Interesting how doing open mics you meet all sorts of performers, from complete beginners to talented amateurs, to stars, and everything in between. And what IS between? And what IS a star? I’ve had blog post items on this site about Johnny Borrell of Razorlight at open mics I have held or attended, of Dan Haggis of the Wombats, and of Sarah Manesse, who was a big star on the French X-Factor. In fact, she was not the first such television singing star of the rising generation of talent shows I met. I also over the past few months saw this great singer, one half of a duo called Twem – Samir and Mehdi Beni.
And last night, I went and saw the duo together at a concert they had at the Sentier des Halles theater in Paris. I had seen Mehdi a few times at open mics, and even sang with him once! (If you call what I did singing….) But last night was the first time I have seen the twin brother duo together in live action. These Frenchmen twin brothers have appeared on several TV talent contests, always having great success, and it is easy to see why. Most recently, they were quite a hit on The X Factor in the UK, in fact.
Last night their show at the Sentier des Halles was a nice mixture of their usual stuff, and a few tributes, along with a guest singer or two. There was a tribute to Michael Jackson, to Whitney Houston, and by the piano and guitar accompanist a tribute to Ray Charles. Oh, and a guest singer did one to Amy Winehouse too – damn, all mighty and amazing dead singers…. They also sang a song from their album-in-the-making, all of the songs of which will be in English.
It was a very entertaining show, and I enjoyed seeing French-Moroccan Twem twins in action in their environment, with a good number of their fans – one of which apparently comes from quite far to any show they do. I better not tell her about the open mics…. It was quite difficult for me to figure out who was who, as these twins really do look alike. And even more miraculous is just how incredibly similar-sounding their singing voices are. I was greatly relieved when after the show when people waited to meet them in the bar that I could recognize which was which – body language or something.
Incidentally, on piano and guitar accompaniment was none other than Vincent Lafleur, whom I have mentioned before as one of the MCs of one of the open mics I have done. Or is it two?
Two completely unexpected posts, but the second part is cooler than the first. First part is just to say that I took my guitar with me to celebrate the birthday of a friend of a friend since I decided I would go to the Cabaret Culture Rapide blues jam afterwards. I ended up playing guitar and singing for an hour or more at the birthday party, at the 25 Degre Est bar and restaurant, outside on the terrace with a cool breeze blowing. I played some of my songs, some cover songs, had an audience, felt great. But here is the more cool post:
Last month I was exchanging emails with someone from the entourage of a very cool American rock musician, Garland Jeffreys, about his then upcoming concerts in Europe. He was about to play in Belgium, and then he would play in Paris. I could not get to Belgium, and as it turned out, I could not even make it to his Paris concert, as I had to go on a reporting mission to Le Mans, in France, on the very day he was playing in Paris, at the Divan du Monde, on 2 June. I returned to Paris from Le Mans too late.
Judging by a revue I read about the concert, I missed something great. Now flash forward today, lunch, in Paris, near the Place de Clichy. I was having lunch with a man I had met at a sports conference in Turkey in April, another longtime Paris expat named Ciaran Quinn. It turns out Quinn likes this blog, and it also turns out that he comes from a very musical family and has music in the blood, but mostly as a spectator. He suddenly popped out that he had just seen the most amazing concert, that of Garland Jeffreys, in Paris on 2 June!
So we got to talking about Jeffries a little. The thing is, Jeffreys is one of those almost cult American musicians on the periphery who has had a very cool career, and was once even considered to be the next big, big, big poet musician to pick up the relay from Dylan – that was back in the 1970s. Jeffreys is also famous for having gone to university with Lou Reed, and befriending him before he even started the Velvet Underground. Jeffreys started out in all those places Dylan did – and where I also tested my chops, in failure – in Greenwich Village, like Gerde’s Folk City, The Bitter End, the Gaslight, Kenny’s Castaways, etc.
