Okay, so what, it’s normal that after two exceptional nights the gears shift down a little for the hairpin turn. And if yesterday’s lede was not forcing it, this one surely was. But last night my own particular evening at the Highlander and the Cavern was a little bit of a comedown after the two previous nights.
I have yet to find the right way to record videos and sound in the new layout of the Highlander, so I produced very little worth posting from last night. Unfortunately I thought I found a great little corner of a table to put the Zoom Q3HD, but even as I did it I worried that with the speaker behind the recording device I would not pick up good sound. In fact, the sound was crap. Abysmal. Too bad, because I particularly wanted to get in some of the fine vocals of Nico, who used to play at the Highlander a few years ago before moving to the UK, where she now lives. She returned to play a few open mics, and I missed her at the Galway, and got her last night, but with absolute crap sound quality. Nevertheless, check out when she really gets revving up towards the second half of the song below, and you can guess at the power of her voice.
There was a bit of blues stuff again, and a few other interesting people. I did my Tom Petty song, “I Won’t Back Down,” and “Borderline” and “Cat’s Cradle.” It worked all right, I could feel good about it. But it wasn’t exaclty “tear the house down,” stuff.
But it all left me still hungry, so I went over to the nearby Cavern club along with Tory Roucaud, whom I recorded playing there a few months ago when SHE tore the house down. But for some reason I cannot pinpoint, the Cavern was not its usual self either, last night. This is one of those places where the house band plays and you go up and sing, as in a karaoke, doing only the repertoire of the house band. It is an excellent, together, mean and tight. And for only the third time in the two years since I discovered the place, I decided to do a song. Previously I had only dared try “Stand By Me.” This time I tried “What’s Up!” since I’ve been doing it myself on my guitar and it is pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, they did it in a different key and my voice was too low on all parts, so I could not belt it out the way I like to. Moreover, the sound system was uncharacteristically bad on the vocal mic, so it was almost impossible to hear anything of my voice – still, a lot of the people in the room sang along with me, and that was great moral support. Tory did “Creep,” and I know she did a fantastic job, but there again, the vocal mic was absolute crap. So we did not get the quality of her voice we should have had. I’m putting up the video of that anyway, just for the atmosphere, and hoping you can see that she did a great performance.
I had high hopes for the open mic night last night in Paris, and it came to pass – far beyond my wildest expectations. If the headline to this post, and my lede, sound like a massive dose of hyperbole, too bad!
First stop was the Bus Palladium, the famous Paris venue that I have written about on several occasions on this blog. Last night was the second of the Bus’s new open mic evenings, the first being around a month ago. I don’t know how long it will continue, and I didn’t ask. I get the feeling that the Bus is kind of feeling out the territory, and seeing how it works out. They took a very professional and highly organized approach to the thing by sending out a Facebook announcement and asking musicians to send an email and a myspace link to their music as a tryout. And they admit that this made it a “semi” open mic.
I got accepted along with 14 other acts. I missed the first evening a month ago, but they said that they had room for 14 acts, but received 35 responses. So I felt honored to have been accepted, but I’m not so sure they got 35 responses this time. In any case, the whole evening lineup was planned in advance and I was to play 7th. Musicians were greeted at the door and asked questions about our music and what material we needed.
So professional and cool, and that is normal for such a fantastic and historic venue. Having said that, as the evening progressed, I had some mixed feelings about it and how it might pan out in the future. Most of the tables in this cool restaurant that greets the “afterwork” crowd, were booked in advance, so most of the musicians sat like cattle on the sidelines on a step, awaiting their turn. The usual Tuesday night crowd was the same last night as on the afterwork evenings hosted by Yann Destal, and that meant that music for them was really a background thing, and not the main attraction, or, I soon felt, something they care for at all. One table of around 25 people was particularly noisy, with the effect that although I thought there were a number of very good acts, I could not hear their vocals or their guitars.
