this monday at the hideout
A duo with Robbie Gjersoe. A lot of these Monday shows haven't been featuring music I've written, so I'll catch up a bit with that. We'll also play some of our favorites from the different Monday configurations in which we've both figured throughout the year, like our trios with Jenny Scheinman and Beau Sample and John Abbey, and the Monk/Monkees night. A handful of new songs as well, and some requests would be nice.
The Chicago Sun-Times is running a piece about musical residencies in this Sunday's paper, and it seems a lot of the focus will be on my Hideout series. Personally I think having a regular room to play music in one night a week, a stream of various incoming collaborators, and a little group of quiet citizens to listen to it satisfies 90% of what I want from music performance, now and for the rest of my days. What does the missing 10% consist of? Income, high-concept pageantry, ass-shaking rock-and-roll with drumkit, and quantity (50 shows a year doesn't quite do it for me). But the fact that all those concerns and desiderata, even money, are crammed into that little pie slice shows how much things change, or, it might be more accurate to say, how much they regress. As a young adult I found the romantic prospects of 200 nights on the road and a catalog of recordings paid for and distributed by prestigious companies to be strong motivators (and, I have to admit, celebrity and pussy did flit into one's head from time to time). As a 10-year-old or a near-50-year-old, though, the excitement is mainly generated by learning good new music, working on chops, and finding people whose talents and perspectives may put you in a relationship of mutual advantage. The music itself trumps the driving and the drinking and the fucking. This could be due to senility, or self-justification. I'm not bragging, just describing.
Maybe this is a good moment to say as a coda to the above, in case anyone is still interested and reading, that my series will be continuing next year and in fact indefinitely. I'd quit if I moved from the Chicago area, or Tim and Katie stopped wanting me at their club, or enough people stopped showing, but it's proved a good regular situation, so why change. Well, there are actually a couple reasons why. There's been a few people that come every week (!), and I suspect (actually, they've said as much) that their insanely loyal attendance is based partly on an idea of scarcity, the residency being something special that won't go on always so love it while it lasts. While I don't want to let them down, and some kind of self-rationing, pace my friend Jon Langford, has to be exercised to keep your value from completely eroding, I'm liking the engagement too much, and getting too much out of it, to stop myself out of canniness.
One aspect will be modified next year, though, and that's the hardcore blue-plate-special ethos. I don't think I have enough friends to draw from among people who live here or are passing through on a tour to plug in 52 Mondays a year; and learning an hour and a half of new music every week is hard. But the main and the positive reason that I want to focus on a finite, rotating set of groupings is that I would rather go deep than wide. I feel sure it will be much more productive to play more frequently with people like Nora O'Connor and Don Stiernberg and Gerald Dowd and Robbie and Beau and Jenny, people with whom I have established good working ties, than to extend the preoccupation with variety programming. So in 2011 I'm going to concentrate on a half-dozen or so duos, trios and quartets, with an occasional conceptual night, as I did this year covering Slow Train Coming, paying tribute to Alex Chilton, and mashing up Monk and the Monkees. Those nights were way fun. Fun has to be a factor.
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