No time to go into any long-winded details – you’re spared – as I’m in preparation to fly to Seoul, South Korea, tonight for the next week, the F1 race and a musical evening or two (or preferably more).
To I just wanted to make note of last night in Paris, which actually fits a little into the above sentence, for last night I caught Sood on video doing a song on his own at the Tennessee bar. Sood is from…South Korea. He now lives in Paris. But he has a lot of energy on the guitar AND on the vocals. Check out the video.
I showed up at the Tennessee around 9:30, found it way too full and knew I’d never get on before midnight. So I left for the Galway and Stephen Prescott finished his set and put me up first! It was nice, although I was not very happy with my performance – except my last song when I finally said, “To hell with everyone, I’m singing this for me.” That was my song, “Let Me Know.”
I stayed for a few more performers’ sets and then I returned to the Tennessee. This time I was too late as it was almost midnight. So I ended up not getting to go up. But I did see Sood and then I saw what the MC James referred to as the North African Mafia, and they were good – especially as usual, Karim’s wicked guitar playing.
I think that since I started this blog last March or whenever it was, I have put up nearly 200 videos of other people at open mics around the world, but when I play, I can never get one of me. Thanks to my friend Les DeShane, a fabulous musician who is also a pro with a video camera, I finally have videos of me performing at an open mic. Unfortunately, Les also counted on me doing videos of him, and while his music is superb, there is no doubt I did flat and uninteresting videos of Les. But I’m putting up the best of each of us from the Galway Pub open mic in Paris last night. No more words on this page, I will leave the rest of the space for videos. Oh, no, must mention that I here screw up the lyrics on “Father and Son” for the first time in about a year!!!
I will write more about Les another time, as he is also on an interesting musical voyage like mine, that has taken him to most corners of the world as well….
Oh, almost forgot. At the end of the videos, I want to add a final video, that of Arturo from Colombia, who does a great version of an REM song….
Just a quick item before I travel on to explore musical Liege over the weekend as I attend the Belgian Grand Prix for my IHT and NYT coverage. I just wanted to wrap up the Paris August blues with a note about last Monday when I went back to the Tennessee Bar and The Galway, the fabulous venues that dared stay open all month.
I made a fool of myself at the Tennessee by singing my new song that was not yet finished and which I had not memorized – so read from a piece of paper that fell from my knee just before the bridge. But then went on to the Galway and sang four songs in what felt like an inspired manner, and that was confirmed by friendly comments afterwards. One of those comments came from Stephen “Danger” Prescott, formerly of the Salvation Army punk band, and now the MC of the Galway. This is the same Stephen “Danger” Prescott” that I mentioned who had turned up at the Highlander the previous week or so before in order to perform just like any member of the public, which I found extraordinary for this Australian from Melbourne who has lived in Paris for the last three or more years, playing every week at the Galway as the MC. But there was something very different about his act at the Highlander, and I was greatly amused at how he told me from behind the mic NOT to use the video, given his state of…. well, you’ll see. He gave me permission on Monday, noting that it was all in good fun and not a typical night for him. And it really wasn’t his fault, either, as a client bought him that huge jug of beer…..
But this is the story: At the Tennessee bar open mic last night – thank goodness it is still running in August – during the short time that I was there the best guitarist was clearly the guy whose video I have pasted in below. He had a very agreeable tapping style on the guitar, and an agreeable timbre to his voice as well. And to top it off, the guitar was not even his own, but the one most people shared at the open mic.
I got called up suddenly to play after one or two other performers and when another guitarist tapped the strings of the same guitar so hard that he broke two of them…. Since I had my own guitar, it was a good moment for me to go and play. But I had not played on stage for what felt like a million years – was it a full week? Can’t remember…. So I started off a little cold, then built it up with each song and received a resounding applause for the final one – my own, “Let Me Know,” which I played a little differently than I have in the past, as I have now been influenced by my own studio version of the song!!!
Anyway, I left soon after my own performance to go to the Galway Bar, just down the Seine, near the Place St. Michel. Stepping outside of the Tennessee I met up with two friends from the open mic circuit, Lord Prosser and LadiesDi. The former is an Englishman who talks like he comes from Birmingham, and as it turns out, he does. He has lived in Paris for more than a decade, though, and plays at all the open mics. LadiesDi – not sure where he got that name – is from Argentina, and he has been hanging around Paris for a while. Anyway, they told me to tell the man at the Galway that they would soon join me along with a woman from Sweden (I think it was).
So off I went to the Galway. When I arrived out front I found Steven, the Australian MC, had changed his bush hat of the last time I was there for a Mohawk haircut.
“You picked a great night to come back,” he said to me, recognizing me immediately and telling me he had seen the video I did of him on this blog the last time.
I looked inside to see there was practically no one there. Just an American man singing and playing behind the mic and a few people in the bar.
“There are going to be three others coming soon to play, too,” I said, referring to Lord Prosser, LadiesDi and the Swedish woman.
“This guy will play, then I will play, then you can play,” said Steven.
Yes, I had picked the right night. Just the time to tune my guitar and then go and play my four songs, no waiting. And as it turned out, an audience would build up quickly, even during the time I played. And more and more of the musicians from the Tennessee showed up as well, so the even went on quite late after midnight.
So back to the main narrative thrust of this post. The tapping….
I played three songs and by then LadiesDi was there and taking photos of me and he made a request for the last song. He asked for “Cat’s in the Cradle,” the song I do by Harry Chapin. Then I think he said, “Cat Stevens” and it may be he wanted “Father and Son,” but as I had already sung that at the Tennessee, I leapt at the opportunity to do the Chapin song.
