Things I'm up to:
- The show with Jeremy Fisher @ the Commodore was so much fun for everyone that Pat Steward & I have been asked to do more of the same. There is some clandestine footage at this address.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=NXCMbwXZ6kQ
Jeremy Fisher & his Tourettes will be seen on the Craig Ferguson Show August 2oth or 21st...not sure which right now...and at an unamed LA location on the 21st.
- the Colin James & Craig Northey dates are shaping up so I'll have those for you soon. Sorry to all yuo who have asked about specifics. I will be with the Colin James band for the Thunder Bay Blues fest July 7 and in Morden MB on August 24th.
- the reason I can't do Colin's July dates is that I am in Montreal @ "Just For Laughs" with Kevin MacDonald's "Hammy & the Kids" show and with the "Kids in the Hall"
- Crystal Zevon has recently published an excellent book about the life of one of my friends and mentors Warren Zevon. I will be talking a bit about Warren on Greg Godovitz's Toronto radio show "Rock Talk" July 7th. Newstalk 1010 CFRB is where it will be...I think it is 7pm but I would check into it using your web skills.
I've put up my blanket gig schedule in the "performances" section. The fall looks varied and exciting. I thought I'd give you a "heads-up" bulletin for this week.
June 21, 2007 - Jeremy Fisher @ the Commodore
I will be playing bass and singing with Jeremy Fisher as he opens for O.A.R. at Vancouver's Commodore Ballroom. Pat Steward is on drums. Jeremy is amazing. Use the internet (youtube is good) to check him out.
Dirty creatures. Wasps, ants, cockroaches, and rats. Stinging nettles, poison ivy, bracken and milfoil. Mudshark, bullhead, leach, jellyfish and the red tide. Rub you the wrong way. Other species key in on you. Rat steals the starling's egg and scurries into the thorny brush. Starling has no recourse but to scream from her nest in the eaves. Pest on pest violence. The rat emerges out the other side and, with wisps of yolk on his black whiskers, squeezes under the tight chain link diamond onto the wide litter strewn easement by the shoulder of the throbbing expressway. The grayish dirty gravel is warm and rubbery. The rat raises his forelegs up to sniff the ether of petroleum exhaust. Bang. The young eagle hits then is up flying low over the traffic with the heavy rat still wiggling in its talons. Fifteen crows explode up like a gothic firework and tail him in wide formation. Catastrophe has a shape. Cop cars on the O.J. white Bronco. They want in on the action but nobody knows what to do just yet. Badass alpha being demands respect. The eagle lights on top of a telephone pole on the far side of the highway. He keeps the rat pinned down and takes a moment to calmly scan the horizon. The crows settle quickly on the adjacent wires. Clowns to the left of me. Jokers to the right. In the middle an intensely distant gaze. Mythical beauty rests in stark contrast to the mundane and polluted surroundings. Ice white crown, bright yellow eyes and piston hard, bible black feathers. Top feeder on bottom feeder. We are repulsed by one and revere the other. The power differential between the two beings is so great that the eagle projects no sense of effort while the large rat reads the exact opposite way. The rat is an odyssey of struggle condensed to the "Coles Notes" version. He knows that something has pierced him clean through and severed something necessary to life. Consciousness has taken a sharp turn. The jig is up. The coup de gras comes quickly as the bird pecks downward between its feet with a partially opened beak. The hooked upper portion is through the rat's skull and into its cerebral cortex then back up and out faster than any man could ever punch or any horse could ever kick. It is so fast that the motion almost never happened. What later falls to the thorny bracken below is for the crows, ants and wasps. The starling finds a thin, clean, rat rib bone and takes it back to shore up its nest. Dirty creatures