My dear one is in bed with a head cold. He's a heap. When I got home yesterday he met me at the door, all sleepy and snuffly and shuffly, and excited about Kurt Vonnegut's interview on alternative radio. The Dresden survivor talked brass tacks about Marx and Socialism and inspired S to wear his red star pin on his lapel. And despite him feeling under-the-weather, after filling him full of chicken soup we ventured into the night to hear Grasshopper.
They shook the pub, rocked the foundation, knocked me out of breath. It's been a while since they performed, and they've refined it, honed it and sharpened it so it hits you between the eyes, resounds in your chest, makes you want to wiggle your hiney and tap your toes.
Grasshopper plays the best songs, and only a few covers, but even those they made into something new. JJ likes to sing sad songs that touch you just right between your heart and your throat and if I'm not careful she could make me cry. Which is somewhat ironic because I know most of all she wants people to get up and dance.
Tebone is a fine songwriter and a true musician, and he has quite a few tricks up his sleeve. I love his songs Gaugin, Count on Me, and The Golden Mean. The lyrics he writes are delightfully existential without being sappy, and the tempo rolls them through and back again. I had called the band "country swing" but they're definitely a rock band with a full solid sound and a sweet honey singing the blues.
Most indelible in my mind is one song that gave me a wild feeling last night. I wrote some lyrics for them a while ago, and Tebone put those words to music.
And they played it last night.
It's not the first time I've heard them play it, but it is the first time the hep cat girl in glasses at the table behind me said to her droogies, "It's the song!" and rattled the empty beer glasses on the table, shook the bench with their excitement, sang along for the whole song. I didn't know what to think. I don't think I breathed the whole duration of the song, which Tebone calls Keep the Time. I guess the flushed cheeks and tingling fingers is embodiment of delight mixed with a touch of pride, but if it is pride at all, then it's similar to a honey bee pollenating a flower to make fruit.
I think I just called myself a bee.
Anyway.
Incredulous I turned to S and said, "They like it. They like that song." He laughed at me. Later I learned that the cool cats at the table beside us take studio mixing classes from Grasshopper's drummer, and they've been working on the song in class. Which explains how they know all the words. I wrote those words. And I'd be hard-pressed to remember them all. The experience flattened me out. Boom, there I am.
One of the phrases in the song includes "come on we've got some Cain to raise." After the show I climbed up on stage to hug my goodbyes and I mentioned to Tebone how S had talked about "raising Cain," and how he had found the true phrase to be "razing cane," like cane breaks in the South, big boggy fields of cane that gets cut to the ground. Interesting how the term gained a separate and different meaning through common speech, unaffiliated with the context, or the written term.
Tonight I have to work on a lesson plan for tomorrow's two hour class I'm sub-teaching. I asked S for advice, since he spent a year teaching photography and journalism to "at-risk youth" aka juvenile delinquents, and his suggestion was to "work their asses." But the ladies in the beginning bellydance class range from hot little 15 year old bodies to plump great-grandmothers, and the one thing in common is their desire to take a fun class and maybe learn something while doing it. I know I could work their asses, I could make them shimmy until they dropped, but I think instead I'll teach a simple choreography to some traditional Middle Eastern music; it's less than three minutes long and I could do it in my sleep. It even works as a duet. I just have to figure out from R's notes what moves she has taught them and go from there.
Right now the sun is shining and hail is pelting the windows. My mother-in-law says it's the devil beating his wife.
Let the storm blow wilder now
I love the way you ask me how...
They shook the pub, rocked the foundation, knocked me out of breath. It's been a while since they performed, and they've refined it, honed it and sharpened it so it hits you between the eyes, resounds in your chest, makes you want to wiggle your hiney and tap your toes.
Grasshopper plays the best songs, and only a few covers, but even those they made into something new. JJ likes to sing sad songs that touch you just right between your heart and your throat and if I'm not careful she could make me cry. Which is somewhat ironic because I know most of all she wants people to get up and dance.
Tebone is a fine songwriter and a true musician, and he has quite a few tricks up his sleeve. I love his songs Gaugin, Count on Me, and The Golden Mean. The lyrics he writes are delightfully existential without being sappy, and the tempo rolls them through and back again. I had called the band "country swing" but they're definitely a rock band with a full solid sound and a sweet honey singing the blues.
Most indelible in my mind is one song that gave me a wild feeling last night. I wrote some lyrics for them a while ago, and Tebone put those words to music.
And they played it last night.
It's not the first time I've heard them play it, but it is the first time the hep cat girl in glasses at the table behind me said to her droogies, "It's the song!" and rattled the empty beer glasses on the table, shook the bench with their excitement, sang along for the whole song. I didn't know what to think. I don't think I breathed the whole duration of the song, which Tebone calls Keep the Time. I guess the flushed cheeks and tingling fingers is embodiment of delight mixed with a touch of pride, but if it is pride at all, then it's similar to a honey bee pollenating a flower to make fruit.
I think I just called myself a bee.
Anyway.
Incredulous I turned to S and said, "They like it. They like that song." He laughed at me. Later I learned that the cool cats at the table beside us take studio mixing classes from Grasshopper's drummer, and they've been working on the song in class. Which explains how they know all the words. I wrote those words. And I'd be hard-pressed to remember them all. The experience flattened me out. Boom, there I am.
One of the phrases in the song includes "come on we've got some Cain to raise." After the show I climbed up on stage to hug my goodbyes and I mentioned to Tebone how S had talked about "raising Cain," and how he had found the true phrase to be "razing cane," like cane breaks in the South, big boggy fields of cane that gets cut to the ground. Interesting how the term gained a separate and different meaning through common speech, unaffiliated with the context, or the written term.
Tonight I have to work on a lesson plan for tomorrow's two hour class I'm sub-teaching. I asked S for advice, since he spent a year teaching photography and journalism to "at-risk youth" aka juvenile delinquents, and his suggestion was to "work their asses." But the ladies in the beginning bellydance class range from hot little 15 year old bodies to plump great-grandmothers, and the one thing in common is their desire to take a fun class and maybe learn something while doing it. I know I could work their asses, I could make them shimmy until they dropped, but I think instead I'll teach a simple choreography to some traditional Middle Eastern music; it's less than three minutes long and I could do it in my sleep. It even works as a duet. I just have to figure out from R's notes what moves she has taught them and go from there.
Right now the sun is shining and hail is pelting the windows. My mother-in-law says it's the devil beating his wife.
Let the storm blow wilder now
I love the way you ask me how...
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