I also took this as an opportunity to talk about how I had met Chapin while doing a television show in Ottawa in 1976. And I recounted what a great guy he was. We spoke while waiting for him to be called on stage to play for the TV audience. We learned we were born on the same day, December 7, and that we both wanted to go to acting school. He was, of course, 15 years older than I was – and I was just a teenager. When he was called to play he grabbed his Ovation guitar quickly, dropped it, and broke a rib in the guitar. He laughed uproariously and shrugged it off, running out to play with the broken guitar. It was the way he was, I thought, it best summed up his personality – from the little I had seen.
It was also sad that he had this hit song about growing up and working as a father and never really seeing his son grow up. But in the end, it was even more tragic in Chapin’s life, as he died in a car crash on 16 July 1981 at around 37 years old – so saw even less of his kids’ lives….
I sang the song at the Galway, it went down well. Then right after me, Steven decided to go up to sing a song before the next invited guest. And the song he sang, of all things, was the old 1970s hit, “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” This is really not a very common song these days in open mics. But it woke up my sense of the past, the supernatural, and the tappings of voices from the past…for it was the song on which during that same music program in the 1970s with Chapin that I appeared in a music video of the song. Sorry for that mangled sentence. Too lazy to fix it. In other words, my biggest, starring role on the music show was that of a kid going off on a jet plane and leaving his girlfriend behind. It was a music video, style 1976, and I had the main role, acting out the “Leaving on a Jet Plane” story. (It helped that the woman who played the woman was the TV show’s cute blonde secretary, and I had a crush on her and got to kiss her during the filming….)
Anyway, so there we are. It was as if the spirit of Harry Chapin and that TV show had come back for moment to animate the Galway Pub in Paris. (Or as if I had nothing better to write about today, especially after finishing the re-reading of The Occult, by Colin Wilson…!)
As I was leaving the Galway I just had to stop and whip out the video recorder to get a few seconds of the act consisting of a reggae kind of guy and a woman from New York. She later told me that she had seen me at the Tennessee, and I had, in fact, noticed her there too – as she was noticeable. But her singing was magnificent, it turned out, and it was too bad I didn’t see her at the Tennessee. I managed to catch a little of the song she did at the Galway, and I’m pasting it in below, although it is far from good enough as an expression of her sound….
Monday nights used to be all about Earle’s open mic for me, as far as I was concerned. I knew Monday was a good night for other open mics, but as long as Earle’s existed, that’s where I would be. If Earle’s open mic was closed for holidays or vacation, I would then go to the other available places. Earle’s open mic is now finished officially – although who knows if that’s forever – after a half decade running from one spot to another.
That meant that last night I finally decided to get out to another Monday night venue – after a few weeks without anything. It turns out that two of the best are both located near each other in the Latin Quarter, one at the Tennessee Bar near the Odéon, and the other at the Galway Pub, on the quai near the Place St. Michel.
The Tennessee is located behind the Rue St. André des Arts, in a small street called rue André Mazet. Upstairs it is rather hip looking, a small bar on two levels. Downstairs is cave-like, and it even has caveman drawings in a part of it. Brick walls, a nice little comfortable stage with an upright piano. The open mic is run by James Iansiti, an American from California but of Italian origin, who often wears a fedora to cover his bleached yellow Mohawk haircut.
I was among the first to arrive yesterday, so I was among the first to perform. It is a classic open mic with James calling up the performers more or less in the order of their arrival – although he does not keep a list. It is very informal, and it is about half and half expat performers to French performers. I did four songs last night, and I felt very emotional and was able to feel not the slightest bit of nervousness because I was so angry at the world. I don’t know if that came through in the playing, and I never stuck around long enough to find out what anyone thought of my songs. I split and went to the Galway to continue my personal therapy and sing some more.
But I did see a few interesting other acts at the Tennessee, including a couple of French guys who did a fabulous rendition of “While My Gutar Gently Weeps,” and also a guy from the United States somewhere who played some classic blues stuff with his electric guitar and he sang.
I went to the Galway and got there early, far too early, in fact. There was a World Cup soccer game on the television. The open mic normally starts at 21:30, but we had to wait until the game ended. That took nearly half an hour, and then the open mic started immediately afterwards – and once most of the people cleared out of the pub after the game!
The open mic is MC’d by a man named Steven, or Stephen, from Melbourne, Australia. He looks a little like Kurt Cobain and wears an Australian bush hat of some kind. You can see that in the video I did of him introducing the evening and starting off with a song…. that song just surprised me so much as it was the last thing I expected to hear from an Australian who looks like Kurt Cobain. He and his French fiddler, Pierre, played “Rocky Road to Dublin.”
It fired me up so much that I decided I would play the “Raggle Taggle Gypsies” when I went up, which was right after Steven. I played three more songs after that, “Just Like A Woman,” my own “Since You Left Me,” and finally “Year of the Cat.”
Among the other performers I enjoyed were a young Dutch woman who had a nice voice and some charisma, and a Frenchman named Etienne. I had seen Etienne somewhere else, but I could not remember pricisely where. I thought it was at the Highlander, but my recollection of him was that he was bluff, full of himself and not talented. When this Etienne began to sing, however, I realized I was mistaking him for someone else. This guy has a very cool voice and presence and an emotional thing that gets through – hmm, more Kurt Cobain than Steven, after all….
