That’s Shane Valentine on the piano, Todd Kassens on the bass, Barney Batista on clarinet, Rob Toy on trombone, and Tony Nozero (of Drums and Tuba) on drums, except for “Timeflies” where we have Mike Legget. We practiced every week for six months, played one show, and then Tony quit the band and I was so broken up over it that I gave up music for a few years and devoted myself to poker.
I don’t blame him, though. Six months of practice for one show? Good Lord.
These are rehearsal recordings, and it’s very unlikely that I’ll ever record these songs again, so I offer them here as the only concrete evidence that they existed at all. Enjoy.
(NOTE: The sole surviving studio recording of the band is posted here.)
We were a four-piece, with Jeremy Bruch on drums, Michael Hoffer on tuba, and Liz Pappademas on accordion. (I remember when I asked Liz, a pianist, if she played accordion, she answered, “I have an accordion.” That was good enough for me.)
The songs above were recorded live at the Parlor in Austin, Texas, by Adam Holzband, and are available below, along with the studio version of “Expired Texas Plates,” for your enjoyment.
I traveled with my upright bass, guitar, violin, banjo and Boss LoopStation. Yes, I looped back then. I’d set up a simple rhythm by thumping and scratching the body of the bass, or something like that, and then I’d grab the guitar or violin and play along and sing.
I’ve since decided that looping is bourgeois and counter-revolutionary, and I don’t do it anymore, even though I love using words like “bourgeois” and “counter-revolutionary” when talking about effects pedals, or kittens, or anything — I just like those words.
But I digress:
I’ve seen many loopers over the past couple of years, and the thing that began to trouble me is this: Looping is too often a quick and easy substitute for either A) getting a good band together, or B) having the skill and presence to hold the attention of an audience with nothing but an instrument and your voice.
The loop pedal is like Instant Awesome In A Box. It’s too easy. It’s cheating.
Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve seen several acts making remarkable music with loop pedals, including Vicki Brown here in Tucson. But the innovators are, as always, in the tiny minority. Most of the time it just seems like that Mad TV sketch with Stuart Larkin saying “look what I can do.”
So I figure when I can hold a room spellbound with just an instrument and my voice, maybe I get to loop, but until then I’ll just keep practicing and save money on batteries.
Meanwhile, here’s an album’s worth of live recordings made at the Hole In the Wall in Austin, Texas back in 2007. I don’t hate what I did, mind you. In fact, I think it’s pretty good, and I’m glad to have a decent recording of it. I just didn’t want to keep rolling down that path any longer.
I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the man in the house who had the minidisc player going, but I thank him.
Watch it once. That may be enough. I’ve watched it at least one hundred times in the past week. I love it. I love it so much, I want to marry it. It is what I want to be like when I grow up. It is music.
It comes from the BBC show “Top of the Pops.” I don’t know the year. The dancers go by the name of “Pan’s People,” and if you search for more of them, you’ll find the typical early-seventies hootchie mini-skirt ass-shaking stuff we all know and love. But this stands apart as something fun and unusual, and infinitely more attractive.
Watch it more. Watch it again and again. The scenery and the choreography are so full of little bitty things, and the visual direction is so haphazard, that there seems to be no end to the new things you’ll find to look at each time you watch this video. There is no correct focus. There is no firm hand at the tiller. Just look, and look some more.
Yes, the camel is wearing a fez. That’s just the beginning of understanding.
I repeat, this is what I want from music, from life. This is all I want to see when I go out to listen to music. This is the best thing in the world. Why don’t we do this anymore? What happened to us? Was it Bob Dylan? Did he screw all this up for us? With his guitar, and his voice of a generation, his voice of warning?
Up his. He sells underwear now. I want the camels in my music, or bust.
Who is Jeff? I’d like to thank him for uploading this video, but also punch him for using such low resolution.
God, behold the snake. Just look at it.
I will be damned if I ever make a music video less cool than this. And therefore I will be damned, because there is no way to approach this video, coolness-wise. This is the end.
If this video had a finger, again, I would put a ring on it, right this minute. Give me a break.
There is just no end to this video, in terms of things to admire. I cannot duplicate, or even counterfeit, the footwork executed by the camel. It is entirely too fancy.
I hope every woman involved in the making of this film, every one of “Pan’s People,” is happy and well, and fulfilled in life. This video is a mitzvah. End of story.
Along about the Christmas Hellfest of 2001, I was shopping in Borders Books and Music, and I found a CD called Taraf de Haidouks.
I had always thought that I loved Gypsy music, but I had never really heard any. I loved Bizet’s Carmen, but I knew that wasn’t it. I loved an old record I had called Music of Hungary, but I knew that wasn’t it either. I tried to love a lot of stuff that wasn’t it.
But this CD, as I scanned it into the listening station and put on the headphones (Borders is actually pretty cool), was it. It was my musical Nagasaki, where Tom Waits’s Swordfishtrombones had been my Hiroshima ten years previously. It changed everything I knew about music, and it still does. It made me — a Westerner, a rocker, and so on — question the everything I knew about the what and why of making music.
The more obvious aspects of the music — the instrumentation and harmonic structure — I quickly appropriated for my own sound, but the deeper underlying issues of what and why are the parts I’m still exploring. I’m still digging through the rubble. This was the first shove in the direction of the Gadjo Bango sound.
Here they are, the Taraf de Haidouks:
For those of you that don’t play the violin, accordion, cimbalom or upright bass, I should mention that every single thing they’re doing is really, really hard to do.
And again:
And again, with the Kocani Orkestar:
The groups in the above video didn’t share a common language, and they don’t read music. In the original DVD, you get to see the Taraf accordionist teach the horn players the song by pointing to keys on his accordion. It’s really beyond belief.
This music, from this same region in southern Romania, was studied, recorded and rearranged by Bela Bartok, ninety years ago. Later, it was recorded by Alan Lomax. It was rediscovered by Belgian musicologist Laurent Aubert in the eighties, and Johnny Depp, oddly enough, was a big factor in bringing this music to prominence in the nineties.
I’m still dealing with what this music has done to me. In fact, there is doctoral thesis by Gheorghe Ciobanu called “Lautarii din Clejani” which was published in 1970 by the Music Publishing House of Bucharest. I know about it, but I can’t find it. The only copy I know of sits in the library of the University of Bucharest, which I can’t get to very conveniently. If any of you have a copy of it, please send it my way. If it’s in English, that would be nice, but I will learn Romanian for this.
Maybe I’ll learn about the what and the why.
I follow this post with another, entitled “All Along the Way,” which was recorded under the deep, deep spell of this music. Enjoy.
That’s Shane Valentine on the piano, Todd Kassens on the bass, Barney Batista on clarinet, Rob Toy on trombone, and Tony Nozero (of Drums and Tuba) on drums, except for “Timeflies” where we have Mike Legget. We practiced every week for six months, played one show, and then Tony quit the band and I was so broken up over it that I gave up music for a few years and devoted myself to poker.
Of course, there are exceptions. I’ve seen several acts making remarkable music with loop pedals, including