The Likely Lads | Brad Spurgeon's Blog

Just a very brief note to mention that it was a nice and calm and quiet Saturday night celebrating Calvin McEnron’s birthday at the 49 Bar in Pigalle. A nice cool, small bar with tasteful photos, including one of the famous Edward Hopper painting of a diner. I played two sets of maybe four songs each, including by popular demand my “A Change is Gonna Come,” which I am working at more these days to try to get right.

Calvin, whom I met at Earle’s open mic at the Truskel bar in Paris nearly three years ago, played some of his songs, and there was a short jam with one of the members of the Likely Lads of Paris and a jam of the band The Last Waltz, also of Paris, in which my son plays guitar and does back up vocals and writes songs.

Check it all out! Just a party, really! But Calvin McEnron is more than worth the celebration….

Oh yes, almost forgot that I saw this cool violinist on the metro the previous day as I went to the Abbey Bookshop to celebration a Christmas party.

I get to hear this band all the time at my home, since it is the band of my son Paul. Formerly called, The Euks, it is now called, The Last Waltz. The band played its first concert while I was in Istanbul, so I missed it. Last night, it played its second concert, at the Disquaires in Paris. I was there and filmed it.

It is quite a different thing to be sitting around at home and hearing the sound of a budding band coming through closed doors and actually being at the venue and watching the band perform for its public for the first – or second – time. And I can say that I was favorably impressed. I was also happy when it ended that I still had all senses and had not been whacked in the head by a guitar or a foot as I tried to get in fairly close towards the end on the last song and found myself in the middle of an onstage riot – or at least chaos of dance and flailing limbs.

I stayed a little longer to see for the first time for me also a band consisting of a couple of friends of my son’s from years ago, which was on the same bill by accident. This was The Likely Lads, and at least two of them used to go to school with my son when they were kids.

Then I moved on to do a little bit of my own music at the Be There bar’s open mic on the Ile St. Louis. I always enjoy this one, and despite arriving and finding very few people present, it turned out to have some interesting performers. I am not sure who was who, but the band names I got were goodbye paname and super vener. I enjoyed my own moment – thoroughly screwing up a new cover song I thought I had memorized, “What’s Up.”

By the way, my son Paul is the guitarist on the right in the images in general, or stage left, usually playing in front of or below the saxophone player painted on the wall.