I made some videos at the quieter moments, but it got pretty loud and rowdy. It is very common to find open mics where people talk, talk and talk. But this one seemed a little heavier than usual to me. Having said that, I was really determined to see if there was a way that I could break through the clamor and grab the attention of the afterwork crowd and pull them out of their conversation and into the show. I had invited someone with me, too, and I felt a little helpless at the thought of her seeing me standing all alone up on the stage singing to myself.
So the first thing I thought I should do was cover songs that everyone knew, and forget about my own songs. The second thing I thought I had to do was to dive into it absolutely totally, but not so much as to be aggressive. Well, to cut the long story short, it worked from the first notes and lyrics of “What’s Up,” through “Father and Son,” and “Mad World.” The audience applauded, sang along, cheered, and briefly left their conversation to take part in songs they all knew and wanted to leap into. I finished with my own “Borderline,” after asking if I should do another cover or one of my own.
So I left the Bus Palladium walking on clouds and delighted at having worked like a bullfighter, or rather, a rodeo rider, trying to tame the bucking horse and succeeding.
From there I decided it was still early enough to go on to Ollie’s open mic at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance, and I was right to do so. I got to play a song at the end of the evening. But there I felt hardly up to the task, as Ollie’s was such a HUGE contrast to the Bus Palladium: You could hear the proverbial pin drop so quiet was the audience. And like usual, the place was full of massively talented young people. (I’m not saying the Bus was not, but it was more difficult to hear and appreciate them.) Ollie’s is attracting new musicians every week, and there is thankfully more and more French language stuff too.
Then, like icing on the cake, at the end of the Ollie’s evening I struck up a conversation with the man who I had seen at the Galway the night before. This was the man with the guitar with the carvings on it. Remember the video? It turned out that I had found a fascinating like-spirit – Ollie had prompted me – who wears more than one hat: His name is Danny Fonfeder, and he owns 50 percent of one of the most successful school supplies companies in Canada, makers of the Buffalo pencils with the famous tartan box, that I used as a child in grade school. His dad founded the company, and Danny is apparently running it, but in any case, he is travelling the world in his job for the company, and like me with my Formula One race travel, he brings a guitar with him and plays in open mics wherever he can. He started two and a half years ago. But unlike me, the guitar he brings with him – that fabulous carved thing on the video – is one of his own, that he has made for a company he owns and started up six years ago.
It is called Blueberry Guitars, and Danny put the whole thing together when he met a woodcarver in Bali, and decided he wanted a guitar with woodcarvings on it. He started this Blueberry guitar company and it is quite a good business, with guitars I could never afford – check out the $7500 Blueberry guitar on eBay. The wood comes from Canada, it is carved in Bali, and a luthier from the U.S. is responsible for making these into real musical instruments. I invited Danny out after the open mic, along with my friend Tory Roucaud, in order to interview him – and her – for my open mic film.
Now, does it really sound like hyperbole, that headline and lede? No way! A monumental evening.
Back in Paris on a Monday after the complete lack of musical culture in Valencia, Spain, it was great to attend two of my favorite open mics in the same night: The Tennessee Bar and the Galway Pub. It was even better to discover that there was something in the air that meant that both places were brimming over with musicians, and good and interesting ones at that. At the Tennessee Bar the accent was on the blues, at the Galway, I suppose the accent was on just about everything – with a little tilt toward accents from the south of the United States and Sweden.
When I arrived at the Tennessee just after 9 PM there was hardly anyone there and I thought it was going to be empty. But it soon filled up with spectators and musicians, including a lot I had not seen before, but while I was there, it was certainly predominantly blues and jazz-like pop. The last act I saw I was sure was Iggy Pop doing the blues, but the voice was definitely not the same – and this guy spoke French…. Also, he didn’t take his shirt off, which would have been the real Iggy giveaway. Check out the video of him, though, and see if you agree on the Iggy bit.