He played lead guitar on John Cale’s first solo album, Vintage Violence, of 1969. (That got me wondering if he ever crossed paths with my friend Frazier Mohawk, who just died, and who produced Nico’s album, The Marble Index, with Cale.) Jeffreys released his first solo album in 1973 at Atlantic Records. The album actually had Dr. John on it, and the Brecker Brothers – who later did sensational stuff with Joni Mitchell. (Oh, AND it had David Peel on it, whom I had met at Gerde’s Folk City in 1976 and thought was full of shit in his stories about being friends with John Lennon, until I saw his album “The Pope Smokes Dope,” and other things….) Jeffreys was also in a documentary film directed by Wim Wenders and produced by Martin Scorsese, in 2003.
So we’re talking a real monument here, and a great musician, singer and writer. And he has just recently come out with a new album, called The King of In Between. Oh, and dammit, had I made my way to Amsterdam on 28 May – when I think I was in Monaco – I would have seen him take the stage with Bruce Springsteen, at the latter’s concert.
Okay, so what is the purpose of all of this?!?! It is just about how things come around. So here I was today sitting there in this brasserie eating lunch with Ciaran Quinn, who is an expert in sports-related Internet promotion and other such web related things – he’s got a contract with the Olympics this year – and he tells me he saw this concert that I had wanted to go to. THEN: He tells me about this sensational idea he came up with to create what he calls – I think he called them this – a “videograph.” This is not an autograph, where a celebrity simply signs a paper and says a few words of hello and how are you… this is a thing where you hold your iPhone video camera up and ask the celebrity for a few words as an autograph – a videograph. In this case, the videograph was for Ciaran’s young son, who is a musician, and Ciaran asks Jeffreys to say why music is so important to him. Very, very cool. But also I thought it a wonderful loop in the story of how I had been corresponding with Jeffreys entourage, almost went to the concert… then had it all come back to me a month later, in the form of a videograph. Someone better make an app for these things – a videograph book!!! (Maybe they already have….)
I did not have the time to put up a blog item last night because I had a devastating night the night before followed by an offer to meet an old friend to pick up a lent book that was so important to me that it took precedence over the blog posting – THEN I had to go on to my next open mic adventure. But that means stories of three venues here on this page today, as I made a brief transitional stopover on Tuesday at a bar where the host of the Wednesday night open mic was playing. Things get simpler:
So, the devastating night on Tuesday? Well, I think I just now suddenly realized that it all fits into a general movement and theme right here now: On Monday night at the Coolin bar I had started feeling problems of loyalty and correct, good treatment of people to other people. Right? Okay, so on Tuesday I go to the Ptit Bonheur la Chance open mic, and my faith in the goodness and correctness and rightness of human nature is reinforced as the MC and organizer, sometimes known as Ollie Joe, fought off a somewhat aggressive effort by another musician to hold the stage while calling up his friend to sing a duo with him after his own slot, but with me standing in the wings holding my guitar as I had been told I would play next.
So Ollie Joe holds his ground and say, “Yes, fine. After Brad.” “No,” he repeats. “Not now, Brad is on next.” More insistence…, and Ollie Joe again says: “She can go up after Brad. It’s his turn.”
Oh boy did that feel good and right!!! So I had a good time at the Ptit Bonheur, sang some quieter songs, and put my head out on a limb dying to get one right that I have so rarely got right, and I did: “Only Our Rivers Run Free.” So then I leave with my friend Brislee Adams to go to make a brief stop on the way home to take in a few songs by the transition man, the MC of the following night’s open mic, Thomas Brun, who was playing not far from the Ptit Bonheur la Chance, in the Wos Bar on blvd St. Jacques, and he was playing in duet with Philippe Germaine. They were really good.
That was a transition to the Highlander open mic last night…. or not really. The transition was that I get back on Tuesday night and discover by Facebook that the woman who last Tuesday and Wednesday made out with me in a bar, sang with me on stage, invited me back to her place and told me I was the man of her life, she had realized how important I was to her, and loved me and wanted to run off to Spain with me for the weekend to see if we could really live together – as we had broken up and got back together – we make love on Wednesday in her apartment and then…suddenly after the first step of becoming “in a relationship” on Facebook with another guy on Saturday she has the guy MOVE INTO HER APARTMENT TO LIVE WITH HER, as of Tuesday, which I discover on Facebook as I arrive back home. Just a week after I was the man of her life she’ with another guy and I did nothing to provoke it!!!!
