The Buskers Blog

The Buskers, Inlet, NY, 7/25/09. A couple of hours to kill before the show, so we climbed a hill.  Then we cooled off in the lake  just a few yards from where we were to play. Love those Adirondacks. fyi that's drummer Kyle Tupper holding on to the big stick.  You know how drummers are.

Gear Talk: A Keyboard Player Kvetches

I done wore out another keyboard. I just had several keys replaced (on a Yamaha P-120) because they had tiny cracks at the back and were getting stuck in performance. A $130  repair.  And now I have another broken key. And the thing needs a new power supply.  On the last tour with The Buskers, it was only on a wing and a prayer we could get it working (generally minutes before we were scheduled to begin playing), and I'd set it down as gingerly as an IED.  The area on the stage around it became a holy no-go zone for the entire band lest anyone should bump it.  It’s not like I didn’t call every music store in the area looking for one, but the P120, being almost five years old, is hopelessly out of date, discontinued, forget-about-it.  The power supply would have to be shipped from Japan. Which reminds me, I left the music stand at a gig in May.  I think they threw it away.  Replacement cost? $74 for a piece of Plexiglas and metal.

So I did what I had to do and bought a new one while on vacation last week, because I had a gig looming the day we got back.  btw: the folks at Mainely Music in Ellsworth, Maine were very good to me, both price and service.

Bur here’s my complaint: keyboards, being complex digital electronic circuit boards and many moving parts, wear out and have to be replaced like expensive-ass refrigerators (and they’re just about as heavy, I could add, but that’s another whine).   WHEREAS guitar players just add to their collection or get the damn thing repaired until it has the patina of age and its value goes up tenfold.  It’s not fair.  I don’t get paid any more for playing the most money-consuming instruments (and heaviest, I might add, but I’ll leave that alone for now).

The thing is, I really wanted a new guitar this summer—saved up some money, asked for money for my birthday presents, and now—I had to blow it all—and more besides--on a refrigerator, so to speak.

And here’s the part that hurts the most—I don’t even like my keyboards very much.  I appreciate them, how far the technology has come in my playing lifetime, how much lighter they’re becoming, but all I ever want to play is a Steinway grand, a Hammond B3, and a Fender Rhodes (OK, let’s throw in a funky Clavinette, too). 

So shouldn't I be able to buy that little 16” archtop guitar with the P-90 pickup as a consolation prize?

August 1

A beautiful sunny day.  Played the engagement party for a former student this afternoon, in a new trio combo w/ Paul Hubert (on his Gibson ES 135) and Don Wood on drums. Nice chillin’ roadhouse roots feel.  Highlights: when the groom’s family arrived, they processed formally into the tent carrying traditional Vietnamese gifts, first and foremost among which was a roast suckling pig; and after the gig was over, after I’d said hi to some old friends and goodbye to the bride-to-be,  after streaming with perspiration I finished loading up the car, I changed into swim trunks and joined some  guests for a swim in the lake.  I let the mother of the bride know that in the future I will attach a rider to all contracts indicating that whoever hires us "shall provide a swim in a suitably clean and refreshing lake directly after the performance."  With late afternoon sun shining over the hills to the West.

btw: Don Wood will be playing the next two Buskers gigs with us, August 14th & 15th in Meredith and N. Woodstock, NH, respectively.  No lake swim on either of those, but KZ will be playing violin, so it's not a deal breaker.

Highlight of Recent Mini-Tour: The Moon & River Café

 

Schenectady, New York.  11 pm.  Bleary from the evening’s gig, toting gear back and forth to the car, long hours of driving and reading maps, I show up at your wide-open, morning-glory-covered door and it's clear I’ve come home—Richard’s Home For Wayfaring (Wayward?) Musicians, better known as The Moon and River Café.  “Free music in a safe, comfortable and positive atmosphere.”

Back when Kathy contacted owner/manager Richard Genest, looking for somewhere in upstate New York to play last Friday, I guess he had already booked two singer/songwriters for the night, but he generously made room for us too, and we all shared the evening and the kitty.  The brethren of musicians. With Kyle Tupper touring with us on drums, we had the whole shebang to fit into the tiny stage area, but except for KZ’s bow nailing a patron or two-- she was practically sitting in their lap, we pulled it off, and what an audience to sit in the lap of! 

You don’t get a roomful of appreciative listeners at every venue.  We do a fair amount of summer town bandstand gigs, where the audience is spread out in lawn chairs over a huge area at a safe distance from the stage.  You can’t blame them; most bands are trigger-happy with the volume of their P.A. systems. And there are endless distractions—motorcycles going by, kids playing in front of the stage, airplanes, motorboats, people going around collecting donations etc.  It’s really more like [actual] busking, where you have to invest much of your creative energy into grabbing and keeping their attention.  Or a circus.  But the Moon & River was like a house concert for friends.  Friends we made that night. Or better yet, family.

So thank you, Richard.  We look forward to returning. Lots more music we want to play for you and your family.

