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12.6.2003 Sorry folks, due to weather and the inability of the other act to make it up north, the Monday show has been cancelled! Does anybody have a real big living room?! Let's have the show at YOUR house! (imagine the dough you'd make selling beer!!!) I'm serious, I wanna play, dammit! Hey, last nights Losers Lounge was a blast! Who sat at the booth next to the stage and had a GREAT time??!! Hanson. Yep, all three of 'em, and I'll have to admit.....they were REALLY nice guys! I also want you to guess who got his picture taken with them for this website. Oh......you know it! Coming soon! Congrats to Joe McGinty and the whole Loser's crew (there is still 4 nights left of the anniversary shows, I , however, could only do the one night due to my schedule) It was really swingin'.......man....so many great singers....Matthew Caws from Nada Surf, Ed Rodgers, Laura Dawn, Joe Hurley ROCKIN' on Walk On By (like you've NEVER heard it before!) Great time had by all......hope to see y'all soon, and hey........someone lend me a living room for Monday night! Cooly Moe T 12.4.2003 Greetings, fine fattened people of the Holiday Girth. Hope your Thanksgiving went as well as ours did here, with Ma and H Clark laying out a feast for just about 100 folks! Yes, there actually are a couple leftovers (food type, not party-goer type...the last one of those left at about 3:30 am!) Here's the news.....first off : Got an email from Blender.Com (the swanky music division of Maxim Magazine, I believe!) and guess what? "Cross-Eyed and Bow-Legged" made it onto Senior Editor Gene Newman's Top 5 (along with Bobby Dylan, Graham Parker, Iggy and the Stooges and Blink 182) Woo Hoo!! Still wringing life outta this record yet! www.blender.com/editor/ So, Friday, Dec. 5th (today for most of you people) I will be performing at the Losers Lounge 10th Anniversary Show, which is a Tribute to the great Burt Bacharach!! I'll be doing one of my all time fave Burt rave-ups (as done by Gene Pitney) "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" www.loserslounge.com As I've said before, these shows always sell out!! (this show is five nights, but I can only do one night, which is Friday! Be there!) It's at the Fez , under Time Cafe! Then, Monday, Dec. 8th, I'll be doing a solo show at Union Pool in Williamsburg (484 Union, one block from the Lorimer St. stop...it's the second stop in BillysBurg...5 minutes from the city! verrrrry cool place!) 718-384-1664 I don't have all the details on the other acts ( I know one is a good friend of Kevn Kinney's, and that's good enough for me!) It'll be an early one for you geezers. So, check out the site or maybe I'll annoy you with one more email with times and acts....it'd be great to see y'all there! 11.4.2003 Hey Folks! Thanks to all who came out to Arlene's on Saturday...it rocked Acoustic!! Go pick up the Daily News (for you NY'ers), there's a picture of yours truly (in full teeth clenching rock star mode), and one of George Gilmore (in full Baptist Hellfire Preaching mode) from the show. Uh, page 41........I'll try to get it on the site later.... And hey......they didn't airbrush my face...it's just blurry!! Woo Hoo!!
10.29.2003 Yes, we have a gig on Saturday!! Go to the bottom of this for details...orrrrrrr....educate yourself on the way down!! It's that time of the year, Autumn, when The Creeps are out.....skinny, sickly, pale.....wandering aimlessly in the night, in search of something, ANYTHING !! Torturedl, pitiful, dressed in black from head to toe....staying in the shadows, avoiding the light at any cost. And that's just on Avenue A, and as long as Mommy and Daddy are paying their rents, they can be that way!! Halloween. Always my favorite. You can ask my Mom when she comes out from Illinois for Thanksgiving. Sometime in August I'd start figuring it out what I wanted to be....hmmmmmmm. I'd look at all my plastic Aurora Monster Models on the shelf....nahhh, too easy, though classic. I'd already won third place as Evel Knievel in 3rd grade in the Dekalb Halloween Parade....the ingenious use of a Clorox Bleach bottle on my bike as a gas tank clinched it. I won a dollar and 3 candy bars. Ahhhh, the sweet taste of victory and fame. It would be my last. AAAANYway, Halloween was it. I'd go down to Grants, or Woolco and check out the glorious rubber Monster masks. Then to the candy aisle to see what kind of booty we'd be reaping (yeah, the candy kind). See, candy was a very serious thing to a kid. It was a currency, a drug, a fight resolver,....it was important. You KNEW what houses tended to give out what on Halloween. You mapped it out in your head. Sometimes on paper. Oh, I could give you a list of what kind of candy NOT to give kids. Anything maple (what am I, your Grandma??), coconut...