Okay, so that was the REAL transition. So I go off to meet this other woman from a previous relationship, pick up the book and find the woman has not changed one iota – which I had not expected anyway – and then I go off to the Highlander. I see Thomas Brun immediately, he signs me up, for once I’m pretty early on the list, and allows me to go out and eat my dinner – a loyal, honest and direct signer upper at open mics. So I got out for a falafel, come back, hear some good music, and get inspired by one of the performers who is a good storyteller. He tells tales before his songs. So I decide at the last minute to do the same thing.
I tell the tale of this woman who tells me she loves me and I’m the man of her life, we make love, she wants my child, etc., then of how she is “in a relationship” with another guy a few days later, and living with the guy as of the very night before! I say something like this to wrap up the story: “Now if that is not a ‘Wicked Game,’ I do not know what is. So then I sing Wicked Game, by Chris Issak. Then I decide to continue on the same theme, and I sing my song “Borderline,” about a treacherous love affair with an unstable woman. Then I finish off with the most logical song for the series: “What’s Up!” with its appropriate chorus: “What’s Goin’ On!!!”
PS., anyone who knows me well will know that it was all my fault from the beginning and I never should have seen the treacherous woman!!!! But still, I thought I had seen every possible scenario! In fact, no. There was still this other one to come. NO MORE!!!
PPS., not sure I should write such personal items on this blog, but what the hell – one from the heart…. One reason I am putting it up here is that I am capable of laughing at myself and what a fool I can be. No problem showing that publicly. Plus it’s the sort of story that if it was NOT true, no one would believe!
I occasionally write rotten, nasty, unfriendly things about open mics that a) I usually love, and b) I’ve written huge praise about before. I hate doing that, but if I kept the criticism to myself all the time and only ever said nice things about the places I go play music at, then who could trust that they would find anything like the truth on this blog? Who could respect me and think that there’s a real story being told here? And the friends who saw me angry about Coolin’ pub last night, if I said nice things about it – wouldn’t they find the real person and the public writer a bit of a hypocritical contrast?
So unfortunately, I had a rotten time at Coolin last for practically the first time ever and I feel completely obliged to say it. I will nevertheless temper the criticism with the statement that part of the problem was that I had to go off to the Galway afterward and so could not stay to the end of the Coolin evening to see how it all panned out, or even to play my own set. But the problem, at base, was this: Coolin has become such a fabulous success and draw to musicians as an open mic that last night there were 30 musicians signed up to play!
The organizers being so kind that they want to give everyone a chance to play, actually made a bit of a mess of it, as names on the list ended up not being on a first-come, first-serve basis, and some performers were surprised to see their slots not ending up where they had expected, and having to wait a lot longer than expected. One guy, in fact, discovered that his slot on the list had been taken by another guy who said he had the same name!!!! Had I not intervened on that one, the guy – whom I know – would perhaps not have played, or played last.
In short, it was total chaos AND the crowd was one of the loudest, least interested that I have seen. Having said that, the organizers made a big effort to get everyone up, and I’m pretty sure they must have, since the open mic went on until close to 2 AM. And photos I have seen show that it may indeed have turned into a great evening with warm audience connection and participation by the end. But I was embarrassed that my friends who came on my advice, ended up being thrown around on the list, at what appeared to be the convenience of other more important friends.
Hey, that’s all really petty, though, isn’t it? And actually, the only thing it really says is that for the first time Coolin, because of all of its success, had 30 people on the list and did not know how to deal with the influx – which is normal. I suppose all successful open mics have to pass through that situation at some point, and find ways to tell performers they will NOT be able to play.
In any case, I left at about 12:15, went to the Galway, and I was asked immediately if I wanted to play – as there were no more performers on the list, since they were at Coolin! – and I accepted happily (as I had told Coolin I would not play there) and then discovered two friends were there whom I had not expected. This was Joe Cady and Rony Boy, a fiddler and a guitarist from a band called The Romantic Black Shirts. I asked if they would play along with me, and they agreed happily. I had played with Rony Boy last week, and I have played with Joe many times. But we had never played all together.