The Galway had lots of people spilling out into the streets, and I enjoyed many of the acts, including a couple from Sweden who are travelling Europe on their music busking earnings and along the way picked up a violinist from Western Australia. Then there was a guy from Canada – from Montreal, and who plays Brutopia all the time, he said – who had a wicked acoustic guitar with supercool carvings on the table and the neck. And then, one of the best of the night, Stefan Cashwell from Georgia, who unfortunately could not be heard as well as he should have been, because by then the drinking crowd had hit overdrive. But it was all great fun, nevertheless.
Since last year all I have done is complain about how Valencia, Spain is the world’s crappiest city for open mics and jam sessions and live music. It was the only place in my two and a half year journey three times around the world where I failed to find a place to play. This year so far, although I played a few songs on a restaurant terrace – thus marking my territory, unlike last year – I must say that I can blame myself for a little failure this time.
First, I learned on Thursday that there was a massive beach party on Thursday night where someone at the F1 circuit told me I should go to play – that people would be playing music on the beach – and later that night the waiters at the restaurant said the same thing. That is not at all an open mic or jam, but it is a place where music is played in public.
Okay, I could swallow that one. But last night, I met some buskers on the street in the old town and asked if they knew of a place to play, maybe a jam session. They told me there was the French Institute of Valencia that held a jam on Sunday night and that I should not miss it. They said it was not far from there, so I set out to find the address immediately, to ensure that I wasn’t going to miss anything.
In fact, I never found the institute. But today when I decided to look into its exact address and confirm there was a jam, I saw that the jam took place last night. In fact, it might well have been finishing up while I was walking up and down Ca. Moro Zeit looking for the place.
That was two potential places to play that I missed out. Of course, coming from Paris to play at the French Institute makes little sense. But I still feel as if there must be some hidden jam or open stage in this city that I have missed.
I got so desperate last night, in fact, that I looked up on google for karaokes in Valencia hoping that maybe they would allow a guitar player/singer, if there were any karaokes. Something led me to believe also that they may use the same word for karaoke and open stage. So the first place I went, not far from my hotel, was entirely empty. I spoke to the manager of the place, and she said they hardly ever have karaokes because it disturbs the neighbors…. She sent me off to one on the other side of Valencia, however, which she said definitely happened, at the place Canovas del Castillo.
I walked through the entire city, found the square, and searched all the side streets and the square itself, and found nothing at all. I walked back to the hotel, having walked in a complete circle of several kilometers, with a stop for a cheap paella dinner. They may not specialize in music here, but they do specialize in paella. It was invented here.
Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider and The Occult
No music for me in Valencia last night. But in case I find some place to play tonight and need to write about it tomorrow, I have decided to use this pulpit today to simply mention that tomorrow Colin Wilson will turn 80 years old.
Colin Wilson was one of the two original “Angry Young Men” of the British literary world in the 1950s, and he has always been one of my favorite writers. In fact, we corresponded for a while and I ended up doing a big newspaper story about Wilson, and then that turned into an interview book that was published in 2006 and called Philosopher of Optimism, to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book that made him famous at age 24: The Outsider.
So here he is now at 80, and by the way, he has long said he plans to live until he is 100. So I don’t really know what the point of this current celebration really is – but still….
But that is another story. First I want to say that I also wrote last year about my trials with Vueling, the crappy Spanish airline that hates musicians and guitars. This year while going to Barcelona I booked a flight – as I did last year – with Iberia, the big Spanish airline. But when I got to the airport I learned I was on a Vueling flight. And although I managed to get past the check-in desk with my guitar, I got aggressed by a flight attendant as I boarded the airplane. He asked me if I had booked a seat for my guitar. I said no, and he said it had to go in the hold – and he took it from me. Meanwhile, there was lots of room available in the overhead luggage compartment.
So with that in mind, and last year’s trip in mind, when I booked for Valencia I decided to keep away from Iberia and Vueling, and I found a flight on one of the Skyteam airlines, some small thing called Air Europa. At the airport I realized it was apparently no bigger than Vueling, but at the check-in desk, the woman smiled at me and asked if she could please put a “carry on luggage” label on my guitar. Damn right you can!!!! What a difference an airline makes. Oh, and the flight was entirely full yesterday, not a single seat free from what I could see….
