Are You Dave?

…Deanna Hunt of This Is It! Productions e-mailed me today and asked if the Lemons wanted to play at the opening of the new Clearview Cinemas theater here in Hoboken in October. The Lemons unanimously said “heck yeah!”

So now my gig calendar looks like this:

• October 10 - Telemundo taping
• October 11 - In-Store concert at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Triangle, NYC
• October 18 - Jubilee Day - Benefit for Jubilee Center
• October 24 - Clearview Cinema opening gala
• October 24 - private party in Hoboken
• October 30 - Halloween party for Garden Street Music (in exchange for studio time!)
• November 15 - Possible Fuzzy Lemons album pre-release fund-raiser
• December 4 - Fuzzy Friday (tentative)
• December 5 - Dave and Howie’s annual holiday show at the Museum
• December 11 - Fuzzy Friday (tentative)
• December 16 - Garden Street Music holiday party
• December 18 - Fuzzy Friday holiday concert (tentative)

…it’s official, the Fuzzy Lemons have been asked back to perform on a Telemundo show on October 10. Location TBA. We have 2 weeks to translate a couple of our songs into Spanish! ¡Ayudame!

Dana, Kipley and I are back at Garden Street Music again today from noon until 10:00 p.m. So far I’ve waxed my guitar part for “To The Moon,” and Dana and Kipley have both put down some tracks as well. Slowly, piece by piece, we’re building an amazingly awesome rock album. In fact, I think there are at least two songs “done,” no more to record, just awaiting the mixing process.

It’s 4:00 and we’re shifting gears. There are 7 giggly pre-teen girls in the lobby, recruited by Dana to sing (well, shout) the chorus of “Girls Rock!” I’ll let you know how it goes…

6:00 p.m.

The girls did a great job on “Girls Rock” and then they shouted “Skunks In My Shoes” for that track, too. Kipley did his last few acoustic bits, and Dana just finished the vocal for “Baby Brother Blues.” Now she’s doing the saxophone solo, and Kipley is phoning in a sushi order. I’m hoping to step up and do my guitar part for “Baby Brother Blues” next, and then that song will be in the can.

9:00 p.m.

Whew! It’s been a long day we’ve been knocking things off of our musical to-do lists, but oh there’s such a long way to go! I did my guitar for “Baby Brother Blues” and “Fairy Tale Blues,” which took longer than I’d hoped but they came out ok. We did our group vocal for “Fairy Tale Blues,” then I did my vocal for “Yes You Can.” Thankfully, that came out pretty good as well. You’ll notice as the night goes on that I don’t rave about stuff the way I do at 2:00 p.m. Well, we’re all pretty pooped. But Justin and Brandon are here, and Maiken (!) stopped by earlier with her husband, and so we’ve got a good cheering section keeping us going.

Kipley is going into the box to record the vocal for “Someone Who Cares,” the gorgeous album closer that you haven’t heard yet;  then I think I’ll try the lap steel guitar, before we knock off for the night.

Dana, Kipley and I spent today in the studio at Garden Street Music, banging out parts for the upcoming CD. Kipley did a marathon 4-hour stint at the piano, doing the keyboard parts for 5 or 6 songs back-to-back. Then we switched gears and I did some mandolin for “If You Fall.”

Then Dana recorded the sweet, sensitive clarinet part for a song called “Someone Who Cares,” which you haven’t heard yet because we haven’t played it live yet, but it’ll make you cry, it’s so wonderful.

Then I got to sit down and take a crack at some guitar parts. I did “If You Fall,” “Uh Oh,” “Girls Rock” and “Jump,  Wiggle & Shake.” I probably did one other song in there as well but I can’t remember because my brain is fried.

Dan is a great producer, working us hard to get the best performance he can. I listen to the rockabilly guitar I just recorded for “Jump, Wiggle & Shake” and I can’t believe it’s really me playing. (Mind you, the final cut was spliced together out of, like, 37 takes, but hey, all that matters is the final product.) As I’ve said before, playing with the Lemons has really pushed my musical abilities in surprising ways. I can’t wait for everyone to hear how much fun we’re having!