So my Galway experience ended up being a fabulous dream compared to Coolin! I was so happy to play with those guys that I decided to place my Zoom Q3HD recorder behind us to record it, even though I was pretty sure the framing of the image would be crap. So I have placed three of those songs up on the site, but remember, I knew the image would be crap, and the sound comes from the monitor for the musicians, not from the speakers in the pub.
Oh, and by the way, I will not be returning to Coolin next week – but not because I’m pissed off. It’s because I will be hosting the Galway Pub open mic myself as the guest MC as the regular MC, All the Roads, is taking the day off. So all that ends well ends well… or whatever…. Of course, after this post, maybe Coolin would not even let me in again next week!!! But I have to be honest. I do repeat, however, that I might have perceived the Coolin evening different if I had stayed to the end – and my perceptions will not reflect those of all participants last night, I’m sure….
Valencia, Spain, continues to be the only city in the world where I have failed to find a formal open mic or jam session in a bar or other place during my four night stay in the city for the race. There is an open jam here in a rock bar, but it happens on Mondays or Tuesdays when I am never in town. None of this matter much on Thursday night when I ended up playing in La Pepica restaurant for a group of British journalists – and last night it mattered not at all either, when I ended up on beach playing for and with Brazilian journalists.
Unlike the night at the Pepica, this celebration was one I had planned for in advance. My Formula One journalist friend from Brazil, Luis Fernando Ramos, brought his acoustic guitar and invited me a race or two in advance to show up and take part in the music on the beach. There was to be a party for another Brazilian journalist colleague’s birthday.
So I went, late, and we played until well after midnight – maybe even until around close to 2 AM … I suppose it was a really good session, as I cannot remember even what time it was when I stumbled off the beach into a cab. But it was a great pleasure, a kind of sitting-around-the-campfire kind of thing, with people singing and playing along – and it was a great way to make up for the lack of open mics or open jams in Valencia. Someone else showed up and played guitar as well, and Luis sang as well as played.
I may be starting a trend here of F1 journalists taking their guitars to the races….
I’ve been saying a lot lately that if you want something interesting to happen in your life, carry around a guitar with you. I might also add a guidebook. At least, that is what happened to me in Valencia, Spain, last night – something very fun and interesting thanks to my guidebook and my guitar. And it also happened at a very interesting place where Ernest Hemingway, Lauren Bacall, Orson Welles and others used to hang out.
To step back a little…. I finished my day’s work at the Formula One race track at the Marina in Valencia and I decided, exhausted after a long night the night before and the travel and the work, that I would not even look for a place to play music. Valencia has never been good for my musical adventure. So I opened up my guidebook, called Cartoville and published by Gallimard in France, to see if there were any good restaurants nearby.
hemingway at la pepica
Carrying these Cartoville guidebooks is a new thing I have been doing this year after I was introduced to the books by my friend Vanessa, last year, and she took me to some amazing places thanks to these books. So I thought, why not find one for each town I go to. Tourism was never my thing – but there’s no point traveling around the world for my work and being dumb about finding places, either.
The books are great because they split up the cities into sectors, and in each sector you have only five or six choices of bars, restaurants and shopping. So the choice is done very carefully, and I am rarely let down by what I find. I looked in the area around the Formula One track last night and saw this restaurant overlooking the beach; it was called La Pepica, and the guidebook described it as a “local myth” and that it was mentioned in Hemingway’s novel, “The Dangerous Summer,” and that these other celebrities had followed him there, etc. And the food was said to be good, and the ambiance was good, and simple, too.
So I walked over to the place, dragging my luggage behind me, and with my guitar on my back – for I had still not checked into my hotel. As I approached the restaurant, I saw suddenly some familiar faces: A massive table of maybe 35 British journalists sat on the terrace of the Pepica, in some kind of get-together for before the British Grand Prix, which is the next race after the one this weekend. There they were, BBC, Sky TV, magazine journalists, newspaper journalists from all the major publications and wire services, web journalists, other television and whatever journalists – the cream of the British racing media.
As soon as they saw my guitar, two or three of them requested I play a song. In the state I was, and given that it was the beginning of the evening and still bright out and they were just being served their first course, I thought, No way. I laughed off the invitation and said that perhaps once I had eaten, I would play.
