some soul-stirring solos here and there.
I certainly don't want to suggest that this will be some kind of ultra-solemn Philip Glass requiem. I plan to mouth off, and play (a few) funny songs, as ever. Maybe even take issue with God's handiwork, because I think Unitarians are down with that. But I look forward to doing a show that lets me quiet down a little and focus on voice and lyric; and the orchestration, the particular quartet, and the place all suggest something memorable and unrepeatable might occur. Am I overselling like crazy? I hope you'll get advance tickets for this one. The lowdown:
Unity Temple
875 Lake Street, Oak Park IL
Saturday, January 28 at 7:30P
call Susan at 708-445-8955, or get tickets online at: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/198770
this monday at the hideout
It's all Velvet Underground love, with Liam Davis, Gerald Dowd, Steve Dawson, "and the rest."
goodbye, tom ardolino
Tom, who played drums for the legendary, influential, and indefatigable rock group NRBQ, died last Friday. A couple days later an obit appeared in the Boston Globe, and then, day by day, came notices in the Miami Herald, the LA Times, and a sprinkling of other big-city papers. No New York Times yet, even though the Times, I feel sure of it, employs multiple music writers whose coverage extends past the modern and megaselling. When a musician's work consists of a lifelong tenure with one outfit, it's hard-to-impossible to disentangle his brain from the group's, and this is harder yet when the group is NRBQ, whose trademark was in-the-moment composition and elaboration while swimming ecstatically in each others' heads. But let me take the occasion of his passing to "give something to the drummer."
On his instrument, Tom was one of the foremost individual stylists in post-Beatles American pop music; he stood in this respect alongside players like Levon Helm, Keith Moon, and Jim Keltner. I don't mean to drop those heavy names to add easy firepower to an argument for a relatively overlooked player, only to say that Tom invented an approach to playing his instrument, such that you didn't have to have the ears of John Hammond, or to look at the credits or the bandstand, to know who was playing the kit. It's conventional to say of players that they sound like no one but themselves, but it's not really true, except in a strongly exaggerated or trivial way, of most -- if it were true, every player would be a genius. Any number of savants playing the blind-test game online will confirm that conveying an unmistakeable musical personality is uphill work.
Tom was the drummer who'd routinely shuffle with one hand and straight-8 with the other, imposing a sort of antique, blustering Kansas City drag on songs whose zippiness, or whose 1980s-pop or avant-garde aims, seemed to point elsewhere, on paper. For him, you got the feeling, there was no music without impetuousness. He would explode into a nutty, implausible fill well past the place it should have begun, and emerge from it abruptly and on time, even if "on time" meant well past the bar marker, as it often did. His tuning was loose, his touch was heavy, his time was playful and precise, and he played with the force of his full body, all of which made for a monstrous combination.
His freedom from conformity-inducing influences (he learned to play in his room, with records, and left his room to go on the road with the band he stayed with for the next 30-odd years) and his guts to walk his own path were only half of his accomplishment as a drummer, and might have left him just another eccentric player, but then there was the thing he was born with, his groove. He truly put the pocket into the rocket. His backbeat got, to these ears, a little farther back as the decades progressed -- the nature of the groove developed, a little, but the quality didn't waver, and the authority rose. I was listening, just incidentally, to "Sister Ray" yesterday, and it occurred to me that how these two rock quartets of like vintage and omnivorous reach -- Velvet Underground and NRBQ -- handled noise was most clearly differentiated by their drummers. When his three stagemates went on a rampage of randomness, Tom almost always held the security blanket nice and taut underneath them.
His physicality was most impressive. I saw him play 30 or 40 times since I was a teenager, and it always amazed and moved me to watch that left hand of his, arcing high and snapping down with reptilian agility, and to feel the fury of his kick foot. I absorbed from him a principle that a lot of others my age were getting from punk players: beating all hell out of your instrument is the path to glory. A lousy principle, as it turns out. But for him, it worked, and for quite a long while. To have left the mark he did in the way he did, in a time when every year produces more players who play like everyone else, is a beautiful thing.
this monday at the hideout
Start the year right with me and Don Stiernberg, our nation's premier swing mandolinist!
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Upcoming Tour Dates
- Unity Temple
28 Jan in Oak Park IL - hideout
30 Jan in Chicago