I’m playing my first solo acoustic gig in a long time this Friday night, and I’ve been working on a set list for the show for the last few days.  Like we tried to do with MiLES FRoM CLEVeR I’m trying to pick songs that are at once familiar but not necessarily too much so, which is to say THERE WILL BE NO BUFFETT.  I also love it when an artist surprises me with an acoustic version of an electric song (like “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters).  So I’m throwing in a couple of those (Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” Pearl Jam’s “Alive,” even The Who’s “Baba O’ Riley”).

As I was in the brainstorming phase of creating the list, this song popped into my head: 

More proof that you don’t need a Marshall stack to blow an audience away.

And if you’re in southern Maryland this Friday, please stop on by Fenwicks in downtown Leonardtown.  My part of the show starts at 7 pm.

I do . . .

And Foo fans thought Taylor Hawkins was a good drummer (which he is). After fourteen years one forgets where Dave started, doesn’t one?

And one forgets that Jimmy Page was never much of a lead player (except for “Stairway,” of course). Doesn’t matter; the man still rocks. Power to the old guys.

. . . is in order these days — and it can take many forms.  Today it’s the Redskins game on TV, my signature ribs on the grill, and the Fabs on the stereo:

 The sum of those sorts of things becomes a good day.  And the simplicity of a good day is a lot right now — the difference between being buoyed by optimism or gripped with despair.  In turn, the sum of those good days (taken one at a time) becomes the rest of my life, I guess.  We’ll call that a plan.

. . . that Peter Frampton is, first and foremost, a great guitarist.

The test of a band’s talent to some degree is whether they can bring it live.  Here’s A Perfect Circle performing “The Outsider,” a killer tune from their amazing “The Thirteenth Step” album.  They pretty much nail it . . .

This video captures my band’s performance of the Golden Earring classic “Radar Love” at Cafe Du Nord in San Francisco on December 11, 2007:

Check out the band’s site here.

I first heard about a new band called “Pearl Jam” from my buds in Drivin’ N’ Cryin’ at one of their shows in Raleigh during the fall of ‘91.  A few months later I was on cruise in the Persian Gulf with VF-143 aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) when I received a care package from Carrie that included Pearl Jam’s first CD, “Ten.”

To say I was blown away would be an understatement.  I’d play the album all the way through and then start it all over again.  The entire ready room grew to love it along with “Badmotorfinger” by Soundgarden and “Nevermind” by Nirvana.  Ironically, although we were halfway around the world, we were ahead of the Grunge curve.  When we got back people were just starting to be aware of those bands.  We’d been listening to them for months floating around the waters of the Gulf and flying over still-war-torn Kuwait.

But the follow-ups to “Ten” were disappointing to me, and I sort of drifted away from Pearl Jam in the 15 years that followed.

 Until now.

I just downloaded “Imagine in Cornice (Live in Italy 2006),” which is nothing less than one of the best concert/band documentaries ever filmed, IMO.  Songs that were unremarkable in the studio (”Severed Hand,” “Corduroy”) absolutely come alive.  (Reminds me of some of the tunes that found their legs on Aerosmith’s last live album.)  Eddie Vedder’s voice sounds fantastic.  The conversations with the band behind the scenes are great, too.  And drummer Matt Cameron (formerly of Soundgarden) is like Ron Wood of the Stones in that you could never imagine the band without him.

Especially noteworthy are the performances of “Better Man,” and “Alive” that both feature the audience singing along.  Incredible moments.  I also enjoy the visual of the original four — Jeff, Eddie, Stone, and Mike — jamming in a circle at center stage.  It reminds me that a successful band really is a family (much like a military unit).

If you don’t feel like downloading a 1 gig movie to your computer then check similar readings of the tunes on “Live at Lollapolooza 2007.”

So, long story short (or not as long as it could be), I’m back on the Pearl Jam bandwagon.

Here’s a taste:

This was mandatory watching around my house on Saturday mornings during my youth: 

The theme song is “And Your Bird Can Sing,” which features amazing harmonies and some killer guitar riffs.  Like most of The Beatles catalog, it holds up nicely some forty-plus years later.

I first saw “Woodstock” when I was only 11.  We had just moved to Holland and were living in a hostel.  My brothers and I were driving my parents crazy so one day they sent us out on the town with the families of embassy co-workers.  My group - the cool group that included Joe Grace, the drummer for my first band - took the tram to downtown Den Haag and caught the matinee.