I went inside, found a table not too closely within sight of the Brits, and I had a wonderful meal. The first course alone consisted of three dishes: a Valencia salad, calamari and some kind of mini muscles, shellfish. I had a nice half bottle of Rioja, and an amazing desert of some kind of parfait ice cream. It makes me want to run right back there as I write these words.
So I finished the meal, reading my New York Review of Books and the latest issue of Rock&Folk, the French music magazine, and then I went out and wondered over to say goodbye to the British journalists. Some had already left, but I was immediately invited once again to play music. And now, I was really ready, and desperately wanting to sing. And what a place to do it in? An old Hemingway hangout in the country of the flamenco guitar….
I ended up playing perhaps a total of 10 songs, split up by periods of talking, carousing and drinking the wine they offered me. Somehow I managed not to drink so much that I would lose hold of the notes, and I must say, with the beach in the distance, the sea a little beyond that, and even the appreciative waiters at this wonderful restaurant, it was an unbelievably great way to finish my first day in a town that has never been nice to me on this musical adventure – until now.
(Unfortunately, although a number of the journalists took photos and made videos of me playing, I have none myself, exceptionally, for this post.)
I managed to get to the Highlander open mic in Paris last night earlier than I got there the week before – around 9:20. But that still made me too late for a good spot on the list. I think I must have been around 15th. Given that I had to get up early to travel to Valencia today, I stayed and listened to a few interesting performers, and then cut out and called it a night. That’s always the problem with a popular and successful open mic – you HAVE to get there first, to have a good chance at playing before 1:30 AM! I guess I could call that an aborted night out, and this, an aborted post…. (Except for the cool videos in the darkness of the Highlander – oh, the video of Scott Bywater is aborted too after my Zoom Q3HD camera was inadvertently knocked to the floor…. :-))
Unsure exactly where I wanted to play last night, I ended up returning to the Baroc after several weeks absence from that interesting open mic on the other side of town. It is located near the home of a friend, and she wanted to meet up so I chose the Baroc over the Ptit Bonheur la Chance. I am glad I did.
I had left the Baroc at the previous open mic feeling pretty down about the audience reception, but last night things returned pretty much to normal, I had a good time, decided in addition to playing the potential crowd pleasing singalong song of “What’s Up!” that I would try the Irish song I had success with at the Swan Bar on Saturday: “Only Our Rivers Run Free.”
I’m not sure that the song went over as well in these circumstances, but the duet I did with my friend seemed to go over best – that was “Wicked Game.”
There were some new faces – to me – at the open mic, and some of the old themes as well – lots of reggaeish, African sounds good for jamming, in which other musicians off-stage do indeed join into for a jam…. So all and all, no regrets – and a lot less to write about since I was involved more with the friend than with the music!
The Coolin’ bar’s open mic decided to take a break last night since there was some big soccer match on its TV screens in the first part of the evening. That meant I returned to the Tennessee and the Galway for the first time in a while, and I had a real cool time – especially thanks to friend Rony Boy who asked if he could play lead along with me during my sets.
It was so cool, and while I had begun the evening a little tired and in low gear, everything served to show me once again that live does not repeat itself at the open mics. Rony Boy played along with me at both venues, and we had a lot of fun doing my favorite covers – Mad World, What’s Up, Crazy Love, Wicked Game and I Won’t Back Down. Rony Boy then played his sets right after mine in both places, and he sounded amazing with his Larrivée guitar. I especially loved his Daniel Lanois cover, which I have praised him for in the past.
There were also lots of other interesting acts, and an invitation to me from “All the Roads,” the host of the Galway open mic, to host the open mic on July 2, which I accepted with pleasure. All that because there was no Coolin’!!! So, like, hey, you lose a lover, maybe there’s another in store somewhere…. 🙂
Hugely mixed emotions yesterday night as I had a couple of literary evenings mixed with music to attend. The first was not mixed with music, in fact, but was the most bittersweet. That was a visit to The Village Voice Bookshop, for a party to “celebrate” the closure of this Paris institution of the last 30 years. The store is closing as it can no longer survive as an independent bookshop in our Internet and ebook world. The second event was a celebration of Bloomsday, at the Swan Bar, where I was invited to play music and to listen to readings of James Joyce prose and other Irish things.
