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“I guess you got to lie and cheat a bit more to get a house like that.” — Damon Gough (Badly Drawn Boy) on the Executive Mansion, at the 9:30 Club, last night.
“What, Korn? Well, I said we’ll play anything. but not any Amercan shite.” — Later that night.
Right now, I’m doing something I do well: eating three PB&J sandwiches at once. A number of people today scoffed at my plans for tonight. But I was able to scoff back, with humor.
Just a while ago I was involved in a heated argument over the merits of mini mince pies that were sold at the Lower School Christmas pageant.
I thought that they were vile, not suitable for mixed media art, and a poor excuse for the eminently more palatable apple butter. I’m glad to say I had a few Brits (well, one) on my side, though not about the Apple Butter.
The past week has been perhaps the hardest I can recall since Andy’s funeral. For the first time in a long time it was hard to leave Farrell. The inertia came, however, not from joy but from the desire to shrink from what’s out here.
I’ve never been the “Hi, my name is…” guy except in a professional role. But I’ve also never not wanted to “get on with it, get out from under.” I can be remarkably cool under the BIG pressures. It is the little ones. . . I won’s say small, let’s say “fine” in it’s core meaning. The manner has gotten me all I have, and it’s kept me from quite a bit of easily grasped fruit. But it’s mine. And in my own, thus-far-non-profitable way, it’s made me rich. It can be brusque or manic, but it is certainly not, never has been, stable.
I was thinking of this last night as Gough complained that he wasn’t getting any volume from his monitor speaker. Would he storm off? Would I get to come back and “blog” that?
The fleeting fear was that it was an act. I haven’t been to a lot of concerts, and my first one was (as many of you have been told) David Lee Roth’s Eat ‘em and Smile, which included a theatrical (read:fictional) banter with an audience member.
[You know, now that I think about it, I wonder if it was fictional. The incident -- someone threw a cigaret lighter at Roth,-- allowed David (I can call him that) to taunt, "Well, I'm gonna f*** your girlfriend after the show." Perhaps he was simply as quick on his feet to have said that. Perhaps he, too is more lucid than the president of the...]
To hell with that, and him. And in the end, even in the (now) spacious 9:30 Club, you could easily hear that, indeed, the monitor was out.
Gough played his entire new album, front to back. In the middle, he gave a long story about how hearing, at 14, Springsteen’s Thunder Road “changed his life.” he went on to recount his first meeting with Springsteen as an unknown, just when his first EP came out. Four years later, as a big name, he was invited to a Springsteen show, and Springsteen dedicated a Thunder Road to his son, named Oscar Bruce Gough; and he rushed out afterward to get the bootleg in order to hear it.
Gough made a lot of self-deprecatory comments, throughout, about how long the story was dragging on. But I was caught in the feeling that that story caught him up in the same way that I say the “thousand natural shocks” catch me. How careful can we be with our words? Can we be, finally, as precise as we wish about what bothers us? Or about anything.
In some ways, in images, in music, in painting, in an adding or paring down of words, I think we can.
We are going to film a 30-40 minute short in March.
Get on with it.
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