I used to play in a Happy Hour band that played Stump the Band with the audience. We had to stop when Massachusetts made Happy Hour illegal. No, really, that happened. My life is one long list of vocations, jobs, life callings, and hobbies that were made illegal. If I were smart, I would have started out doing illegal things right from the get-go. Illegal pays better.
Anyway, we’d wait for the audience to get some tonsil polish in them to loosen them up a bit, and then I’d drag the microphone out front and start interviewing people like a game show host. If that wasn’t working out — because everyone was too rowdy, or not rowdy enough — we’d play Stump the Band. The drummer would challenge the audience to call out the name of any one-hit wonder band that had had a top ten song in the past thirty years, and we pledged to play a minimum of ten recognizable seconds of it. A lot of times we’d play the whole thing if one of us knew half the words.
People would really, really, really try to stump us, which was a fool’s errand. We were pros, and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, or Cannibal and the Headhunters held no terrors for us. Guys that had giant record collections and tape on their glasses would try to stump us over and over again, but that sucked for everyone. The rest of the audience had no idea what the song was even if we did play it, so we mostly ignored those guys and waited for a pretty girl to yell out TEE SET! or something. Truth be told, we always ignored guys for any number of reasons, and no girl ever asked for some dirge nobody would recognize. They asked for fun stuff, like THE TEE SET! PLAY THE TEE SETTTT WHOOOOOOOOO!!!!
They always asked for their favorite oldie, something their big sister or their mother listened to when they were little. And without fail, we’d ruin it utterly and forevermore for them by playing it perfectly but mucking around with the lyrics. Once you hear it perfectly wrong, you’ll never hear it right again.
Sing it with me! RALPH BELLAMY, I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU!
My two sons, AKA Unorganized Hancock, are performing tonight in the very first venue they ever appeared at, The Mystic Theater at 49 Franklin Street. It’s right here in town, so it’s convenient, and it’s one of the nicest stages I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of them.
49 Franklin is a function hall on one floor and a performance hall upstairs where the kids will play. It’s a re-purposed church of some sort, not sure what flavor. I was born a damn Papist and I can’t tell those Know-Nothing sects apart. Presbyters or Unitarians; makes no difference to me. They don’t even have incense or candles or anything. What’s the sense of putting money in the plate if they’re not going to put on a show?
The boys are in the Big City newspaper again. The Lewiston Sun Journal, or as my neighbor refers to it as: The Lewiston Sun Urinal. Well, we take our publicity as we find it, and don’t cavil. I have no idea how they found out our sons’ names, but they did. Any mocking references to the Journal have to be accompanied by a caveat that acknowledges that they at least do their job, and find things out and report them, unlike some hoity-toity rags that allegedly publish All The News That’s Fit To Print. Those papers seem decidedly uncurious about a lot of things they report.
The show is being billed in the Journal as “Unorganized Hancock And Others”. Snicker. Reminds me of this:
A
very long time ago, I played in a Happy Hour band on Cape Cod in
Massachusetts in the summertime. We played every weekend at the largest club on
the Cape. Since we were the first act hired every summer, the bar
manager would dutifully go out to the billboard on Rt. 28 and fish
through the mismatched letters he had in a big box and put our name up
there first. When the nationally known acts came through for one-night
stands, he’d add it to the billboard with whatever letters he had left
over. Our band had a lot of words and letters in the name, so he’d
really have to scrounge sometimes.
One of the most
unintentionally funny moments in my entire life was driving up to that
tired old barn of a nightclub, and as the billboard hove into view it
read:
SIPPICAN’S OLD HAPPY HOUR BAND THAT SHALL REMAIN NAMELESS
There appears to be a magical barroom somewhere in Great Britain where you can stumble in on an odd night and find Glenn Tilbrook, along with a motley assortment of other musicians — and some people just dragged out of the audience at random — in the corner, banging away at whatever song comes to mind. Glenn Tilbrook was the driving force behind Squeeze, if the name doesn’t sound familiar.
