Tour Update Numero One

Not Here For a Long Time; Here For a Good Time

Vol. I

oh, hi.

I drank too much caffeine and the internet connection at the cafe is not very good so I can't maintain an SSH connection so I can't do any actual work because somehow people think it's ok to load four youtube videos at once on a public wifi connection and someone needs to tell these fools what's what and now I have nothing to do so I guess I'll write a blog post and i guess this is it and wow, what a long sentence.

ok.

we're in OK, just south of Toby Keith's home. we ate at Taco Cabana yesterday and had $1.50 margaritas (after spending five minutes waiting for the cashier to convince himself of the validity of our chintzy looking temporary IDs (thanks, Iowa, for instituting a ridiculous 30 day waiting period on IDs. that'll stop the terror)). it was mucho goodo.

shows have been great. last weekend we formed a supergroup of sorts and played a wedding reception. the western front + the wandering bears + the vagabonds = ROCKnROLL.

The show was at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, KS. After playing, we stormed the dance floor and made James Brown proud.

We were in Missouri before that, and were lucky/thankful to play the Lemp Neighborhood Arts Center and see our good friend Mark Sarich. Everyone there was busy with the Lemp's latest endeavor, Orchestrating Diversity. This summer, around 20 St. Louis highschool students are spending 8:30-3:00 five days a week at the Lemp, participating in an orchestral music program. We were fortunate to sit in on a morning session; it was inspiring to see the work being done.

We had grand plans to leave early yesterday and get some work done during the afternoon, but that fell apart when our trailer tire blew out. The repair involved two trips back into town, a rotten log used as a makeshift ramp, and an amplifier case used as a jackstand to support the trailer in the absence of the van's hitch. Everyone got sunburnt. We were thankful for the timing and location of the failure, which could have been much, much worse.

Current CD favorites in the van:

Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
Dr. Dog - Easy Beat
Vampire Weekend - Contra
Fleetwood Mac - umm, everything.

laters, players.

The Western Front / The Wandering Bears - Summer Tour 2010

Hey Folks - come see us out West / South:

Jun 15 - The Mill, Iowa City, IA
Jun 16 - LEMP Arts, St. Louis, MO
Jun 17 - The Riot Room, Kansas City, KS
Jun 20 - Cesspool Castle, Joplin, MO
Jun 21 - Bill and Dee's, Norman, OK
Jun 22 - Headhunters, Austin, TX
Jun 23 - Bash's, Lubbock, TX
Jun 25 - 806 Lounge, Amarillo, TX
Jun 26 - Amped Performance Center, Albuquerque, NM
Jun 30 - The Hotel Cafe, Los Angeles, CA
Jul 1 - Plea For Peace Center, Stockton, CA
Jul 2 - Ghost Town Gallery, Oakland, CA
Jul 3 - Kaleidoscope Free Speech Zone, San Francisco, CA
Jul 7 - tba, Seattle, WA
Jul 9 - tba, Bozeman, MT
Jul 11 - The Perk, Billings, MT
Jul 13 - BackForty Presents, Denver, CO
Jul 14 - Lion's Den, Denver, CO
Jul 16 - Knickerbockers, Lincoln, NE

Every one of these shows is with The Wandering Bears

Those Bears

Something of this proportion is certainly worth mentioning - our sister group over there, The Wandering Bears, have released a smacking of songs, 8 of them - you could almost call that a full length. Let's not.

In conjunction with this is the debut of a beautiful new web space, thewanderingbears.com. It is here where you can listen to and download all 8 songs. Here here, there.

from missionfreak.com:

David just told me I’ll “shit my pants” after hearing the new songs. (My bowels certainly could drop — I am rather intoxicated right now).

mission creek 2010

...with a tip of the hat to Johnny La and his puzzling penchant for parallel lines.

Look, gonna show you a show

This is most excellent, friends and friends.

We are happy to announce that we will be performing as part of the annual Mission Creek Music Festival here in early April. The details are as follows:

Friday, April 2nd
The Blue Moose Tap House, Iowa City, IA
doors: 8pm
show: 9pm
tickets: 8 bucks in advance, 10 at the door
19+
performing with: Little Dragon, The Envy Corps, Porno Galactica

Mmm, HELL YES, you know this is the first TWF show in Iowa City since last August?

Also, our sister project The Wandering Bears will also be participating in this year's Mission Creek. Travel to The Mill on Wednesday, March 31 to see us perform with The Daredevil Christopher Wright, Brighton MA, and The New Bodies.

The Recording is not the Song.

So there's this Blind Pilot song, "The Story I Heard", that just floors me every time I listen to it. While listening to the album today, it occurred to me how much I prefer the Daytrotter version. Pondering it for a while, I was reminded of a discussion in the Dewi Sant van that happened somewhere between LA and Portland. The conversation floated around, skirting many different subjects, and somewhere along the line it touched on the discrepancy between the recorded version of a song and the live version. More than one person expressed the disappointment they felt when listening to a band perform live and it didn't sound like the recording. I didn't have words to express it at the moment, but something about that didn't sit well with me.

I can remember a time, in my high-school pop-punk days, when the greatest compliment a fan could give was that "you guys sound just like the album." In this age of AutoTune, time correction, and sound replacement, I suppose that actually is quite a compliment for many bands. It certainly was for us at the time--it was tantamount to saying "you guys are not a fabrication." And for a long time, this sentiment remained; the goal, whenever performing, was to reproduce, as precisely as possible, the recorded song.

Somewhere along the line that all changed. It's hard to pinpoint discrete moments of mental shift, but if I had to venture a guess, everything probably changed with my discovery of jazz--specifically, bop (and later, Free Jazz). To a jazz quartet, the concept of a song was much more transcendent . To quote Ornette Coleman:

I don't know how it's going to sound before I play it any more than anybody else does, so how can we talk about it before I play it?

A song existed only in the moment it was performed. Improvisation was not just a novel tool to be used to spice up a tired guitar solo; improvisation was the thing itself--it was the interaction between performers. The music became the medium through which a listener might listen in on a conversation between musicians. The Song was what the band was talking about.

To paraphrase Korzybski, "the recording is not the Song." It's easy to lose sight of the fact that recordings are a relatively new cultural artifact. Before the advent of electro-mechanically reproduced sound, the concept of Song was drastically different from what we're currently accustomed to. A Song was not something that existed as a singular entity. A Song did not fit tidily on your shelf or hard drive. A Song was a more ethereal thing--a thing that existed outside of space and time in a sort of meta-musical Hilbert space. Once in a while, if the conditions were right, the Song might decide to materialize in local Euclidean space-time. It existed then and there, in that moment, ineffably bringing together performer and listener.

But heretofore, the whole course of music, from its first day to this, has been along the line of making it the expression of soul states; in other words, of pouring into it soul. Wagner, representing the climax of this movement, declared again and again, "I will not write even one measure of music that is not thoroughly sincere."

When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery?

- John Phillip Sousa, "The Menace of Mechanical Music," 1906

While Sousa's essay is a bit over-dramatic (as befitting his music), he recognized very presciently the dehumanizing effect of recorded music. He saw that as mechanical recordings replaced the folk pastime of music making, something important would be lost. This, however, is not to say that recordings are a Bad Thing--that would be short-sighted.

Even as I write this, I'm listening to recordings. Raheem DeVaughn, Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps, The Tallest Man on Earth, Lil Wayne--all of this music is floating around me. I remind myself, though, that these recordings are not the songs themselves. That would make as much sense as saying that my 8th grade class portrait embodies who I am, right now, at this moment. That wallet sized photo is no more than a visual recording of who I was. To recognize that a recording is no more than a snapshot of a Song at a particular place and time: this, I think, is the important insight.

The Blind Pilot recording that I prefer exists only because of a broken acoustic guitar string and an electric guitar that happened to be lying around. The specific circumstances of the session are now archived in that recording. Like a Polaroid of a perfect day spent sailing the azure water off North Bimini, a song can remind us of the sublime moments in life. But just as fixating on a photo of a former-lover can distract from what is right in front of you, considering a recording as the Song itself limits one's access to the infinite potential contained within.

laguna beach brunch

So our good friend Arlen (of Caroline Smith and the Good Night Sleeps and Cloud Cult) asked me to go on tour with one of his bands, Dewi Sant. Their bass player backed out at the last minute, and I was the first vagabond he thought of. Tour has been absolutely beautiful. I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune next week when we're cold again, but right now, in southern California, I can't imagine feeling happier. I'm going to petition the rest of the band to move here as soon as possible.

Our present hostess, Elizabeth, made us some mean blueberry coffee cake for breakfast. We should probably be leaving for our show in LA right now, but not before I make us a late brunch. The following recipe is the result of things found in a fridge in a beautiful home at the top of a big hill in Laguna Beach:



Uova alla Puttanesca

note: Measuring is for suckers. All given metrics are completely arbitrary guesses.

1 Dozen large eggs
Heavy Cream (or Half and Half or Milk)
1 Sweet Bell Pepper
2/3 Red Onion
4-5 cloves garlic
2-3 Tbsp. Capers
1/2 lemon
Cayenne Pepper
Oregeno
Salt
Pepper

Heat some olive oil in a large skillet under medium heat. Mince the garlic (tip: first slice the cloves really thin, then add some salt--this will act as an abrasive to aid in mincing). Fry the garlic for a few minutes (add enough oil to keep the garlic from caramelizing and congealing). Turn the heat up to medium-high and add the onion; cook for a few minutes before adding the bell pepper. Squeeze the lemon juice into the skillet. Cook for a few minutes and add the capers. Salt, pepper, cayenne, and oregeno to taste.

In a mixing bowl, whisk the eggs and about 1/4 cup of cream/milk. When you're tired of whisking, whisk for another minute or two.

When the veggies are cooked to your desired tenderness, turn the heat up to high and add the eggs. Stir regularly to evenly scramble the eggs.

Serve.