So anyway, as I walked depressed around the streets of Valencia last night, thinking I would not find a place to play, I decided finally after a few hours to return to my hotel. It is no huge big deal to NOT play here or not do a segment on my film here, because I have already had a very fruitful time on that level in Barcelona, so I have marked my territory in Spain. That’s the main thing.
It also turns out there IS a jam session in Valencia, but only on Monday nights, at the Black Note club. I will have left by then.
But as I returned by foot to my hotel I suddenly received a call last night from a Formula One journalist friend and colleague, Patrick Camus, of AutoHebdo. He said he had just seen me walking down the street with my guitar and he was at a restaurant on the terrace and would I join him? So I walked back, only to find that he had somehow managed to recognize me through my walk and guitar from a very far distance – I could not make out any of his features from the crossroads where he saw me.
It also turned out he was on the terrace of the Carpe Diem restaurant, sitting exactly opposite the hotel I stayed in last year. He was with a friend and we spoke and he asked me if I had repaired my guitar yet – after the Malaysia mishap – and I said I had not, that it still held together and I feared fixing it might make it worse. So I opened the case and handed it over, because Patrick plays guitar too, mostly Bossa Nova.
After he played a little bit I took the guitar back and decided to play a song, he and his friend asked for more. So I did two more, and I received applause from the waiters, some people at the other table and people walking down the street. So it was a wonderful moment, and suddenly I didn’t feel so down and low anymore. But I also had to stop because it was after midnight, and a quiet street just beneath the hotel windows….
Patrick had never heard me play before, either, so it was fun to show him what I’m up to doing all this music all the time at the races. I think he will probably not call me Django anymore though, as he will have seen that my guitar playing is pretty basic….
Another thing worth noting was the protest in the main square of the city that reminded me of the same thing that was happening in Barcelona when I was there, about the problems with the economy. I did a bit of video footage, but have not had the time to put it up. May do so tommorrow.
I had to debate if I would do an open mic in Paris last night before getting up early to go to Valencia, Spain today. I opted for doing it, and I’m glad I did. It turned out that I managed to do TWO open mics, as there is a new one in Paris on Wednesday nights, just up the street from the mainstay Highlander open mic in the Latin Quarter.
But I had not been to the Highlander for so long that I did not even know that it had a complete makeover, and now it takes place in the basement room instead of on the ground floor. This may not sound like much, but it changes the whole vibe of the open mic, confirming for me once again that the success or failure of an open mic depends massively on where it is located, what the room is like, in addition to the vibe give off by the host MC, the day of the week and the kind of musicians that end up feeling welcome there.
It will be interesting to see how it develops at the Highlander. At first glance it seemed to me that it should always have been in the basement room. It is a more wide open space, the sound system is better placed in front of the performer rather than behind, and the cave-like feel to the place is comfortable. But there did seem to be a kind of lack of the neat thing of the past: Little corners all over the place where you could tuck up and mix and view the show from different angles. Anyway, we’ll see.
There were some interesting performers, and Thomas Brun, the host, was as lively as ever.
I put my name on the list there and decided to run up the street to the Rue St. Andre des Arts to check out the new open mic at The Mazet pub. It is run by David Oxxo, who, it turns out, is a friend of Thomas Brun. The Mazet is a cool pub and the little stage on the ground floor with a big backdrop of a window leading into the street is very comfy. I played five songs! That was very wonderful, and while there was a lot of talk, it was also clear that people were there to listen to the music too.
The one thing I really wish for, though, is that all the open mics would not choose the same day! There are two or three on Sunday, two or three on Monday, around five or six on Tuesday and two or three on Wednesday. Thursday and Friday and Saturday desperately need an open mic like the Mazet one.
Oh well, it was nice to bop from the one to the other – kind of like the nearby Tennessee Bar and Galway Pub open mics on Mondays.
