Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

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invoke the infield fly rule!

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Hmm.

So, in a bit of Philly surfing the other night I stopped by Philly Future, which featured a link to Fork You, a Philly food blog. And, in checking out the personal blog of its proprietor Scott McNulty – Blankbaby – I found myself thinking, Gee, that names sounds awfully familiar. I wonder how long he’s been around?

The answer to that question is two months longer than me. Which presents a conundrum: is Scott the longest-running blogger in Philadelphia?

Technically, yes – he made 11 posts prior to the launch of this fine establishment. However, said flagship posts were made from Yonkers, New York, not Philadelphia.

Now, let it be known that I am not one to hang on to my tagline via imagination or technicality – after all, that’s why I turned against Ms. Clinton earlier this year. At the same time, I don’t know that it’s fair for any carpetbagger with a long-standing blog to just roll into town and usurp me.

I’m really not sure what to make of this development. Have I been legitimately dethroned? Do we share the title, in different capacities? Have I found my nemesis?

I’m thinking I might have to drop by Fork You Live next Saturday to have a little duel showdown thumb war chat with this “Scott.”

Arcati Crisis and friends Stand Up For Kids

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So, before all of that introspection crap started happening I was actually having an amazing weekend.

The story picks up mere seconds after my Friday post, which was interrupted by Dante’s appearance to ferry me and my various PA equipment to The Dark Horse on South Street for a benefit for Stand Up For Kids.

Stand Up For Kids is a nationally recognized and acclaimed charity that supports homeless and at-risk kids and teens. They offer many levels of service, from counseling children at risk for leaving home, to conducting outreach to kids on the streets, to staffing and maintaining outreach centers where teens can get help in obtaining a birth certificate or finding an apartment.

The Philadelphia chapter of Stand Up For Kids needs support to provide that full complement of services. Their benefit raised money towards supplies for their outreach packets – like juice boxes, deodorant, or sweatshirts – as well as for an outreach van that would allow them to be more mobile in their efforts.

Arcati Crisis has played a slew of shows this year, but the SUFK benefit ranks high amongst our favorites.

First, The Dark Horse Pub is a fantastic bar – one of my favorites in all of Philly. It’s just north of South on 2nd – across from Headhouse. The pub is comprised of multiple rooms that each have their own personality, all clean and comfortable and serving delicious food along with their drinks.

Second, the bill – we played with a lineup of people who we would go out of our way to see. Seriously. It was such a profoundly humbling experience to be listed in the middle of the people whose songs I hum while I walk down the street.

Joshua Popejoy, a model of sharp hooks and specific strumming, and increasingly my go-to for all discussions of mixing. Bill Butler, an outstanding songwriter and one of my favorite Philly vocalists, and the director of the charity The Philadelphia Sessions. Dante Bucci, a virtuosic percussionist who has transformed a zen instrument into a songwriter’s treasure, and who can engineer a PA solution for any space. Jon Glaubitz, an enormously talented guitarist and songwriter with a chameleonic ability to blend in anywhere – no matter if it’s a coffee shop or a rock club. And Andra Taylor, an arresting new voice on the Philly scenes, her hypnotically circular guitar riffs evoking a prism of contemporaries from Patti Griffin to Madonna. And, we made new friends – with David Miller and Jeremy Davis, performers we surely will see again in the future.

However, beyond all of those pleasures was the charity itself. SUFK volunteer, event organizer, and AC-fan Nina found the right venue to turn a gathering into a celebration, found the right music to fill it, and then packed the room to the very limit of its capacity.

Throughout the night Nina sent SUFK volunteers up to the microphone to share their stories about the organization while we set up for the next artist on the bill. The one that really caught me came after our performance – maybe because we were still trembling from a powerful closing swing through “What’ll I Say” and “Apocalyptic Love Song,” or maybe just because she was so very compelling.

She spoke about how she helped to found the Philadelphia chapter four years ago, and how at the time it was just a handful of people who wanted to make an impact. She spoke about how we all pass homeless children every day without realizing that we see them, partially because they so desperately don’t want to be homeless that they will do anything to blend in. She spoke about how – four years later – she is so energized by the enthusiasm of her fellow volunteers and the changes they effect in the world, but that they aren’t enough – they need more support and more volunteers to truly change the streets of Philadelphia.

When she was through I found myself with tears welling in my eyes.

All of these things we do take time. Four years ago Arcati Crisis was an in-joke name for our studio recordings. Four years ago Dante Bucci didn’t know what a hang drum was, and Andra Taylor had no idea she’d be living in Philadelphia.

In that four years we’ve devoted to ourselves, Stand Up For Kids has devoted itself to others, and because of our collective commitment we were able to come together last Friday to share and celebrate positive music and a positive message. We came together into a room as strangers to each other and left with a common cause.