The Village Voice was one of my first Paris hangouts, and I went there in the second year of its existence, starting in 1983. I had seen many readings there, met many people, and got to know Odile Hellier, the woman who started the shop and has run it all these years. She is a fascinating woman who loves American literature, and decided to open a store with the true feel of the American literary expat bookshop in Paris – I guess she is a mixture of both Sylvia Beach AND Adrienne Monnier, who ran their stores only a few blocks away a few decades ago….
When I arrived for the closing celebration, I found that not even my personal invitation to the thing would save me from the impossibility of getting through the doors, so full was the two-floor shop of admirers and book lovers. In fact, they were bursting out into the street. All I could manage to do was glimpse inside and see Odile reading something from the staircase to the throngs below. I made a video of this, to give an idea.
I went off and ate a wonderful pizza dinner at a nearby pizzeria, where I also devoured the London Review of Books that I had bought in Montreal last week. Then I returned, sweating from that hot and spicy pizza, and found that I could now penetrate into the Village Voice. There I found the place now had enough room available for a visitor to wander around, and meet old friends. I started by saying hello to Odile outside the shop, where she was talking with someone and no doubt getting some fresh air after her various readings.
Inside, I found some old friends, including Jim Haynes, the American Paris expat supreme, whom, I recalled, I had met for the first time at the Village Voice in the back room cafe it used to have, in 1984, while I was reading Jim’s very own autobiography, “Thanks For Coming.” Jim and I kept contact over the years, I have been to his famous Sunday dinners at his atelier in the 15th arrondissement, and our lives have criss-crossed occasionally.
I also saw David Applefield, whom I had met at Shakespeare and Company in 1983 in the writer’s room, but whom I had probably seen more often in those early days at the Village Voice. David, at the time I met him, was working on the first Paris issue of his literary review called “Frank,” which would go on to have many more issues and a long life in Paris. Last night he passed on to me a book he has just published, right off the press, in a new imprint, and which was written by another Paris literary alumnus, John Strand.
Strand had started another Paris literary review in the early 1980s, called Exile, or Paris Exile, can’t remember quite. But I do remember him celebrating one of the issues at some kind of evening at the Village Voice in the early 1980s. Strand has gone on to become a multiple prize-winning playwright based in Washington D.C., and his novel is called, “Commieland.” I’m looking forward to reading it, and seeing where Applefield’s imprint, called, Kiwai Media, goes.
Unfortunately, I could stay long at the Village Voice as I had agreed so sing Irish songs at the Bloomsday evening at the Swan Bar, a newer American-culture hangout in Paris. In a brisk walk from the rue Princesse to Montparnasse, I managed to digest that pepperoni pizza and all the desert items – macarons – that I ate at the Village Voice. I arrived to find Sheldon Forrest hard at work accompanying a singer, and the Swan Bar was just brimming full of people.
This bode well, and as I waited to perform my first song, it occurred to me that I had a nice little story to tell about James Joyce, and I could connect it to the build up of my song. It was a story about how the journalist and novelist Eugene Jolas had spoken to Joyce one day and asked him what he accomplished that day, and Joyce responded that he had worked all day and managed to complete a sentence. “Only one sentence??!!!” “Well, yes,” said Joyce. “I knew what the seven words were, but I could not figure out what order I wanted to put them in.” I then told the audience that I had several songs, but did not know what order to sing them in. The one that went down the best, and which I did sing the best, was “Only Our Rivers Run Free,” by Mickey MacConnell.
There were lots of other musicians, lots of readers, and the evening was in general a bigger success – I felt – than last year’s such celebration at the Swan Bar.
I returned home, had a good sleep, got up today and finally, finally, after nearly four years finished the book I have been working on about my first year of musical adventures around the world. I also came up with a new, final, working title: “OUT OF A JAM: An Around-the-World Story of Healing and Rebirth through Music” In the end, I must say, that it felt appropriate to complete the book on such a literary weekend….