We’ll be back in here next Monday from noon to 10 p.m.! Whee!

Our new friends in Ye Pyrate Brotherhood dug us at the Great South Bay Music Festival, so they invited us out to play the 2nd Annual L.I. Pirate Festival. It seems such an obvious match-up, doesn’t it? After all, lemons help prevent scurvy.

Anyway, not only did we get to spend the day amongst swashbucklers, we got to wrangle our way onto the main stage! (Someday, I swear, people are going to get that we’re a ROCK BAND, with drums and bass and guitars and the whole deal.) Everyone was great and I think the event raised some dubloons for a couple of local charities, which is always nice. Big ups and “Ahoy!” to the organizers.

Highlights: This was the first gig at which I’ve been threatened with a sword.

This morning I got a call from Geri Fallo at city hall, the nice lady who books all the gigs for the town. She said Telemundo was taping a show down at Sinatra Park and I should go down there and sing on hispanic TV. “Can’t be that simple,” I thought to myself, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to put on my Fuzzy Lemons t-shirt and check it out.

Well, in the end it happened pretty much like Geri said! None of the other leading Lemons were available, but I wasn’t going to miss a chance to be on TV. Around 3:00 I went down to Sinatra Park, site of those gorgeous waterfront Gordys shows. Sure enough, they had a bunch of cameras set up and a bunch of Telemundo TV personalities taking turns performing and interviewing local artists and musicians. I asked a production assistant if it was true I could sing some songs and she said “sure,” so I frantically texted Kipley and Dana to see if there was any chance they could come down. None at all, as it turned out.

But because the universe is a cool place and Hoboken is an awesome little town, Justin and his wife had wandered by, and I corralled them into being my moral and technical support. They sat with me for over an hour as I waited my turn and tried to figure out what to perform.

I figured I could give them a Fuzzy Lemons CD and lip-synch to it, as a lot of the other artists were doing. But the problem was, the songs on the CD are in English and this was clearly a Spanish-based program. So I shifted gears and remembered that Music Together has taught me several songs in Spanish. I asked Justin to use his blackberry to help me e-mail some folks and drum up some kids to help me sing, and ran through the words and chords to the two easiest, most fun Music Together spanish tunes I know.

The director (the person with the headset who snapped her fingers and pointed at people the most) called me over at one point and asked what I was going to perform. I’d been given to understand that lip-synching was preferred, because overall the sound of a CD was better than open microphones on a breezy riverside promenade. I said I could lip-synch in English, or sing live in Spanish.

“Ok, you sing in Spanish,” she said, and went off to snap her fingers and point at some other people.

So that settled it, I was going to do Music Together stuff, and for that I wanted some kids (I work better with a crowd). No families showed up that I knew, but there were some kids around, some of them the offspring of the Telemundo crew or of the performers. I gathered a couple of them and taught them “Don Alfredo Baila” and prepped them to come help me on stage. They were enthusiastic (read: hyper).

Finally, around 5:15, I the director snapped her fingers and sent me to the stage, in front of the camera. I brought my little flock of kids with me, we plugged my guitar in, and on cue I launched into “Don Alfredo.” It was a hoot. The production assistant and Justin were both standing beside the camera, pantomiming along with the song, giving the kids silent direction to dance and smile and follow the motions of the song.

Then the interviewer came up and did a little bit where she waved our CD in front of the camera and spoke rapid-fire spanish. She asked me some questions (in English, thank goodness) and I think I gave coherent answers. I did a second song, “Maria Isabel,” with the kids dancing around me and Justin and the PA pantomiming moves for them from offstage. Then I finished, and we were done.

Justin gave the director a Fuzzy Lemons CD and she said something to the effect of “You’ll come back with your band and be on the show again next Saturday in Prospect Park.” I have no idea if she meant it or what; she said she’d call the Fuzzy Lemon line on Monday. But I’m going to devote a little free time tomorrow to translating a Fuzzy Lemons song into Spanish. Who knows?

This was our second non-brush with greatness this weekend, as we got to catch They Might Be Giants at the MusicFest, but as kids-stage performers we didn’t rate any backstage access or anything. Oh well.