Guestbook Now Up & Running

Next time you stop by thebuskers.com, come say hi on our new guestbook page.
[courtesy of our webmaster Hanz Busch.]

Also: somehow most of the contents of our tour page temporarily went missing. The dates are all back on and we hope to see you at one of them.

Our Age Is Showing

New drummer with The Buskers on some of our NYS shows: Kyle Tupper, a third year undergrad at Crane School of Music, a freelance player much in demand in Northern New York.  Now I know why.  He played great at our first gig together in Westport, NY.  

But there is one problem. When we all introduced ourselves to the woman who hired us, she asked if Kyle was Paul’s or my son.  Ouch.  Our age is showing.

As if that wasn’t chafing enough, last night The Groovemakers are playing a gig at a bar in Nashua, NH. Paul Bourgelais and I are setting up our carloads of gear and here comes our drummer Don Wood with an entourage —his pretty wife Kelly on one side and her pretty friend on his other, each roadying a big bag of drum gear.  In fact, every gig Don has played with me, Kelly has roadied for him.  But two assistants?!

This was a slap in the face.  But it gets worse: at the end of the night—five minutes to midnight; we’re playing our last tune.  Kelly and friend get up and leave the bar together as if on cue—to fetch the drum cases from the car so the minute we finish they can help Don pack his shit up again.  Is this fair? 

I mentioned this to my own pretty wife this morning. Her typically level response was to ask how old I thought Don & Kelly are (he’s 28, according to his Facebook profile), then say, because it explains everything: “They’re young.”

Espresso Pit Stops In the Green Mountains*

(*Not to be confused with “Green Mountain Coffee,” that ubiquitous, stale mass-produced brand of coffee. Yes. I’m a confessed coffee snob. see below)

Because it’s about midway between the NH Buskers (Paul & I) and KZ (Middle of Nowhere, Northern NY), we’ve been pursuing gigs along the corridor between Burlington and Albany, from Lake Champlain to the Hudson; and though the venue pickings may be slim, the drives are bee-you-tee-ful.  But where to stop for great coffee?

Yesterday, on the drive home from a gig in Westport, NY across the very green Green Mountains, Paul & I made our pit stop at Seasoned Books & Bakery in Rochester, VT.   The cappuccino was not so good: watery espresso, no crema (I stopped at three shots, as the price of the coffee climbed shot by shot), but sun tea was brewing on the porch rail, wi-fi browsers sat at every table, and the classic incandescently friendly Vermont girl behind the counter had just brought out a tray of chewy sesame and peanut bricks which she mesmerized me into trying, and they were delicious. And unbidden, she threw in a big piece of broken cookie to sweeten the deal.  

Driving Route 4 across central VT still gives me goose bumps—an almost physical nostalgia for the days when I attended the Woodstock Country School (yes, and lived in a wigwam).  In Woodstock itself, old Phylus and Pumpkin House Natural Foods may be long gone, but Bentleys bar & restaurant is still there--I’ve even played there a few times, and Woodstock Coffee & Tea has the finest espresso drinks I’ve found in the whole region.  I give their coffee and baristas the highest recommendation.

Next time I’ll have to try one of the coffee places I saw in Middlebury.  Any recommendations?

Woodstock Coffee & Tea

 

Newport, Rhode Island 6/24/09

And Now For Something Completely Different

Hey, Booboo, you want to steal some pick-a-nick baskets? Just in case you didn't take my last entry [all pseudo-scholarly] with the necessary grain of salt, you should know I'm subbing on keyboards with Lisa Young & Company tomorrow night--rock and roll at Jellystone Campground, Ashland, NH.  It's biker week, so the natives will be restless. See you there.

Excerpt From "Barking Dogs and Howling Wolves: Recurrent Motifs In the Lyrics of The Buskers"

Barking Dogs and Howling Wolves: Recurrent Motifs In the Lyrics of The Buskers; A Critical Analysis, by Gregory J. Reynolds [Excerpt reprinted below, by permission, from Eidetic Muse, Volume V, May issue, copyright 2009. Song excerpts reprinted by permission.

The earliest canine image is a passing reference in “So Dark Out There Sometimes,” from the band’s eponymous debut effort, released in 1999.  The lyric, written in the third person, is a series of narrative snapshots of an adolescent girl at risk.  The dog reference appears in the opening verse:

    She says she’s leavin’
    Her future’s double-parked outside
    She says she’s leavin’
    Dog barks and barks but no one seems to mind
    TV’s up too loud besides
    Kid sister says she pulls this all the time.

The narrator remains coolly observant throughout the song, until it reaches its emotional climax in the bridge, wherein more of the family drama is revealed through the introduction of dialogue, used here as the voice of the girl's mother: 

    Mom says don’t forget a good education
    Is one thing you’d have forever
    besides that tattoo
    Hand me my cigarettes, she says
    you’ve got to be patient
    Or you’ll end up with someone like daddy
    And a kid that’s just like you.

Is the use of the third person voice and choice of female protagonist a subconscious act of self-distancing or simply an effort to create “street credentials?”  The socio-economic background of the lyricist, Craig Jaster, is indeed inconsistent with the morbidly dysfunctional domestic environment portrayed in the song, but it is our contention that former studies have neglected to take fully into account the impact of Jaster’s experience as an educator; his choice of subject and grim socio-economic outlook here are an empathic channeling of the cultural milieu in which he has lived and worked since his move from New York City to rural New Hampshire in 1987, six years before he founded The Buskers with Kathy Zimpfer and Richard Danahy. 

High school dropout rates from the period of the song’s composition are in keeping with the challenges faced by the presumably fictional young woman depicted in the song.  In the year 2000 (one year after the song’s copyright), the dropout rate from the public high school in a former mill town close to the composer/lyricist’s domicile was over 15%, with an estimated cumulative rate (ECR) of 50%. However, for the issue of teenage pregnancy, hinted at in the lyric, “Her future’s gotten too big to ignore, but who can blame her for trying?,” we have no meaningful statistical data to reinforce our theory: in 2000 New Hampshire ranked 48th in the nation for teen pregnancy.

We detect a developing interest in the barking dog sound/image in “Will You Come And Meet Me?,” from The Buskers' second album. "Ray’s Vacation," released in 2004.  Originally written for an as-yet-unpublished play Jaster wrote and produced with young actors, the song was originally sung by a female protagonist to the accompaniment of a harmonium drone. On the album, Jaster himself sings.  In this iteration the dog is part of a scenario borrowed as much from Hindu mythology as small town New Hampshire life.

    I stand outside your courtyard
    And tap against your gate
    The stars above keep silent
    And I am so afraid
    The dogs will all start barking
    and I’ll be caught here in my shame
    but everyone is sleeping
    only You’re awake
    oh, will You come and meet me
    or will You make me wait?

The intensity of longing expressed above, paired with the image of a courtyard and gate, clearly reference Jaster’s association with the mystic Saint Ajaib Singh Ji of Rajasthan, India.  Jaster made two visits to Singh’s ashram in India (1982 and 1989), and Singh, who died in 1997, was himself a composer of hundreds of devotional songs dedicated to his own spiritual teacher Sant Kirpal Singh Ji Maharaj of Delhi, India.

In moving from the omniscient third person narration of “So Dark Out There Sometimes” to first person direct address, Jaster is clearly putting himself in a more vulnerable position, no less so for singing a lyric he originally wrote to be sung by a woman.  In this instance the barking dogs perhaps indicate the face of public shame and humiliation. But what shaming does the author/narrator fear? Criticism for his connection with an Indian guru?   It is entirely more likely that the author is referencing the ‘fallen’ human condition itself, given that in the printed lyric Jaster capitalizes the word “You” - clear, unequivocal evidence of intentional reference to the Deity.  

The third and most emphatic iteration of the barking dog theme in The Buskers oeuvre is found throughout the aptly titled, “You Dog, You Devil,” from “Spank That Tambourine,” which was released in May, 2009.  Once again, Jaster is working within a variation on the minor key blues format.  What is perhaps most notable here is the shift from indirection (as expressed through the third person voice in “So Dark Out There Sometimes”) and personal confession: (Will You Come And Meet Me?) to a confrontational modality in which the singer directly addresses the “dog.”

Here the use of repetition—the title phrase “You Dog, You Devil” is sung no less than seven times—and a rising action of potential violence combine to intentionally discomfort the hearer.  In the first verse the “dog” is “like a pebble in my shoe, like a bad tattoo.”  The second verse begins,

    You dog, you devil
    Stop nipping at my heels
    I thought we had a deal
    but I should have known better

The tension is increased dramatically in the chorus with the introduction of that potent symbol of violence, a gun:

    When you pulled out a pistol
    And waved it around in my face
    I thought I was toast
    The gun wasn’t loaded but how could I know
    That was just your idea of a joke

Jaster is returning to the same emotional territory depicted ten years earlier in “So Dark Out There Sometimes,” but here he is upping the emotional ante, shifting the focus from a third-person portrait to a personal confrontation as by adding the iconic pistol.  If we apply the linear analysis of chronological development, the older Jaster is no longer satisfied attempting to objectify or distance himself by placing the barking dogs into another’s “fictional” narrative or by placing them poetically in the distance, but is here determined to address them directly.

    You can howl all night if you like
    But outside’s where you’re gonna stay
    And you’ll come when I whistle some day
    You dog, you devil, you’ll come when I whistle
    some day

The dog which “no one seemed to mind” when it barked ten years ago in “So Dark Out There Sometimes” now has the composer/lyricist warning,  “be careful what you say/ for it might come back and bite you some day.”

In a rare interview given after the release of “Spank That Tambourine,” (NHPR, 5/3/09), Jaster explained,

"I don’t have any enemies in this world.  I’m really just talking to myself [in the song]…even then the   toughest thing I say is, ‘you have to stay outside,’ and ‘you’ll come when I whistle some day.’ That’s just discipline.  I don’t know about yours, but my mind is no lapdog.  It’s more like a bull mastiff, always running away with me if I let it."