That is the best kind of gig to play, and after the clouds of my weekend introspection clear on a bright Monday morning that is the memory that I’m going to take with me. Even if our music only made SUFK twenty dollars it was worth every minute of playing. If I could raise a thousand I would play for days at a time, stopping only to breathe.

“In the beginning, it is always dark.”

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Have you ever watched The NeverEnding Story? You know how the book seems to bleed into Sebastian’s life, with him running afoul of frightening taxidermy during an encounter with G’mork.

Today my life is something like that.

Ever since I I first transferred from Blogger to WordPress in the midst of the first NaBloPoMo (a feat I still can’t believe I engineered), I’ve also been moving backwards though the almost 3000 posts that came before, categorizing them into tidy chunks that tell the stories of my life.

I’m determined to at least categorize back into the year 2000 by the end of the month, and in my surge of personal excavation I’ve become firmly entrenched in the “Behind the Music” portion of my life – recording a seminal album while going through a horrific breakup and a nearly deadly illness. Flirting with potential entanglements Oh, and drinking a lot.

That old, unhappy, unsure me seems so alien in the present day. To catch all of the themes in those old posts I’ve had to do more than read them – I’ve had to put myself in their place. How else to remember that I hatched my plot to break up with Selina as an allegory of why I shouldn’t pull an all-nighter?

In the process of getting into character I feel like those old posts have been slowly transforming my present day life. I Trio “Will It Ever Come,” telling the story of how it was written, and then find myself re-reading the post about recording it in the studio. Yesterday I re-read one lamenting that it was hard to tell if you have a fever when you’re under a spotlight, and last night I replayed the experience at our benefit show – half sick and half in-the-moment.

This evening I have a tickle in my chest that’s scarily reminiscent of the beginnings of my legendary bout of bronchitis and pneumonia that I’m about to be rereading.

The coincidence is starting to become frightening, if only because I’ve now crossed the threshold into the worst month of my life – the torturous rehearsal process for Good Woman of Setzuan, nearly failing classes, the depths of my relationship, deaths in the family.

If this was really The NeverEnding Story I would be able to reach back into the plot to shake me out of the stupor. I remember being five and jumping up and down on the bed in my father’s hotel room, screaming unintelligibly along with Bastian as he inserted himself into Fantasia, first interrupting Atreyu’s conversation with Morla, and later by naming the princess “Moon Child.”

Or, maybe I already have – without knowing it – and the only reason that younger me broke free of his darkness was because I am sitting here, happy and healthy, willing him to get on with his life.

Make You Feel Real Blue

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A few weeks ago Lindsay, Dante Bucci, and Bill McConney were playing a tiny living-room style show in a just-off-South coffee shop called Cafe Grindstone that had an entire vegan menu and a shelf of random used textbooks to peruse.

As I put back the book that taught me that pigeons are superstitious a flyer on a lower shelf caught my eye with a familiar logo – Alexandra Day.

I picked up the flyer and scanned it. A Monday night show at Tritone on South Street – not a twenty minute walk from my house – with one of the best songwriters in Philadelphia. Doesn’t take much convincing.

Then I continued to read. She would be splitting a bill with a band whose name I didn’t recognize, who would play the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

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Improbably, I currently name as Blue my second favorite album of all time. That puts it above albums that I played on repeat for entire days of my youth. Albums that taught me what music was.

How, then, can that one LP – that I didn’t hear a single song from until college – come to eclipse all else in my collection?

It’s the color of it. Blue is rooted in a palette of different blues, explicit and implied: midnight sky outside of a plane window on “This Flight Tonight;” the melancholy emotional blues on “All I Want” and “My Old Man;” the twinkling blue tinge of frost on “River;” and the blue tv screen light in “A Case of You.” It is music that makes me see color, every single time I hear it.

It’s also the sureness of it – the way threads of blueness and yearning to get back to California are woven through the album. The sureness of Joni’s indelible performance, and the perfection of the tracking. In my opinion it is nearly the ultimate in a singer-songwriter album, and if you are assembling an album you ought to spend some serious time listening to Blue to understand how to make its formula your own.

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I mentioned the upcoming show to as many people as would listen, but I have other promotional duties as well, and I couldn’t seem to hook anyone with the play-through of the Joni album. I wound up tired and alone Monday night, installed in the back corner of the Tritone wrapped in a jacket and scarf, sipping cranberry juice.

Alexandra came by my table, her usual whirlwind of energy and vinyl pants, but she immediately caught on that I was at an unavoidable ebb.

“This is a good bar to just sit in,” she advised. “I’ve come here many times just to sit in the corner. And, you’re really going to like the band.”

The band, I learned, was Ellipsis – a local jazz trio. They assemble the second Monday of each month with as many additional players as necessary to make it through the entirety of an album. In the past two months I had missed a swing through Jeff Buckley’s “Grace” and Neil Young’s “Harvest.” And, Alexandra said the word in the room was that next month’s artist would be Bjork.

My excitement was paired with skepticism that any band could replicate the magic of Blue, especially a jazz band who I discovered in short order did not have a guitarist: piano, upright bass, drum kit, and hand percussion, plus a young jazz vocalist. Joni Mitchell’s best album without a guitar?, I mused. Is there any point?

The band set up a projector beside the stage that shone a series of images – the cover of the album, long dusty fields, empty starless nights – across their bodies and onto the wall to their right. Without much preface, they began “All I Really Want,” possibly my favorite Joni song.

My skepticism continued for a verse – the arrangement on this one was measured mimicry, and the vocalist was treading delicately around Joni’s words. Then we reached my favorite point of the song, exuberant in new love even as it plumbs its unsure depths:

All I really really want our love to do
Is to bring out the best in me and in you
I want to talk to you, I want to shampoo you
I want to renew you again and again
Applause, applause – life is our cause
When I think of your kisses
My mind see-saws
Do you see – do you see – do you see
How you hurt me baby
So I hurt you too
Then we both get so blue

I hadn’t noticed, but as the verse continued I leaned farther and farther from my seat, as if I thought the song could just reach out and envelop me. By the time Samantha Rise reached that melancholy pinnacle, “we both get so blue,” my ass was barely in the chair. I was in love and wrapped in the color of her voice.

The show that followed is one of the best I’ve ever witnessed. A silkier, surer version of “My Old Man” that sent a chill through my body. The quiet menace of the quickly descending fifth in the b-section of the otherwise pretty “Little Green.” A raucous, celebratory turn through “Carey,” stripped down to it’s upright bass and percussion and then built again (here I exchanged a glance of incredulous amazement with Alex and she just laughed and turned back to watch the show). A perfect, absolutely verbatim rendition of “Blue.” A saucy, jazzy version of “California” that transformed directly into a racing, free-form take on “This Flight Tonight” complete with scatting. “River,” bare of it’s jingle bells and with a frostier pulse. A subtle, measured read on the oft-covered “Case of You,” possibly the best lost-love song ever written. And, the sometimes superfluous “Last Time I Saw Richard” transformed into a incandescent elegy for the entire album, although in its narrative it perhaps comes first – her old man gone and married to some chick who skated around on the iced over river.

At the end I was breathless and teary. I witnessed something unique and transformative, unusual and terrific. I saw all of the colors that Joni painted into the album, and so many more.

It was a show that should have played to a packed club, or even on the main stage of the Kimmel Center, and I was watching it from the back corner of what is effectively a living room with a bar and a stage along with twenty, maybe thirty fans.

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I’m inexplicably nervous to talk to other musicians, a condition that’s becoming increasingly paradoxical as I play more frequently. I am one, so shouldn’t I understand how to approach one?

Samantha – delicate and composed on the stage – was twinkling and approachable off it it. I think I heard her boasting to another fan that she could defeat him at any Mario-based game. Eventually I noticed her by herself at the bar and plunged in.

“That was so good. Blue is one of my favorite records, ever. You really did it justice.”

“Wow, thank you. It’s one of mine too!”

And so we just talked, just for a minute or two – the easy chatter of two people who love music. She shook my hand and jotted down her information on the pad I had been sketching out my next Trios on, and parted with a nod and a smile, settling in to enjoy Alexandra’s equally amazing set.

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Three days later and I still can’t get her and Ellipsis out of my head. In that last post I wondered if I still saw colors in the world, but Samantha answered that question neatly. Sometimes you just need someone to show you where to look.

Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants

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This Trio almost wound up being titled “Primer” because of the following three quotes:

On being primed:
If you’ve ever read an interview with a songwriter … you’ll hear a repeated theme: that you have to constantly be writing, and constantly be revising and playing. It seems sortof counter-intuitive, because at some point you’ve written a certain amount of material, and you feel like you should be playing or rehearsing that material. But … when you have a new idea it’s much more easy to capture that idea.

It’s funny that you can apply any kind of science to songwriting. You spend a lot of years as a songwriter thinking it’s just lightning that strikes you, but there are things you can do to make yourself more of a lightning rod.

All This Time
When the chorus came in my head I literally walked to the piano and played the entire song in one go and wrote the lyrics. It all happened in 30 minutes. … Effectively the whole song came at once. It was because I was primed. That’s the challenge, you know? You have to be working on songs to have other songs that work.

Will It Ever Come?
Much like “All This Time,” it came at this point that I was very primed, in the summer of 2000. I wrote a lot of what are still my favorite songs at that time … songs that I really still play very frequently. And this one was kindof in the middle, and it just got ignored. It was at the very beginning of Crushing Krisis and I blogged the lyrics. [Ed note: Literally; I wrote them out in nine minutes in the Blogger window. They were my 81st post.]

The next year when I went into the recording studio … I can honestly say I don’t know that ever played it before. And we did it in one take.

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Lyrics and chords for “Time Is Running Out” are behind the cut. [Read more…] about Trio Season 6 – Suite #6: Instants