Are You Dave?

Todd DeJarnatt a.k.a Captain JellyBean has an internet radio show in CA, and he’s been playing The Fuzzy Lemons! Woohoo! Here’s last week’s show; he plays “Sunburn” about 18 minutes in. We’re also appearing on this week’s Memorial Day broadcast later today.

Meanwhile, Tots Radio played “Jump in a Puddle” in heavy rotation this week. It’s a great day to be a Lemon!

And Now For Something Completely Different: Tipped by our very own Ciara Pressler, the ebullient Sarah Cook of RaisingCEOKids.com called us up today for some words of wisdom for her audience. Dana and I were available, so we hooked up the Skype and chatted with Sarah for a bit.

Sarah’s site is all about teaching entrepreneurial spirit to today’s youth. I know what you’re thinking: “What does that have to do with TFL?” We wondered the same thing, but Ms. Cook sums it up nicely on her page: “One of the reasons I wanted to interview them was because the are the perfect embodiment of DOING WHAT YOU LOVE!” Can’t argue with that!

We spoke about the importance of following your bliss, and finding others who share your passion. I think I dominated the chat a bit, but Dana answered the questions very well. It was quite a different event for us, but fun!

Click here for the interview itself. (Let me know if the interview no longer plays, I have the mp3.)

Here’s a great site for good old-fashioned music: The Alternate Root.

Go to their poll page and vote for our friend Penny Jo’s song, “I Like Summer” by Greezy Wheels. It’s a free-wheelin’ zydeco rave-up, perfect for a backyard barbeque. (Check out the other tunes, too! But vote for PJ!)

Another full day! After rockin’ Madison Square Park, we loaded up and rolled back to Hoboken for two sets at the awesome Block Party put on by the HOPES Fathers Group. First we bellied up at Justin’s pad for an hour or so, for some much-needed downtime. Then we hit the studio, grabbed the rest of the P.A. gear, and then it was down to the Rue building to set up.

Last year the Spring Fling was indoors, in the gym. This year the Father’s Group got bold and made it into a block party instead. They had everything: a bouncy castle, big grills laden with burgers and dogs, tubs of Italian ice, and even a small stage for the band. There was only one snafu: While the school got the Block Party permit and was able to close the street with no problem, the town traffic people didn’t get the word in time to get the cars moved off of the block. Oh well, y’can’t have everything.

We also had a setback when Dave Entwistle, sound guy to the stars, had to leave due to a personal emergency. We missed him (and we wish you all the best, Dave!!!) but Justin was able to call in a favor from a cohort to keep an eye on the knobs during the show. I think we sounded pretty good, and we had a wonderful crowd of kids and parents dancing. The band all seemed to agree that our first set was pretty low on energy, but we brought it back up for the second set.

On a personal note, I broke in my new lemon-yellow Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars today, and they looked good, but MAN did my feet hurt at the end of the day!

We’ve officially kicked off our outdoor summer concerts, in a big way! The dream team at Pressler Collaborative scored The Fuzzy Lemons a sweet little gig in the heart of Manhattan. The annual Spring Kids Fest opens the curtain on the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s annual summer of fun, and the Fuzzy Lemons were thrilled and honored to be a part of the action!

Check out the Park Conservancy’s release here. Sounds great, right? And it was! It was a beautiful spring day and the park was swarming with wonderful people out enjoying the event. The line-up of talented performers also included Moona Luna and a whole batch of jugglers, stilt-walkers and the like, which made for a pretty eclectic crowd milling about the stage.

Longtime readers will no doubt recall that I’ve gone on at length about technical issues in the past. And this event did offer its share: Ashley, the awesome young woman in charge, informed us in a pre-event e-mail that they only had an 8-channel mixer available. Needless to say, band e-mails started flying. Should we bring Dave Entwistle? Should we bring our own mixing board and snake?

Instead, the Lemons took a very different approach, and I’m proud of the band for it: We decided to roll with it. I think it must have been Brandon, Maker of Set Lists, who suggested that we leave out the sax, mandolin, clarinet, keyboard and accordion, and just use the 8 inputs for our most basic line-up of guitars, drums, bass and vocals. That still left us with a great batch of songs and made life a LOT easier, from set-up to soundcheck to the set itself.

And guess what? It worked out great, and the band and the audience had a blast! Sure, we could have used more vocal monitor, and Kipley got a little hoarse towards the end, but on the upside we were done with soundcheck so early that we got a head-start on our set!