Festivals are tricky. Audiences (at the children’s stage, anyway) tend to wander through rather than stay put. But it was a gorgeous day and I always love performing with the Lemons and I was pretty happy!

As an added bonus, my college friend Eric was there with his kids; I hadn’t seen him since New Year’s Eve 2000, when our college band did a little reunion show. Always a treat to catch up with old friends.

Someday The Fuzzy Lemons will convince the world that we’re a full-sized rock band, with the technical requirements thereof. After weeks of being assured that the Fest had adequate gear for us, we arrived only to be told that they had a dinky 12-channel mixer next to the stage, and the DJ was taking up some of those channels and a monitor already!

But we made it work and made some friends, most importantly the good people at This Is It! Productions, based right in our hometown of Hoboken NJ!

Justin’s wife took these photos:

This was our first of two near-misses-with-greatness of the weekend. In this case NJ Governor John Corzine was the celebrity present. I would have loved to have him introduce the band but the opportunity never arose, and I’m sure he was gone by the time we started anyway.

It was a treat to play the Mustard Seed school: Many Mustard Seed families have been big supporters of ours so we were happy to show them some love. Plus, Lemon Emeritus Kimberly Perry teaches there and so we gave her a big shout-out.

Also, we got to play on a stage, complete with curtain! No one rehearsed OPENING the curtain so we had an awkward moment at the beginning of the set, but we dove on in and played a fun set, marred only by a few technical difficulties. It was a good warm up for the next day’s big road-trip to the Union County Music Fest!

At the end of last year I counted up all of the classes and concerts I’d done and found out that I’d averaged 90 minutes per day performing music for kids.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve kept that number up: As of the end of August 2009, the average is 96 minutes per day (assuming I’ve done the math right… I was an English major, after all).

So far in 2009 I’ve: Been part of the first rock concert at Liberty Science Center, won a People’s Choice award, performed on a restored barge on the Hudson River, played at a Pete Seeger birthday party, performed solo and with 5 different bands, at various synagogues, bars, museums, play places, restaurants, outdoor venues and the Elk’s Club.

None of it would be possible without the wonderful people of Hoboken and the awesome musicians in my life: the Fuzzy Lemons, Music Together, The Gordys, Erin Lee and Marci, and the rest. Thanks everyone!!!!!!!!!

Hi everyone! It’s been almost a month since my last post… mainly because August is vacation month! I haven’t had any gigs or classes in over 3 weeks. It’s been a lovely time. I got to do some waterskiing in CT on my dad’s boat, and the Fuzzy Lemons have used the time to write a new song or two.

Now, refreshed and ready, we’re launching into the Fall of ‘09. First order of business: FINISH THE CD! We’ve booked two more 10-hour days at Garden Street Music, for Dana, Kipley and myself to record guitars, vocals, keys, accordions, mandolins, woodwinds, and gosh-knows what else. Meanwhile, we’re starting to bounce ideas around for album artwork. The goal is to be able to put the thing in people’s hands on Dec. 1. I love seeing all of this creativity come together!

At the same time, we’ve got a bunch of gigs coming up, including some road trips!

• September 12 - Concert for the Mustard Seed school in Hoboken
• September 13 - Union County Music Festival, Oak Ridge Park, Clark NJ
• September 20 - 2nd Annual Long Island Pirate Festival, Farmingville, NY
• September 21 - Studio day
• September 28 - Studio day
• October 11 - In-Store concert at Barnes & Noble, Lincoln Triangle, NYC
• October 18 - Jubilee Day - Benefit for Jubilee Center
• October 24 - private party in Hoboken
• October 30 - Halloween party for Garden Street Music (in exchange for studio time!)
• December 4 - Fuzzy Friday
• December 5 - Dave and Howie’s annual holiday show at the Museum
• December 11 - Fuzzy Friday
• December 16 - Garden Street Music holiday party
• December 18 - Fuzzy Friday/HFA holiday concert

That’s a decent list. Playing shows, recording albums… that’s how I want my life to be!