Happy birthday to our friends Phil Morrison and Bob Lawton. Regular readers of these posts won’t need to be reminded that Phil directed most of our music videos and Bob booked our shows from . . . when did Bob become our agent . . . late ’86? until 2003. On this day in perhaps 1989, the band Double Dynamite–fronted by Phil, Bob on drums, me on guitar, and Greg Kendall on bass–had both our first show and our first rehearsal, opening for Big Dipper at Maxwell’s. [UPDATE: Now that I think of it, we opened for Dumptruck.] If I’m right about the year of our debut, then we’ve been together for 25 years without a personnel change and, at the risk of immodesty, every one of our performances has been better than the one before. (Admittedly, there have only been five, most recently in 2004.) No one who saw it could possibly forget our set-concluding “O-o-h Child” at Merge 15, Phil bearing his soul and much of his anatomy. But forced to choose one, my particular favorite moment would be at Under Acme when Bob, having fought “New York Groove” and “Baby Strange” to a draw, effortlessly nailed the drum fill at the end of “Young Americans.” Here I go, bragging again, but no less than Hyped to Death considered our lone 45 “Hero Takes a Fall” so successful, they called it excellent, not once but twice.