When I started playing music for money, I more or less stopped going to musical performances. I really couldn’t derive any enjoyment from them, and simply fidgeted until I could bug out early. The only exceptions were performances that were so unlike what I was doing that they didn’t even seem like the same thing. I went to La Boheme with my wife, for instance. That’s another galaxy removed from pop covers in the corner of the pub, so it didn’t count. There’s no way my lizard brain could transmogrify my presence just behind the orchestra pit while How Cold Your Little Hand Is soared overhead into the urge to be facing the other direction and helping out.
Another exception to attending other musicians’ performances was Glenn Tilbrook, although it didn’t start out that way. A fellow musician and friend dragged me to a geriatric music tent in Cape Cod to see Squeeze, and it turned out they’d gone bust and were touring as two buskers instead of a power pop band. It was there that I came to the realization that Glenn Tilbrook is the most talented busker in existence. Every venue on this planet with a liquor license should have entertainment like this in the corner all the time, and never does any more.
I was the worst of the bad musicians I generally played with. But the last bunch I ended up with did entertain people, without exception. Whoever showed up got a show from us. Four people or four thousand, we DID THE SHOW. Glen Tilbrook DOES THE SHOW. It’s nice to see.
That YouTube video is the first time in a long time I’ve seen THE SHOW being performed anywhere. It’s almost exactly the format for what we used to do. None of us were a shadow of the singer or player that Glenn Tilbrook is, but the bones of the thing are there. We’d drag people from the audience, and make them play a note or sing a word, or pretend to sing along, or just dance around with us and have fun. We talked to them, and they to us, and if a pretty girl and her tubby friend said they like Brown-Eyed Girl A LOT, we’d play it two times in a row to make them happy, because what’s the harm?
This is sort of uncanny for me to see:
Twenty years ago, my friend Paul, the stand-up drummer, would halt our show, and mockingly threaten our audience: “If you don’t start dancing, (Sippican) is going to sing Tom Jones!” He’d repeat the threat mordantly from time to time, like reeling in a fish, and then we’d trot it out if things got quiet. Stevie would throw me a wig, and the two guitars and drums would start vamping It’s Not Unusual. There was an ubiquitous TV commercial back then, featuring a bald guy with a muskrat glued to his head, selling weaves or wigs or something, called the Hair Club for Men, with the tag line: “I’m not only the Hair Club president; I’m also a client.”
So then I’d stuff the wig partway down the front of my shirt, and Paul would say that I was not only the President of The Chest Hair Club For Men, I was also a client, and then I’d sing an amusing version of It’s Not Unusual — amusing being the only kind of version of it I could sing, because I never could sing, really — and when we’d come to a hard pause at the end of each line, I’d bow my head like some exhausted Fat Elvis while running my fingers suggestively through my nylon chest hair, and wordlessly lever my wrist to point the microphone I was holding towards the audience, and without exception, no matter whether the audience looked like a nursing home or a biker bar, guys and girls, young and old, deaf and dumb, mean or jolly, drunk or sober, labor or management, barfly or barkeep, every manjack of them would roar in unison: BA DA DA DA DA DAHHHHHHH.
It was glorious. I think I improved our approach to the thing when I started stuffing a second wig down the front of my pants for the full Tom Jones effect, but then again, I’m not sure it was possible to improve the effect of the original.
[Editor’s Note: Written two years ago. In the interest of verifying “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is,” one cannot help but notice the author and his family moved into a somewhat larger version of this shed one year ago. Reposted with comments intact, as they are so trenchant.]
[Author’s Note: There is no editor, and there are a lot more squirrels and bees in my house than in that shed.]
Here it comes: I would rather live in this shed than in your house.
Click on the picture. It’s a very high resolution shot. Look at it. It’s beautiful.
