post-week party friday 9/25. bry-bry with babes @ bukowski's offa boylston in boston's back bay. it's a tough life, but somebody's gotta live it. .

posted: sunday sept 20 @ 11:00 p.m.

web stuff by day, cambridge clubs by nite, y'all. some call it boston. i call it heaven. rather than reinvent the wheel, i'll post the info/schedule i sent to a certain johnny-joe-joe to let y'all know how i'll be kickin it in beantown with the groovin' new shooze. look for a new posting toozday a.m.

monday 9/21: cantab lounge
cantab lounge @ boston.sidewalk.com

taking a lunch break from the workshop. rather than eat, bry-bry checks his e-mail and gets served up some good food from chef megan, who met bry-bry at cantab lounge last nite. she reports to the core crew:

aw shucks, dahlin. really. you shouldn't have.

props to megan and july for the appearance and support - and props to peter and geoff and glenn for takin' me to school.

okay, back to web land.

peace, b.

toozday 9/22: club passim
clubpassim.com

good ol' club passim. nice room. nice listening room. brutal, in some ways, that they only give you one song, but it's a good thing in the most important way - with an average of 40 people on the list each nite, what choice do you have? any more than one song per person and they wouldn't close shop 'til 2 a.m.

i did front the cash for a mixdown of the performance onto digital tape (i did 'six' again). depending on how it sounds, i think i'll soon for two-song nite (where they cutoff at the first 20-25 people) to grab another DAT of my performance. then i'll have the high(er) quality 3-song live demo i've been lusting for so i can starting shopping clubs in new york and boston. maybe even put a low(er) quality dub of 'mama' or sumpin' as a double-secret bonus track. i think i'll go with two more new songs, which may include 'smiling' and the now five-day-old 'one-four.' i polished up the lyrics to 'one-four,' which turns the 23rd psalm downside-up, while simultaneously taking notes on xml during tuesday's tutorial. notebook pages look ridiculous. the song itself? thematically similar to sundays. drop-d tuning. think the bible as the king james joyce version.

also: ran into my buddy jessie, whom i'd only met a coupla times at caffe lena earlier this year. good player, roots player, blues in the traditional sense. the down-home, singin' on the front of the porch son of a sharecropper sense. the real sense. last time i saw him, we'd finished our sets at lena and were just hanging out front on the sidewalk, showing each other riffs. after doing a lot of traveling 'round the u.s. and in europe, he's settled on the berklee school of music. did the riff-trade thing again tonite: went into the green room cuz he wanted to know the rhythm i was kickin' during the spoken word part of 'six.' 'really?' i asked - but then i played it and realized it's much more screwy and syncopated than i imagined: it hits on the '2' and the 'and' of the '3', and sometimes on the 1 and other times on the 'and' of the '4.'

huh?

psyched to get that tape in the mail and come back for some mo'. (hobes - psyched for some mixing and mastering?)

til then - stay black y'all, b.

wenzday 9/23: kendall cafe
thekendall.com

chilling in the corner early early early ('round 6:30) over fried shrimp and jumbalaya. mmmmmm-goooood. small room. tiny room. as the sidewalk site put it, 'somebody's living room.' but a good room. good vibe. until the host threw down the sign up list - suddenly turned into filene's basement. total mob scene. lots of pushing and fighting to get to the sheet. i spotted a pen, started to write in slot 6, was pushed away, so i had to settle for slot 10. ugh.

go back to my seat and notice glenn pettit, whom i'd met at the cantab lounge monday nite. he'd gone right after me and had claimed into the microphone that he wasn't sure how he could follow me - but follow me he did with very strong lyrics and intricate guitar work. a heluva player. i was psyched to see him again, talk a little more shop. apparently he was part of lach's anti-folk/punk-folk scene in the east village from way back in the day, back when people like michelle shocked and ani difranco were just a coupla no-names kickin' a two-song set like everybody else at monday nite's anti-hoot. he's working on releasing his own cd in december, and i can't wait to hear it. played me a tune of his called 'sundays' with some really strong lyrics - he's very influenced by bruce cockburn.

i could go on, but lemme just say it was cool to talk and hang with glenn, and i was psyched to meet someone of his calibre who was genuinely interested in my stuff. but, that's why i go to these things - to meet people, to learn.

kid dynomite jj showed up soon after to order up his own plate of fun, and a brew to boot. then marlena and steve showed up, and whaddya know, it's a party.

the lineup went really quite quickly. super fast even. nice pace, nice momentum, until the big surprise - a featured act, dogwood moon. they were great, we had a lot of fun listening to them. good duo, you should definitely check 'em out (they've got a tune on the soundtrack to the soon-to-be-released flick full tilt boogie).

crowd's attention span a bit diluted by the time i got up there, but most of the ears pricked up as i kicked into 'sundays,' and 'six' just demands to be listened to ('six maids milk a milkman milk a mailman junk mail junk bond milk michael milken'). great to play to a room of people who know who michael milken is (and danny moon, too, heh-heh). in retrospect, i shoulda started out with 'six,' but what the hell ya only live once.

still a good time, and a good nite. and sooper props to j.j. and marlena and steve - and my new buddy glenn - for the support.

quick and absolutely unrelated question: are there any women involved with web design who aren't attractive? or in all of boston, for that matter?

peace y'all, b. (still ugly after all these years but wearing it well just like the shooze)

thurzday 9/24: cafe NOho

it coulda been good.

went for a run into cambridge this mornin' to get more familiar with the way to cafe soho, and wouldn't ya know, it is now the ole mexican grill. no wonder it wasn't in the phoenix listings. hmmmm.

search for another open mic close-by on a thursday nite proved futile. so it was a no go. after the last conference session ('round six o' clockish), i went back to the room and ran through 'one-four' a coupla times to an audience of one - my l'il grey tape recorder. it's gettin' tighter, but memorizing the spoken word final verse is gonna be tough, since it's based on the sounds of words, words that collectively mean nothing (e.g., the line 'yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of death, i shall fear no evil' becomes ' yo they iraq throw them volley eave them showdown if darth, ice show far nor orville.' yikes.) after a coupla run-throughs of that, i called mario and shot the shit for about an hour. always good. and later i met up with supermodel cindy ferrari for a nice late-nite din-din on newbury street. fun fun fun.

not being able to play in public was a bit of a letdown - i was fired up to do some more of the new tunes - but i've still come away from this trip with more of a sense of the boston music scene. better yet, i've come away with the beginnings of a new demo tape of bry-bry live. by january i'll be using it to start shopping new york and boston clubs for bonafide gigs. on my last day in beantown i started trying out samplers and beat boxes after being pushed to the limit by the crazy cool tunes we heard pumping thru the speakers at bukowski's on friday nite (hey megan - make yo ass bigga babeeee!).

hopefully i'll be in a studio soon to finally finally finally get some of these songs onto a cd. it's looking like acoustic guitar, funky bass, sampled drums, and vocals. not much else. cuz ya don't need much else.

stay black y'all,
b.

all stuff copyright 1999 bryan paul thomas
bryanthomas.com