WTF?

So.....

Any of my busking peeps out there know of a new ordinance that supposedly prevents musicians from performing on subway platforms? My buddy Dave and I were approached by some officers while busking the other day, and were informed that we were in violation of this new ordinance. They were cool about it. But it strikes me as bogus considering the court rulings on busking in the past, not to mention

THE FIRST AMENDMENT.

It's been a bad week for busking. I went out with Dave and DK earlier this week to play and we got pounced on by some rookie cops who first declared music peformance in subway stations to be illegal (which is obviously incorrect, as any garden-variety squirrel could attest), before finall ticketing us for the only offense they could think of, "blocking pedestrian traffic." You'd have to see where we were playing to form your own opinion. But suffice it to say that only the world's thickest numbskull could interpret is as "blocking" anything.

We're of course contesting the whole thing. Updates to follow.

The new "platform ordinance" is what annoys me more than a $50 fine. If it is indeed real, it's probably only a matter of time until it's overturned in court.

I've been playing in subways for three years now, and have been asked to leave five times ever, TWO of those in the last week! To quote one of the officers who fined us earlier this week, "It's at the discretion of the officer." In other words, it's NOT illegal, because if it was, an officer of good moral standing would ALWAYS ticket the offending busker. I've been overlooked, passed, and given good blessings by more NYPD transit officers than I can count.

Anyone else see a hole in the Transit Authority's logic here?

other pursuits

So, it's been a while since an update (again), but I swear it's for good reasons. Firstly, I've been worried that that fatal copper-ray disease (from looking at computers too much) that Willem Defoe's character comes down with in Speed 2: Cruise Control might be real -- and I don't look good with leeches, people.

Secondly, I've been starting up a band with some friends of mine. Not the Flagellants. There might be one or two more singles from them, though ;);)

So yeah, a band. Sorry, I'm still reeling from those winky faces, I can't believe I wrote those. Yeah, we have a band. Electric Warlords. Well, not really, more like Acoustic Amateurs, but we ahve high hopes. That's all a band ever needed, or so I thought I'd been told but probably haven't been.

It's actually working out really well though. My good buddy DK is a phenomenal guitarist and songwriter, and his buddy (and mine now too), Dave, plays the keys like he came out of the womb on a glissando. We've been recently supported by the bass master (not the fishing game) Jeff, lord of the Thumper. I call his bass the Thumper. He doesn't know this and I haven't told anyone else either. We also might have an awesome dual pianos thing going with their friend, Eric, whose solos have left craters in my thought process.

Now we need a drummer. Of course. Everyone needs a drummer. DK says we should get a percussionist instead, but I don't know what that means. Except that they play less-traditional things than drum kits, I suppose.

Also, a band name. We're all super inspired by the Band (well, I think everyone is, anyway), and their name is no different from their music: perfect. (Let's ignore the fact that they didn't want to be called that, and didn't even come UP with the name). Something simple, evocative of the music, not pretentious, and not taken already. Yeesh. Come on, I just solved perpetual motion here, people. Don't give me another toughie.

Gigs and other news to follow shortly, if all works out well.

Rob and DK live at Wolf & Lamb!

It's been a bit since my last post because I've been juggling a new job and working out some details for my first live gig in a while. My buddy DK and I are playing a "bluegrass" (really folk, but management couldn't be convinced otherwise) gig at Wolf & Lamb Steakhouse, tomorrow 2/18 from 7-9. Please come out if you can. Their food is amazing. Our songs will probably be okay too, but don't taste as good.

Wolf & Lamb Steakhouse
8 E. 48th Street (between 5th and Madison)
tomorrow, Wednesday February 18, 7-9
no cover (but you gotta sit at a table and thus, eat)

Meanwhile, this song is plaguing my existence. In the very best of plaguey ways.

felix felicis

Yesterday: got a job, booked a music gig, and had an awesome busking experience wherein I met a kindred busking soul.

I've been looking for jobs for nigh on two months, after being, quite frankly, given the runaround by my former employer, Apple. Unemployment came to the rescue (for the first time....I'm cautious about things that could be mistaken as "freeloader" activities), and I've been busking on the side to get some extra green stamps though it's been too cold to do it often.

After weeks of polite harassment, the Chess Shop in the village hired me yesterday at a rather low salary, but heck man, it's chess! I love chess. And just by virtue of working there I'm gonna become a chess superbrain, right? I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Plus, it's going to be a job that's fairly easy and entirely enjoyable. Me don't do restaurants. Anything resembling soul-selling kinda turns me off.