I’m generalizing, of course. It’s possible that I’m not referring to you. But there are so few of you that are exceptions to my impertinence that I simply say it matter-of-fact-like: Your house has no soul. It’s got no anima. It’s a misshapen plastic lump dedicated to the exaltation of your car and your television. It is the bastid love child of a realtor with the taste of a vegas hooker and a contractor with a prominent eyebrow ridge.
It makes you unhappy. You don’t know that, because many of the ways it does that are subtle. Paying for the damn thing, though it brings you little pleasure, is not so subtle.
I do listen to people a little in these matters. I watch them a lot. And what they do about their house cancels out what they say about their house every time.
You tell me that absolute neatness is paramount. Then I see you camping out in one little corner of your house in a midden of messy but prized possessions.
You tell me you want to luxuriate in a whirlpool while reading poetry with candles next to an open window. Then I see you showering in a hurry in a room with all the shades drawn. The spiders like your jacuzzi, so it’s not going to waste, exactly.
You tell me that you like your television over the mantel in the living room. I see you turning one room after another into a “den”, then eventually building additional rooms, trying to make a comfortable place to look at a screen. I call your living room the “Furniture Mausoleum” when you’re not around. Sorry.
You tell me how much money and effort you’ve spent to make your home perfect. Then I watch you leave it, gladly, on any provocation. You can’t wait to escape your homemade Colditz.
You’ve explained to me in some detail that under no circumstances should you be expected to pay any attention to the maintenance of your house. If a material can deteriorate in any way, and so require the touch of a hand, it’s verboten. So you flee your vinyl house for a vacation in Tuscany and wish your house had soul like the one with grime from the 17th century still visible in its stucco.
You spent $35,000 on windows, and then boarded them up with blinds and drapes because they don’t look at anything.
No stranger can ever find anything in your kitchen without asking, or find a bathroom.
The sun doesn’t shine in your windows, except in your eye when you’re trying to sleep.
It’s impossible for guests to sleep comfortably at your house, though it covers 3500 square feet and is two stories high.
You can’t prepare actual meals from raw materials in your kitchen.
You feel isolated but have no privacy.
You exit and enter your house every day by bumping into a trash can in an unlit warehouse for your car. Your dog wouldn’t.
There are birds in your yard and you’ve never seen them.
You tell me all the live-long day you adore your house, but when your mortgage is ten cents more than your Zillow estimate you mail the keys back to the bank.
It may just be that my idea of what a house should be is dead. I have to respect other people’s opinions, after all, especially about their own affairs. I might tell people they shouldn’t do things, but I’m not interesting in telling people they can’t do things. I mostly try to dwell on the positive in these matters, but if my opinions about housing were unleashed, I’d make Gordon Ramsey look circumspect in comparison. In a way, my cottage furniture business is a rearguard attack in this regard. I’m trying to save the entire stock of housing in America one end table at a time. Big job. It would be unwise to bet on me. But it’s always unwise to bet against me, too. I sense that many are dissatisfied with their abodes now but are confused about the genesis of the feeling.
I’ve watched the “Let’s Wander the Earth with a Floozy Realtor and Choose Between Three Tawdry Split-Level Houses” show with my wife, and my advice to all the prospective homebuyers is the same. I yell at the screen: nuke all of them from orbit, and maybe you can make something pleasant out of the hole.
(If you’re just stumbling in, it’s Chatham, Massachusetts I’m referring to.)
(It’s on Cape Cod, which is only technically Massachusetts. Live over the bridge and you’re a different sort of person altogether.)
(If you drive through Chatham at dusk, you can often see foxes trotting right down the middle of the road. Scarlet jacket optional.)
(Half Cape with wart and pickets, garnished with arbor vitae and served with sea air reduction.)
( It says here in my Archy Tecter fer Dummies book that someone called Italian Nate musta lived here, along with a Greek feller. It’s a Mediterranean thing: you wouldn’t understand.)
(I don’t know who lives here, but they have more money than me. And you. And you and me. And you, you, and you, and me and you. And you over there and me.)
Tag: cape cod
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments