New IO Tunes

We're working on a few new songs with Int'l Orange these days. A couple of them have already made their live debut at our last two shows: "She Can't Stand To Be Alone" and "Long Shot" were my contributions, and Robert brought in "Nude Photography," which is currently undergoing our patented going-over, but it sounded really interesting the first time he played it for us. Also, we're working on a couple of Snuzz tunes, including "Shut Up Singin Bout the End of the World" and "Checking the Damage." It'll be great to rotate in more new material in our upcoming shows. We're heading back to NYC next weekend, and I'm sure we'll play some of them there.

Garrison Keillor's Big Stand

Garrison Keillor, the host of Prarie Home Companion, is usually the kind of guy who makes you think of Norman Rockwell and comforting, conservative America of the 1950's, so it was shocking (and kind of exhilarating) to read this article he wrote recently about the state of U.S. politics. If nothing else, it'll stir up some discussion:

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We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
By Garrison Keillor

Something has gone seriously haywire wth the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned, and there was a degree of plain decency in the country.

Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor. In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach.

The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics...The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy- the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged with fear- fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.

Politics as Unusual

The Old Ceremony is playing two political benefits in the next month or so, one for Democratic Senate candidate (and former Clinton advisor) Erskine Bowles, and one for a general "get out the vote" campaign. This year has been the first time I've felt so strongly about a campaign in my life. I was watching the last one closely (and agonizingly) but this one I actually have been getting off my ass to do something. It just seems to me (and a lot of people I talk to) that this election is absolutely crucial in the future of our country (and the world). I've read so much political history and analysis about Nixon, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton lately, and none of them did anything to approach the destructive and selfishly arrogant policies of this administration. I actually had to stop reading the NY Times every day because I'd get so upset before breakfast that I didn't know what to do with myself. After seeing Farenheit 9-11, I went out and got a stack of voter registration forms and came back to later screenings to register people to vote. I may be imagining it, but it seems like a lot of young people are getting more involved these days. Am I just getting old, or is that true? hmm....

IO at UNC

Int'l Orange played a show on the UNC campus the other day for the first time. The strange thing about Chapel Hill is that, though there are thousands of college kids who one might think would be into local rock music, there has been virtually NO connection between the music scene and the campus. Well, one local dude named Stuart Cullinan is setting out (with a lot of help) to change that by organizing concerts on campus by good local groups. We were headlining the first of these, held in the Great Hall, which actually is more reminiscent of a Great Big Basketball Court. Pep rally flashbacks aside, we had an amazing time playing, and the crowd was very responsive. Judging from that experience, if these things keep going we might see a renewed interest in local arts among UNC students, which would be amazing. Now all we have to do is just get this weasel voted out of the White House and we'll be all set...

Old Ceremony recording session

So the Old Ceremony (www.theoldceremony.com is finally up now) holed itself up in Chateau Brandau out in the countryside outside of Chapel Hill and produced its first recordings - three very different songs: American Romeo, Blood & Oil, and Shadows on My Trail. We were crammed into one little room as the five of us laid it down into the wee hours, then Mark doubled up (in addition to the live organ parts) on vibes, and I added my vocals. The whole process took less than two days, and we are very happy with the results. For American Romeo I was trying for an early 50's Sinatra vibe, with some 60's French film music thrown in for good measure. Shadows has a similarly 40's/50's vibe, but is much darker, sounding more like the soundtrack to a Hitchcock thriller..Blood & Oil, though it is set in the 40's - it's the story of the wife of a WWII G.I. who has an affair while he's away and then runs off when she hears he's coming home - has more of a rockabilly/Bad Seeds morality-tale-gone-awry vibe. The overall vibe is fairly dark but musically accessible - kinda 'Songs for Paranoid Lovers.'

Patti Rothberg

Had a great time playing the shows with Patti Rothberg. She and her guitarist, Freddie Katz, and I played Columbia, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Chapel Hill, travelling together in their mini-van, complete with a menagerie of stuffed animals on the dashboard and an enormous cd booklet containing almost exclusively records by NYC bands in the late 70's and early 80's. It was great to get a little education on the early NYC punk stuff - I thought I knew about it, but I hadn't even scratched the surface. Freddie introduced me to some great John Cale stuff that I'll be checking out more. Be sure to look Patti up (www.pattirothberg.com) - she's a terrific singer and songwriter and an all-around cool cat.

Here's a picture of us all at the Local 506 show.

The News Roundup

The Old Ceremony show went great - hopefully we'll have some pics here for you very soon, and maybe even some mp3s of the show. Thank you to everyone who came out. We'll be doing a residency at a soon-to-be-named venue in Chapel Hill and possibly Raleigh in the next coupla months, so there will be more chances to catch the band.

In other news, I'm getting ready to do four shows with Patti Rothberg in Atlanta, Columbia, Charlotte and Chapel Hill. She's apparently a great performer of the ole rock musics, so I'd recommend checking it out. Also, my friend Danielle Howle will be joining us for the Chapel Hill show.

My tendonitis has been better lately, probably cause I've been laying off the computer a bit. It's a terrifying thing as a musician to get tendonitis cause it threatens your entire way of life. The week I started feeling it, Robert Sledge also was coming into rehearsals with wristbands (he'd injured them while moving heavy stuff). We're a fragile breed, we are.

meet the kid

we just signed on a new piano player to complete the core lineup of the old ceremony. his name is james wallace, though i prefer to refer to him as "the kid" due to his youthful air. originally, i was planning to not have him join us for the first show on wednesday, but after playing with him the other day, i think he's gonna be just fine to do the first show. he has a great ear and a real musical sense, plus he's a funny guy. i'm happy to add the final piece in the old ceremony puzzle: meet the kid.

Les Sans Culottes & The Old Ceremony

les sans culottes

Just found out that the first show of The Old Ceremony, my new pop-noir band, will be a month or so sooner than we originally expected. We'll be playing at Local 506 in Chapel Hill next wednesday opening for Les Sans Culottes, which from what I gather, is a fake-french pop band from NYC.

We (the O.C.) are excited about our first show. It's bound to be a learning experience either way. The idea of the band is that we take on extra members at certain shows - violin, cello, saw, theremin, sax, trumpet, trombone, etc. This show will be just the core group - guitar, drums, upright bass, vibes, and organ. We'll be adding a piano player to the core soon most likely as well.

It's great to have an outlet for the non-rock stuff I've been writing for years. Growing up with jazz standards (singing round the piano with the folks) made me really love jazz when it's played as pop music and years and years of listening to Tom Waits and Nick Cave and Kurt Weill have created permanent pathways in my brain for rundown cosmopolitan, dark, pseudo-east-european, or just downright threatening but beautiful pop music.