I auditioned for a performance gig at my girlfriend's restaurant two days ago, and found out yesterday that I booked it! Yes, Rob, there is a Dollar Claus. He just likes to ignore you for months at a time. I'm not sure if this place (a Kosher steakhouse) will exactly "get" my amateurish spin on american folk music, but why not give it a shot? I mean, I LOVE pickles.

As the final move in a day filled with luck, I decided to go busking, presuming my good luck would pay off in spades and I'd make a king's ransom in singles. Instead, I couldn't find an available station anywhere between 145th and 23rd streets. Yoink. I started heading back uptown, resigned to make tea and play video games for the duration of the eve, when I saw a guy playing Dylan songs at 42nd Street. He was around my age, clearly had enthusiasm for the material, and....I dunno. I was feeling ballsy. So, after first going to 59th (no dice), I came back to 42nd and asked him if he'd mind me accompanying him for a little while. He replied that his night was almost over, but he'd give it a shot.

He started up "Blowin in the Wind" and I played along with my mandolin and harmonica, flubbing a little here and there on solos (par for the course). He asked if I knew "Suzanne" ("sort of" was may response), and we went through that and then "SO Long, Maryanne" as per request. Honestly, it was a blast. This is what busking's supposed to be like! Chance meetings. Music no matter what! Woody Guthrie woulda been proud. I think.

Anyway, at some point I introduced myself to Jeff, and him to me. A few songs later he peaced out, but we agreed to meet up again soon and play. It was instant gelling, no denial. I was glad I hadn't wussed out and kept my lip buttoned when I first saw him.

I stuck around for a while and played solo. There were some really nice people who told me I wasn't far from being on American Idol (do they have folk episodes of that? if so, I'd do it), and got an Eric Clapton request. Wish I knew some.

I made pretty good money for only playing around an hour, and I have to say that I musta drank some luckjuice yesterday because I haven't had a day that serendipitous in a long time.

rubbing one out

I put off busking all day for mini projects, both real and necessary, and imaginary and a waste of time. Planning which variety of tea I'll drink next? Yep, I definitely spent a few minutes on that. Restringing mandolin after not changing them since October (purchase date of mandolin)? Slightly more necessary. But 8 strings doesn't equal 8 times the restringing fun. It equals 45 minutes.

Around 1 am on my way home I decided to step off the train and busk. Luckily, my mandolin found its way into my hand (busking with my skin flute has become increasingly difficult in the cold). However, no one found their way into my station, so I hopped back on a train one and a half songs later.

It was good, though. I was feeling musically pent up, and it was good to sonically ejaculate all over the Museum of Natural History murals in the 81st Street subway station, then dart back into the night cackling and counting my zero dollars.

I'm again struck by the fact that I wasn't invited to my five-year high school reunion. I mean, do these people READ THIS BLOG?!

Erroneous Rock

This is a random post no matter how you look at it, but it's especially random when you consider that I haven't updated this site since June of 2008, and then only to write an ode to Weezer/my dog.

I was away in CT for a few months this fall doing theater and writing a bunch, and I've busked from time to time since then but haven't felt the need to blog about any of it. A feeling of same old, same old kept me away I guess.

But no more!

Here's a new song that's a collaboration between my buddy Jeb Heil and myself. He wrote the lyrics, I wrote the music (earlier tonight, actually). It's a little haphazard and a lot ugly, but I've been wanting to make something careening and unsightly. My part was written in about fifteen minutes, so I'm not gonna judge it too much.



butterflies, butterflies
beautiful butterflies
chocolate covered and bite sized
a pound of them is the grand prize

skinny men and fat women
walk around holding hands
do they love each other?
well i guess they do, but don't we all?

oh i guess we don't (x4)

advertise, advertise
subliminal advertise
sell you looney tunes neckties
hold back my desire to modernize

shit water, piss water
we'll put through this machine
and we'll drink it
will it make us sick?
well i guess it will, but aren't we all?

oh i guess we are (x4)

seeing red

On this, the most glorious eve of Weezer's latest release, I turn my gaze back to my favorite band's body of work, which has both inspired and enraged me through the years.

You see, my dog died recently. Yogi really was this man's best friend, and she represented both stormy times and painfully new and bright times in the last 12 years of my life. She came to as a present in Christmas of 1996. "A boy should have a dog," I remember my mom saying. We'd picked her out a few months earlier from an accomplished Basset breeder who lived up a precariously steep and muddy hill, akin to the Grinch's peak. At the time, Yogi was too young to leave her own mother, so mine assured me that my present would be present by February. And indeed she was. I remember marveling at how huge and cumbersome her paws and ears were (they seemed to remain at that size while the rest of her struggled to catch up to their advanced growth), and the white question mark etched in her fur, just above her tail. She was beautiful. And mine. The first thing I'd ever had that required responsibility. And certainly the only thing I've ever had that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility.