I am writing this from Valencia, Spain, and as often happens when I go off to another country, the Internet connection is not strong enough to defend itself against the coffee I’m drinking – to steal a style from Tom Waits. So the problem is that although I took several videos last night, it has taken a couple of hours for three to upload, and I wanted to put up about six. Maybe I’ll add something more tomorrow. I did not make the choice – YouTube took them randomly.
Last night was the annual Music Festival and I decided to learn from my experience with the Fete de la Musique from last year: I did not want to walk the crowded, rowdy, chaotic streets of Paris looking for and listening to all manner of music on this mad night of musical letting go.
For many musicians in France, the music festival, au contraire, is something that goes on all year round. The annual organized music festival is for them just an excuse for people who don’t usually care about music to go out and get drunk, hurt, involved in fights and public rowdiness.
So as it fell on a Tuesday this year, I decided that the best thing for me to do was to continue living as usual and to attend the best open mic in Paris at the moment, which takes place on Tuesday nights at the Ptit Bonheur la Chance bar in the Latin Quarter. As it turned out, Ollie Fury, who hosts the evening, had a job beforehand playing music on the street in front of a crafts shop, because it was, indeed, the Fete de la Musique.
But he ran to the bar and started the open mic on time after singing for an hour and a half, and the bar was already nearly full of waiting musicians and spectators. Still, there were a lot fewer of the regular performers. But there were a sufficient number of interesting acts, and a big audience, to make the evening a memorable one nevertheless.
Most of all, like always at Ollie’s, it was a comfortable, fun, warm evening, and one that felt all the better when once I left the place and set foot in the streets made me appreciate my decision: The streets of Paris even at 2 AM were full of rowdy, drunk, aggressive people and very few musicians by that time. Cabs were all occupied, and the general feeling was one like New Year’s Eve, which did not drum up particularly good memories for me.
So thanks to Ollie and the Ptit Bonheur la Chance and all the musicians and spectators for supporting the regular night of music on an evening where it might well have been cancelled – as other open mics did last year.
On my way to the Galway Pub open mic, I made a brief visit to the Mecano last night to take in a song or two of a guy that Earle had been telling me about. In fact, I had spoken to the guy on the phone because he had ended up at the Mecano looking for my brunch, and of course I wasn’t there, since I’m no longer doing the brunch.
As I entered the Mecano I saw that the guy, whose name is Adam Farnsworth, sat on a stool in the spot where I used to sit, near the front door. But there was no mic, and his lousy acoustic classical guitar was not plugged into an amp. Adam, it turned out, does not need an amp or a mic or anything else, as he fills up a whole room with his powerful vocal prowess, which sounds like a cross between Axl Rose, Tom Waits, Robert Plant and – Adam.
Adam has been in Paris for a month working one of his regular gigs with the C.R. Avery & the Special Interest Group, which has played some top Paris venues. Too bad I didn’t get there earlier to get some of Adam on video.
But after speaking with Adam and Earle for a while, I moved on to the Galway. There I met up with Kim from Detroit, again, whom I had first seen at Ollie’s open mic a month or so ago. There were some other interesting performers as well, and I got to try out one of my new songs for the very first time.
As I said to Stephen Danger Prescott, the MC, it was the perfect environment for me to try out the song because no one seemed to be listening. There’s nothing like singing to yourself but with an audience present in order to shake off the fear of the first presentation of a new song. I got some compliments afterwards for some of my other songs – a couple of Dylan songs and What’s Up – so I know that some of the people were actually listening. But for a while it was nice to pretend to myself that no one was.
It has been a quiet weekend for me for once, no place to play on Friday, no place to play on Saturday. But that has given me more time to try to memorize a new song and also to continue reading this thing I’ve been reading on my computer since the Canadian Grand Prix. And of that, I am really excited. I just love reading friends’ book manuscripts, and I can truly say I have never had one quite like this one. In Montreal, when I attended that Charnobyl Voice evening of music, I did so with a Formula 1 friend and colleague, fellow F1 journalist, Mark Hughes. During the evening Mark let out – after I complimented him once again on an amazing book he did with and on the life of a racing car driver named Tommy Byrne – that he had just finished doing another similar book. But this time it was on the bass guitar player from the 1970s band Free, whose biggest hit was “All Right Now.”