(hey, it might have been a big TREAT in the 30's, but not in the 70's, my friend),even if it is covered in something (usually, ugh, dark chocolate). Raisins? forget it-you give me raisins and you'll be picking them out of your screen door for days. I decided, for the first time on this gig(?) email thing, to have a guest "interview". So I called my brother Jim, whom some of you may have met him at the last Arlene's show. He was there with my punk rock nephew Brian. I said "hey Jim, do you remember Hallowe......" and before I could finish, he was goin' off on it. Ladies and Gentleman, my brother Jim -"Yeah, it ain't like it used to be. No siree. We took it to a new level when we were kids. It was an art. We would start right after school. The minute we left school, since we still had our costumes on from the stupid little pageant at school (you could always tell which kids had mom's who had time to make elaborate costumes, and the ones who just slapped some charcoal on their faces and said "honey, you're a bum"...the Jehovah Witness kids were easy to spot.....they wore a shirt and tie, well, like they did every day) where everybody would walk around and look at what everybody else was wearing. I remember this kid, Sam, who dressed like a woman. His left breast was leaking by third period from all the kids, uh, abusing it all morning." I asked him about the candy issue...well....he still seems to have a chip (not chocolate) on his shoulder about it.." Oh man, Wacky Wafers....don't eat the apple ones...they taste like Clorox (how does he know what Clorox tastes like???- Tom) and they give you bad breath. Mary Janes? Yeah, like kids liked those things. Hang on to 'em for maybe 30 years then maybe....Candy Corn? Come on, only parents buy those things. Noone eats 'em! Anything black licorice, just hand right over to Dad. Fruit? A) Hey, I don't eat it at home, I don't eat it at school, I'm NOT gonna eat it if you give it to me...B) It'll probably come right back at you somehow C) Who wants to carry around 5 pounds of FRUIT taking up valuable candy space??!! @#$!! people who gave me fruit. And those "Fun Size" candy bars??? Who says small is FUN? Big is fun. Pffff...fun size (Man, I didn't know how strongly he felt about this stuff! It's o.k. Jim, let it out-Tom) I remember the guy that would give us unsharpened pencils. His yard was filled with pencils. Nice try, buddy. There was the guy that would put in those little Jesus pamphlets with the candy...again, nice try. (Jim then yells to his wife, Cindy, and asks what the worst things she remembers getting and I had to agree...those little peanut butter things wrapped in either orange or black wrappers...I hated those things then. I , however, just ate a whole bag full last week!!! I'm old!!)There was a teacher we had to stop trick or treating. She insisted on everybody coming into her house..she'd give us cider and warm donuts, take our pictures, wasting valuable T & T time!! Hell, that's probably not even legal to do these days. I think we invented the double bagging thing. Always thinking. Forget those little sissy plastic pumkins. Then we just switched to pillow cases...fill it up, go home , unload, maybe change costume, then head out again. Don't take your bike, you'll only LOSE time, and don't take the fat kid, he'll slow you down (Christ, Jim......did we actually have the same parents??!!- Tom) My little (Hah!) brother Tim still searches for the ideal house. One that gives out either tater tots or pork products. (Alright, alright, settle down, Jim...I wouldn't have called if it was gonna be such an issue... I just wanted to see if you remembered anything........man.....) Ladies and gentleman.......that was my brother Jim. Let's all piss him off and send him an email: james.clark@hillmangroup.com hee hee. One year we ran out of candy toward the end of the night at the Clark house, so my Dad, being the wise guy he was, took one of my rubber masks (last years model, at that), turned it inside out (hey, I never thought of that...it was WAY scarier that way!!) got an old rain coat, stuck a pillow in the back for a hump, and answered the door that way. He started reaching into the kids trick or treat bags (that is, the kids that stuck around long enough, most of the others shot off the porch leaving long trails of candy behind....our front yard looked like Willy Wonka puked in it!!!) and taking out handfuls of candy, grumbling and snarling. My little brother Tim spent this time hiding behind a chair in the den, cowering (nice, Dad!). Soon, our candy bowl was replenished, and he did those kid's teeth a favor (and ours, a disservice) . My Mom made her famous homemade popcorn balls one year (with red dye in the syrup....bloody popcorn balls!) and our neighborhood trouble maker (who was about 15 at the time) kept going home and changing his costume (slightly), coming back for more minutes later. Mom finally caught on and said "Neil, go home". My older brothers would go out the night before Halloween and really rake it in! You'd be surprised at how many people would fall for that..."oh, that's tonight???!!!". In our house, though, most bizarre thing about Halloween wasn't the ghouls and goblins. It was my brother Mitch. Mitch had wayyyy more control over his candy intake than the rest of us. He'd get his huge stash of candy, stick it in his safe, yes, safe that he had previously received for his birthday (yes, he was ten, and wanted a safe)...and wait. And wait. And by the time we were down to the worst candy. The Maple, raisin, coconut kind....out came the card table. Open for business. He'd line up the Snickers , the Milky Ways, The Jawbreakers, The Bottle Caps, the Double Bubble, the Jolly Ranchers, the chick o' stix, tootsie rolls, laffy taffy, smarties, etc. .....and sell it to us. SELL it to us. I must've made him a small fortune "borrowing" money from Mom to buy the candy he got for free. No freebies for anyone, except for that one year that the National Enquirer ran the story about the rat turds in Clark bars....he gave all those to my Dad. Who proceeded to eat them. Happily.
10.24.2003 |
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