I had moved to North Carolina a few months before from Ohio in the wake of my parents' divorce. I've been told that I use the word "miserable" to describe far too many things in life, but I can't quite think of any other term for how I felt then. My dad was half a world away. My friends were that same distance (and later further, when some of them left Ohio, ensuring that no matter how much we said we would, we'd never meet again). I was in a hick town that didn't know culture from q-tips. On top of everything, I had no idea how to express any of the things I was feeling. My brain was throbbing in a hot bath, stoked by my tear ducts, and my mouth had all but sank away into a third cheekbone. Part of me shut down in those days.

As the school year began and I slowly made friends, Yogi was the one constant, however new she was, that kept me anchored and focused. I was never as nice as I could have been (she may have been scolded a bit too harshly for messing in the house a few times, or kept out from underfoot by being locked up in her kennel too often during that first year), but I can scarcely think of any relationship I've had that came close to how much we loved each other. This is good, because I was socially (miserable) during high school. Girls hated me, I confounded myself with how I behaved around them, and my friends were all in the same boat. I needed someone to confide in and be myself around. Yogi was the perfect listener.

I didn't know much about music during the first half of high school, a fact which I lament to this day. However, towards high school's end, I'd picked up quite an eclectic taste of music, ranging from progressive rock to trance, from musical theater to japanese pop. I began writing music and discovering how to externalize the sordid soup of emotions I felt internally. It was my own little renaissance, peaked by my discoveries of Devo, They Might Be Giants, the Flaming Lips, and others.

Finally, as graduation loomed, my best friend Funk spoke of a band he'd mentioned before, only this time I listened to him. They hadn't had an album in 5 years (for a contemporary band, I knew this made them practically off the map of the known universe), but a supposedly triumphant return was to come soon. He loaned me their first two albums so I could try 'em out, presumably in hopes that I'd take to them and be psyched and prepared for their third.

Maybe it was the carefreeness of those last remaining days of high school...feeling those few surviving responsibilities and ties slip away before a summer of assured debauchery and cavorting settled in (seemingly for good). Maybe it was my growing understanding of what makes music good, and what I most enjoy from it. Whatever it was, when I heard the Blue Album and Pinkerton, my mind dug its teeth into the heart of Weezer and never let go; I'd found my soulmate.

Here, in this music, were melodies that paled everything else. Here was emotion that would have blown my heart's mind if I'd heard it two years earlier! Here I was both rocking out and emoting like a loser because I was finally realizing that those aren't mutually exclusive concepts! These guys wrote about Dungeons & Dragons and being an outcast as well as talking like they were King Shit but still admitting that there was no hope for them to ever find a woman. They wrote melodies that sounded like they broke straight through the roof of my little split-level NC home, and built layers of burning guitars that felt like they scorched miles and miles of land in a radius around my stereo. I was alone, in a broken home, listening to music that felt more like it came from me than from 4 guys named Rivers, Matt, Pat, and Brian.

Yogi was in my car recently thereafter for a second listen (coulda been the first, but I'm doubtful). Following the breakup I went through right around the same time, Weezer began to represent my heartache and I found myself writing more and more, and wanting more and more to express all the guts that were swirling around inside me. And Yogi was there.

When the Green Album was released, summer was just beginning. Funk and I whisked around parking lots in our cars, blaring "Don't Let Go" as if it was just as good as "Why Bother," though I think deep down, we knew it wasn't. Yogi was there, in the back seat, slobbering on my window and getting knocked off balance when I made a turn too sharply, and listening along (albeit perhaps begrudgingly).

Then college. Maladroit came out at the end of my first year in Boston, and I was on cloud 9. When I went home for the summer, Yogi and I spent even more time together than usual, the weight of all those lonely months crunching us closer when we were finally together. We swam together in the river off the field in my neighborhood, and spent daylight hours chilling out at home while I waited to go to my dreaded night shift at the axel factory (4 pm - midnight). My friends all worked other jobs that had decent, human hours, so we rarely brushed shoulders. When I switched to the morning overtime shift at the Volvo plant (6 am - 4 pm), I was too tired to see my friends, so Yogi would curl up beside me on the futon as I drifted off to sleep. In the few waking hours I had at home, we would play together and I'd ceaselessly excavate the internet for Weezer videos and interviews from their heyday, as well as download bootlegged tracks and outtakes from their more recent work.

Around this time, I realized that my thing with Weezer was never going away, and that it was so strong an attachment that it made me sad...someday, Weezer would cease to make music, or otherwise cease to exist in some form. Their music had had such a profound effect on me that I couldn't bear to imagine what it would be like to know that there would never be anymore of it.

