Author: Ira

Our U.S. tour with Run On is a little slow out of the gate, 19 years ago today.  New soundman Mick Learn has come highly recommend, though if we’ve ever met, it was only in passing while we were playing his home town of Portland, Oregon.  When he’s late for soundcheck at the Grog Shop in Cleveland,  we call him for his ETA and find out he thinks the tour begins tomorrow.  Fortunately for all concerned, he’s visiting relatives nearby.  We welcome Rick Brown by encoring with “Let’s Compromise,” by one of his old bands, Information.

For the last three days of our 2003 tour with the Aislers Set, the Sun Ra Arkestra are added to the lineup, starting on this day in D.C. at the 9:30 Club, and we mark the occasion by adding another Sun Ra song to our repertoire: “Somebody’s in Love.”  The next year, the latest installment of our swing state tour features another world premiere.  Jon Benjamin and Jon Glaser arrive at Asheville’s Orange Peel and teach us the song they wrote en route.  Sung to the tune of “I’m Your Puppet” (which we’d played the night before in Charlotte, Jon and Jon’s opening night), “PT Cruiser” is a touching tribute to their beloved rental car, and maybe I’m biased, but I’d say it’s way stronger than this one or this one.

On this date in 1993, Half Japanese headlined the original Knitting Factory on Houston Street, but the big news was that David Fair would be joining Jad, for the first time in years.  When we were invited to be on the bill, we couldn’t say yes fast enough.  We opted to perform in our Sleeping Pill guise–James and Georgia on drums, some live loops and a tape collage.  I was all set to play maracas, but then I remembered there was a perfect percussion instrument sitting in the trunk of our station wagon: Our muffler had recently fallen off and for some reason I hadn’t just thrown it away.  Now I knew why.  Do you see where this is going?  As I beat my hands to a pulp pounding as hard as I could on that big metal contraption, trying in vain to get any sound out of it, it slowly dawned on me why it was called a muffler.  Oh well, at least it weighed a ton.  Working out much better was our horn section.  We lined up Chris Nelson on trombone, Phast Phreddie Patterson on the C melody saxophone, and Lars Espensen on tenor sax to parade around the audience, taking the music to the people, as it were.  (Lars would subsequently report that he’d played the theme to Car 54 Where Are You nonstop.)

One of our best experiences of 2000 was getting to know and work with Neil Innes, some 25 years after becoming a fairly rabid fan.  It remains a vivid memory of high school hearing “The Intro and the Outro” for the first time, so vivid in fact that I mistakenly assumed mine to be a universal rite of passage.  We had the idea to invite Neil to the U.S. to play a few shows, backed by us, and on this date in 2001 we performed the second (and penultimate) one, in Cambridge at the House of Blues (a location considerably less, shall we say, House of Blues-y than your average establishment bearing that name, and one that unsurprisingly has closed).  Our repertoire comprised a wide range of Bonzo Dog Band, Rutles, and more recent material–Neil even agreed to “Piggy Bank Love” despite it turning out that he’s not the singer on Gorilla (James and I sang it instead).  And now for something completely different, in both 2006 and 2009, we found ourselves on the First Avenue stage in Minneapolis, providing a little local color with Bob Dylan’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” (aided by Why?) at the former show, and the Gestures’ “Run Run Run” (all by ourselves) at the latter.

Another memorable swing state show on this date in 2004, in Knoxville, maybe too memorable.  David Kilgour and Lambchop’s Paul Niehaus, William Tyler and Deanna Varagona are holdovers from the previous night, and we welcome back Sue Garner, in addition to Rick Brown’s lone appearance of the tour.  Nevertheless, we have a rough time making a connection with the audience, and then it gets worse when someone throws a drink at Todd Barry during his first set.  The mood onstage is dark and I stop “Behind That Locked Door” to propose that the audience either shut up or leave, adding that I don’t care which one they choose.  A couple of songs later, we perform a particularly ferocious “From a Motel 6” which morphs into “Point That Thing Somewhere Else,” after which Todd returns, though it never exactly gets back to normal, even for a tour that is almost never “normal.”  Things also not going according to plan in 1990.  Wilbo Wright gets creamed by turnpike traffic and is so late to our in-store at Pier Platters that Georgia and I end up doing it as a duo.  We stick to the script in 2005 at Emo’s in Austin.  Jad Fair opens the show, and joins us for six songs, including local favorite “Fire Engine.”

You don’t have to have seen us bring Roy Loney up for an impromptu “Slow Death” Friday at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in San Francisco to know of our fondness for the city-specific.  Over the years on this date, we squeezed six members of Lambchop onto the stage at the Mercy Lounge in Nashville during the 2004 swing state tour and we covered the Electric Eels in Cleveland in 2009.  More local guests: Tara Key at the Knitting Factory in NYC in 1991 and Rick Rizzo at the Vic in Chicago in 2006 (he was nearly deafened when he stepped on a fuzzbox turned way way up).  And at a 1990 in-store at Olsson’s in D.C., touring Fakebook, while Georgia and Wilbo Wright lay down a groove, Kevin Salem pulls a copy of Henry Rollins’s Pissing in the Gene Pool off the shelf and declaims a few excerpts.