“What?!?!”
Yup, I had heard him correctly. He told me a few more of the details. The book, titled “All Right Now” (what else could it be called?!), was done in the same style as his book on the racing car driver, called “Crashed and Byrned,” which is one of the best racing memoires I’ve ever read. That story was about Tommy Byrne, who was possibly one of the greatest racing drivers to make it into Formula One but never really get a chance at a top team, spending his five races in F1 in a back-of-the-grid team despite a massively promising career in the lower series. But the key to it was the interest of Byrne’s life growing up from nothing in Ireland, of Byrne’s voice telling the story, and of Hughes’ interjections telling bits of the story in his own voice to give an added layer to the whole.
So Hughes told me that he had now done the same on Andy Fraser, who was the bass player in Free, and creator with Paul Rodgers of most of the songs – like Lennon and McCartney or Jagger and Richards – including the big hit, “All Right Now.” He had approched the musician himself and proposed doing a book. Fraser agreed, and Hughes went on to meet him in California. So since reading friends’ manuscripts is one of my favorite activities, I immediately asked if I could read it – or he offered and I immediately jumped at the chance. The book is not yet published, but this thing is as good as the Byrne book and has a potentially much bigger public to reach.
So far the story is interesting not just to read up on what might otherwise be considered an obscure musician from the 70s – I mean, it’s not McCartney or Jagger – but also because as with the Byrne book, there’s a bigger, much bigger story here. Fraser joined and formed Free at like 16 years old in 1968. He was catapaulted to fame, never had a regular teenager’s life of discovery and only much later realized he was gay. Then he contracted AIDS. But not only did he not succumb to the disease, but he has surmounted it and lives a fully creative life. The book is full of this kind of message, and his life is an example. Fraser went on to write the hit song, “Every Kind of People,” for Robert Palmer in 1978. And he has also written hits for Joe Cocker, Chaka Khan, Rod Stewart and Paul Young. AND he has done solo albums, and continued to develop his music to this day. He is also nearly 60 years old and in amazing physical condition, seemingly relishing his unique life from, in his case, like Byrne’s, humble and unlikely origins.
But for me the real beauty of this book also is just to see how another musician created his life in music, and what I could not imagine when I started reading it, to have another – and unusual – look at the music scene of the last 50 years. I mean, this guy as a teenager actually played with John Mayall AND Alexis Korner. In fact, it was through dating Korner’s daughter that he met Korner and eventually got the gig with both Mayall and then met up with the future members of the band Free. While I still battle my way into the Keith Richards autobiography, I am filled with excitement in reading this one and won’t put it down – even though my computer printer is not working and I have to read it from a PDF!
I don’t know how happy either Mark or Andy Fraser would be for me to quote much from an unpublished book, but I did want to put in at least one nice bit from Andy, hoping that “fair use” copyright laws allows me to do so! Check out this bit Fraser says when talking early on about Free: “The thing that really made it feel unique was how we all gave each other space in our playing. That really stood out for me and it lent the whole sound a great power and spirit. It’s something I see in the great orators. You watch Barack Obama for example, and everything comes from silence. It starts off and you can hear a pin drop, that space in between is everything so that anything you add then has a big effect. A good speaker knows this, knows how to command silence; they begin softly and so when they start saying things with vigour it becomes incredibly powerful. We had that with Free, just naturally fell into that from the very first moment. Although people say they would love to hear Free together now, aside from the fact that Koss isn’t with us anymore, it could never be the same anyway because although everyone was talented, the most important thing was the spirit and what was in between the notes. That was derived from the respect we had for each other and the joint vision, how we each understood, without it being said, what we were trying to do. If you heard us now and there was no spirit you’d realized there were just some very simple riffs that didn’t mean much without spirit.”