Bookending things as they seem wont to do, Weezer released Make Believe around the time I graduated from Emerson. I remember joyfully drinking in "Perfect Situation" and "Hold Me," and having rabid conversations with Funk and my friend Matt about how much better this was than anything on Maladroit. I had recently begun seeing a girl named Molly, and I distinctly remember cleaning my apartment before she came over, "Haunt You Every Day" thundering all the while. I brought the CD home with me to North Carolina when she came to visit, and we spent several afternoons taking Yogi around Hendersonville with Make Believe serving as a soundtrack. It was all too brief, however, as I had to stay in Boston for the summer to make money before beginning Urinetown and the impending move to New York. We had a few days with Yogi.

Rivers released his solo album of home recordings just in time for Christmas this year. I flew home Christmas Eve (Work not being very understanding about granting time off for this particular holiday), and left the morning after Christmas. It was my shortest trip home yet, and therefore my shortest stint with Yogi. My 12-year old Christmas Present, though as beautiful as she was all those years ago, was visibly old, and, I think, visibly sad that I was not around for long. We spent as much time together as I could manage, and I even put off listening to River's album until I got back to NYC. I sometimes regret that...I think she should have liked, "Superfriend," most of all.

When Weezer released the "Pork and Beans" single two months ago, my mind very nearly suffered a cardiac arrest all over again. It was a single that harkened back to everything I loved about Weezer's golden age...a beautiful melody, blistering guitars, hilariously goofy but sincere lyrics, and a general mood that doesn't match anything else on the radio. I called my friends immediately to see if they'd heard it, and followed up with each pre-album single release they had. When the Red Album was officially announced (and pushed forward), I freaked out. All I wanted to do was have it in my hands, feel the jewel case...read the liner notes and the lyrics..and cruise around North Carolina listening to the album, a cream soda in my hand, and Yogi in the passenger seat, her ears flailing out the lowered window like muddy comets.

But I got the call from my mom on wednesday. Geez, almost a week ago. My family's out of town in Europe. Yogi's cancer seemed to accelerate overnight. The kennel owners tried getting her to the vet's to put her down. She didn't even make it in time.

Yogi died without me there. Without me telling her how much she meant to me, how much I care about her, and how good a dog she'd been. Without me singing, "Longtime Sunshine," a song we found together, to her. She died. And she died alone.

The days immediately afterward were a dark blur. I was so overcome with guilt that I rapidly descended a path of depression that I knew wasn't called for, but that didn't steer me off it. Yogi was gone. My connection to overcoming those 12 years of pain, awkwardness, loneliness, as well as my tether to the good times, was gone. I was cut loose, lost in some frothy sea that bore no resemblance to the waters I'd been sailing only hours before. North Carolina began to sound less like my home. Everything began to sound less like my home.

Then I thought back to Pinkerton. Nothing comes close to the way I feel about that album...I don't think there's anything more cathartic or perfectly crafted than Pinkerton, and the fact that this type of music has since been absent in Weezer's output has made me depressed, no joke. But just because it hasn't continued doesn't mean it's gone. And even if Weezer dies off, or becomes a poppy abomination that no self-respecting Morrison or his dog would listen to, their older music is still alive. It really is. When I listen to the "god damn" mental breakdown of "Across the Sea," I feel just as anguished yet full of hope as I did when I first heard it in 2001. And although I wish I had discovered Weezer sooner, it doesn't matter when I came into my own with them. It's music. It behaves the same if I listen to it ten years ago or tomorrow. It's unconditional. It's me who isn't built that way.

But I did come to treat Yogi better. She was the best friend I'll ever have, and nothing can take that away. Even when her dogbowl is thrown away, and when we take down the length of red zipline she ran along, and when the last bit of her remaining fur is swept away; when all the last traces have been erased of the first thing I had that required responsibility and that loved me no matter how badly I attended to that responsibility; when all that's gone, she won't be. I love Yogi, and she loves me. She knows how much she meant to me; I could see that even in our brief moments together this past Christmas. She was loved, and she recognized me as clearly as the long, wet nose that hung down below her brown eyes. She represented a huge chunk of my life, and just because she's left doesn't mean my connection to those days is gone. At midnight, when the Red Album downloads into my computer, she'll be right beside me listening to it. I don't feel silly saying that...it's just the way it is. I can't imagine it any other way.

Life is a mystery, as the question mark by her tail suggested way back when. But she wasn't. She was beautiful. She was my friend. The mystery is what did I do to deserve such a present?

"I've got your letter,
you've got my song."