I'm currently working with Julie Neumark to set up a Midwest tour for late September/early October. Some of the cities that we'll be coming to are Chicago, Cincinnati, Toledo and Grand Rapids. We're working on a few others (including Milwaukee and Champaign) and hope to have the tour schedule nailed down soon.
I'll post the dates when they come. Check back for more details.
I'm excited to let you know that I've got a couple of LA shows coming up soon.
Firstly, on Thursday June 12th I'll be playing my first ever set at Genghis Cohen. Genghis is a great little singer/songwriter room with good sound and tasty Chinese food to boot. I am the last of three performers and my set begins at 10pm. Admission is $7.
Then, on Thursday July 3rd, I'm starting off the night at 8pm at M Bar in Hollywood. This is the final show that a friend of mine is promoting before moving back to Canada and it's the eve of Independence Day, so it should prove to be a very good time. Admission for this event is $8.
See the Shows page for more details.
I hope to see you there, and for those of you in the Midwest...sit tight. A fall tour is currently in the works.
As always, thanks for your support!
So, lately I’ve been trying to get more into the busking gig and I’ve been going down to Santa Monica a little more often. I was down there the other day (Rachel was kind enough to go with me) and set up shop at what has become “my spot” – in the middle of the third block in between the Apple store and Victoria’s Secret.
So, I’m sitting there minding my own business playing some songs and this guy with a guitar down the street a ways starts jamming with a saxophone player. Now you haven’t heard saxophone until you’ve heard really-crap-busker-jazz-saxophone. I mean, this guy was loud as hell and was so bad that according to Rachel, and I quote, “this one old man with a cane and a crazy eye stopped and said, ‘Sounds like shit!’.” So, it’s not just me.
Anyhow, they finished their song and the guy with the guitar started walking my way. I was in the middle of “Miles Away” and he walks right up to me whilst I’m playing. At first I thought there was gonna be a busker’s dual, but then I noticed the small camera crew that accompanied him and figured something more “Hollywood” was up. He asked if he could play a song with me and I replied with a hesitant, “Sure?” He then proceeded to introduce himself the way that only people with a certain sense of self-importance can.
“Have you heard of Loudon Wainwright?”
“Yeah.”
"Well, you just met him."
"Right on."
For those of you who don’t know, Loudon Wainwright III is a 70s singer/songwriter of some fame and perhaps better known amongst my generation as the gynecologist from “Knocked Up” and the father of singer/songwriters Rufus and Martha Wainwright.
Anyhow, he wanted to play one of my songs, so I taught him “Miles Away” and we played a shortened version of that song and then I played one of his songs with him. Turns out the cameras were for a presentation that Loudon was filming for a reality TV show that he’s hosting about one-thing-or-another. He was walking up and down the promenade with his guitar, talking to random people and playing a song or two with a few buskers. It was a lot of fun and actually brought a little business my way – sold a few CDs thanks to the Loudon association and one guy actually thought that he was my mentor.
Apparently you never know who you’re gonna run into down there and hopefully they’ll email me the video of us playing together, but I’m sure they won’t. Either way it was pretty cool.
Volume 3 brings us near my hometown of Monroe, MI to Toledo, OH on Friday April 18. No offense to Toledoans, but every time I come to this area of the city it looks more and more depressed. Upon crossing the Maumee River we were greeted by a man getting arrested and tased on the side of the road. Gone are the youthful days of bliss, seeing Sloan a million times at the Main Event which is now a shut down sports bar covered in graffiti. Ah, Toledo. What a great city.
Load in was at 8pm and doors were supposed to be at 9pm. This works in theory, so long as they actually let us in at 8pm. We got into the venue about 8:20 and did a damn fine and efficient job of setting up in time to get the show started by 9:30. Great turn out of friends from Monroe and BG and the show went really well in my opinion. All three bands played well and I think everyone had a great time. It's always fun for me to play to this crowd and I thank all of you for showing up and supporting me and us. It was a blast. Hectic....but a blast.
On Saturday morning we set out for Julie's hometown of Cincinnati where we actually played in Kentucky at a place called Molly Malone's. Molly Malone's is an Irish pub housed in a really cool old building right across the river from Cincy. The room that we played in was on the 3rd and highest floor and used to be a house of ill repute. Turns out the room is also haunted by a patron of the brothel who was found out by his wife. As the story goes, this gentleman used to frequent the establishment and one day his wife walked in with a gun and shot him dead whilst he was with a female companion. Now, I'm not usually one for stories like this, but an incident happened to Ted and I that made me actually consider the validity of this story. I'll leave out the details, but we certainly felt the presence of another being and some strange shit happened behind the bar when no one was in the room except for the band and everyone except Ted and I was on the other side of the room. So, we made nice with "Joe" and invited him to enjoy the festivities of the night without incident.
As for the show itself, it was great. Julie pre-sold about 150 tickets and around 200 people showed up. The place was rockin and it was a lot of fun. Good room, good stage, good sound, good atmosphere....in a lot of ways Saturday was great.
.........and then came Sunday.
I believe we last left off driving back to Chicago from Grand Rapids. In theory, Chicago's show on Thursday night should have been awesome. It was at Joe's which is a pretty good sized place (largest I've ever played in....) and we were opening for a national touring act called the Randy Rogers Band.
From the moment we arrived at the venue the scene was rife with confusion. We went from loading in from 5-6, to having sound check at 5 (RRB didn't end their check till 5:30), to performing at 6, to performing at 6:30, to not doing a check at all, to performing at 7:45 and then, finally, performing at 8:00 which is what we had thought and advertised all along.
That all being said, everyone at the venue was really nice and most had no idea of the confusing and constantly changing "schedule". They were just as frustrated as we were. It turns out, however, that the confusion was all caused by a silent auction that was going on in an ajoining room from 6-7:30, which is why we couldn't do a sound check. Anyhow, a large room looks incredibly empty with 75-100 people in it and that was certainly the case when we played with Julie. I think we played a pretty good show and the stage and sound were awesome, but it would have been nice to go on a little later when the people showed up......about 800 of them by 10:00. Oh well. It was a great experience and I'm sure it'll be that much better next time.