To this point my record collection was 95 percent Beatles albums with some Dave Clark Five and Lovin’ Spoonful thrown in for good measure.  It’s safe to say “Woodstock” expanded my horizons quite a bit.  As a fledgling guitarist I realized I had much to learn after watching this performance by Alvin Lee of Ten Years After:

I think I went to see ”Woodstock” half a dozen times that summer.  Like many others, the film introduced me to not just Ten Years After but The Who, Jimi Hendrix, CSN&Y, Jefferson Airplane.  My album collection exploded in the years that followed.

Almost 20 years later I caught Ten Years After at the Boathouse in Norfolk.  Carrie was pregnant with our first child at the time and not feeling well that evening, so we didn’t stay at the show long enough to see them play “I’m Going Home.”  We did see enough to convince me that Alvin still had it after all those years.

I’m currently reading Simon Reynolds’ Rip it Up and Start Again, which  is about the post-punk period (’78-’84).  In it Reynolds mentions the band The Art of Noise, a band I haven’t thought about for over twenty years.

When I was in VF-32 in the analog days before DVD players, we used to watch videotapes that our wives would make for us.  These tapes had all sorts of content - TV shows, sporting events, family home movies, etc.  One tape in particular that became a squadron cult classic had this on it, The Art of Noise video for a song called “Close to the Edit.”  The video is at once funny and disturbing and brilliant.  And watching brings back memories, most of them great.  Enjoy.

Back in 1990 I was a lieutenant assigned to the Naval Safety Center as the editor of Approach magazine, the Naval Aviation Safety Review.  I was also “commissioned” by the Fighter Fling Committee to produce the video for that year’s Fling, a tradition Dave Parsons and I started in 1989 (about the time I took over Approach from him).

We wanted to go big time with the presentation that year and had the budget to do so.  My old lost friend Bill Reid, who was president of Cellar Door Productions then, coordinated studio access to Windmark Studios in Virgina Beach.  My other lost friend, Dean Collins, who was in the C-2 RAG at that time, and I holed up in the studio for a couple of days with producer Michael Marquart (former drummer for Flock of Seagulls).  The result was the soundtrack to this video, titled “My Life Story/Politics of Surfing.”

I came up with the music for “My Life Story” and Dean wrote the lyrics and performs the vocals.  “Politics of Surfing” was a tune I’d messed with for years, in fact, my band “The Cheaters” recorded a version that was played on TK-101 in Pensacola exactly ONE time.  When Michael first heard it he thought it needed something so Dean added the chorus.  I’m actually singing the chorus through a small bullhorn, an idea I got from Michael Stipe, who used a bullhorn to sing the chorus of “Turn You Inside Out” on REM’s “Green” tour.  Paul “Pomp” Pompier, a Tomcat RIO who happened to be in charge of the Fighter Fling that year, plays the killer flute during the outro.

Once the music was done, I went into another production studio with yet another lost friend, Jody Cox, to post-produce the video.  All the flying footage was submitted by the Tomcat squadrons at NAS Oceana.  The storyline in between features Commander “Magic” Morris as the Fighter Guy and my brother Briggs as the bodyguard.  (The family still gives him grief about the mullet.)

The video was premiered at the Fighter Fling, which took place at the old Virginia Beach Pavilion that year.  We enlisted RAG students to act as “Yellow Shirts” with wands and they were choreographed with pyrotechnics that created an incredible build up to the video itself, which was played on a couple of giant screens as the music thumped through a pretty huge PA system.  It came off better than any of us had imagined.

Enjoy . . . 

(Thanks to Keith Thome for forwarding me the link to this Google video.)

Drivin’ n’ Cryin’ was a band based in Atlanta that I got to know pretty well in the late ’80s/early ’90s.  I first saw them in a small club in Pensacola, Florida.  They started the set with an acoustic version of what is normally a hard rock song called “Powerhouse,” which I thought was very cool.  Then they played this song, “Honeysuckle Blue.”  I’ll never forget the great guitar sound slamming through the twin Marshall Jubilee Series stacks.  (The same amps that you see in the video.)  Check it out . . .

DNC’s former manager, James Barber, remains a good friend of mine.  He’s also been the guy in Hollywood who’s been shepherding “Punk the TV series” to market.  Stay tuned.