We even did some impromptu jamming during soundcheck; I started a little three-chord riff, and the rhythm section joined in, and soon Dana, Kipley and I were coming up with things to sing so we could test our mics. It was a hoot, and the audience had no clue that we were making the whole thing up as we went. (Well, maybe they suspected)

Speaking of the crowd, we had a good one! Kids and grown-ups were jumping, wiggling, dancing, and having a great time. We got some 50 new names on our e-mail list and sent some happy folks home with the CD.

The Park’s summer event series is booked solid for this year, but Ashley has no choice, she’s gotta book us for something now that the inescapable appeal of the Lemons has been made clear!

Photos courtesy of Ashley Vitha

The crowd grooves to TFL!

Here’s my latest calendar update. Some gigs have been added, some have been dropped. Such is life.

• May 22 1:00 p.m. TFL @ Madison Square Park, NYC
• May 22 HOPES Spring Fling, 5:00 at the Rue building
• June 3 Another Pete Seeger celebration!
• June 4 TFL at KZTV at Mt. Sinai Hospital in NYC
• June 5 11:00 a.m. TFL @ the Knitting factory [I may have to miss this one]
• June 20 TFL @ Father’s Day festival in Nutley, NJ, 10:45 a.m. on the main stage
• June 21 TFL at Make Music NY at Richard Tucker Square, NYC 4:00 p.m. (this is a cool city-wide music festival and we’re thrilled to be rocking this park on the Upper West Side!)
• June 22 TFL @ Shipyard Park, Hoboken 7:00
• June 24 Gordys at Sinatra Park, Hoboken
• June 26 & 27 TFL @ The Bronx Zoo!
• July 10 11:00 TFL @ The Knitting Factory
• July 27 Music Together at Shipyard Park
• August 8 TFL @ Rumson Recreation Ctr 7-8 p.m.
• August 14 TFL @ Kids Kingdom, Elizabeth NJ (thanks to our friends at This Is It! Productions)
• August 15 TFL @ Knitting Factory
• August 16 TFL @ Waterside Plaza NYC 7:00 p.m. (pre-show for a movie night overlooking the East River, should be fun!)
• August 22 Morristown NJ in Historic Speedwell
• September 11 and/or 12 TFL @ Union County MusicFest, Clark NJ (Psyched to do this festival again!)
• September 19 TFL @ Knitting Factory
• September 26 TFL @ Hoboken Art & Music Fest
• October 9 TFL @ Clearview Cinema Hoboken (rain date Oct 10)
• October 24 TFL @ Knitting Factory
• November 14 TFL @ Knitting Factory
• December 5 TFL @ Knitting Factory

I have to just start by saying WOW, what a talented and diverse field of colleagues I have out there in the world of kid-friendly rock. It can be daunting, sitting at home alone and listening to Laurie Berkner’s 37th super-platinum album and thinking “I’ll never be that good or that famous or that successful.” But to hang out with the amazing musicians who came to KindieFest is inspiring, galvanizing, and a whole lotta fun.

Day 2 was chock full o’panel discussions. My schedule kept me from attending the morning sessions, of which there were four: Marketing, Videos, Recording and Distribution. All very important topics and I’ll be pestering my fellow attendees for their notes in the days ahead. The word I got from the Distribution session was that they didn’t delve into digital distribution at all, which seems odd considering the state of the modern music-distribution model. I may pass a note along to the organizers to suggest that as a panel topic next year.

The panel I did get to sit in on, “Old School Meets New School,” was wonderfully inspiring. Four of the Old Guard sat on the panel: musicians Elizabeth Mitchell, Suni Paz and Bill Harley, and kid-radio personality Kathy O’Connell of WXPN in Philly. They shared their stories of how they got started, and the common thread was: There was ever a huge vacuum in the area of music for kids. In schools, in the media, on the radio, no one seemed to know quite what to do. Conversely, that left these creators and their peers a lot of freedom to explore and try things out. Suni Paz, for example, was told that there weren’t any kids’ songs in Spanish, so she tracked some down and wrote some more when she couldn’t find enough. Elizabeth Mitchell was simply happy singing to her students as she pursued her career in “grown-up” music, until the recordings she made of her classroom songs one afternoon became much more popular than her other stuff (an echo of Dan Zanes’ story fro the night before).

They told stories of their failures: Suni Paz spoke of being rejected by the Folkways people at the Smithsonian (”you’re not Joan Baez,” she was told); now she sits on the board. Kathy O’Connell was fired by WNYC on Christmas, and has hosted Kids’ Corner in Philly for over 20 years since.

I mentioned in the opening paragraph how daunting it can be to face one’s own shortcomings in the face of greatness. Sitting hear listening to Grammy-winning performers tell of their humble beginnings, it was easy to hear the little voice in my head that tells me “it’s all been done, you can’t duplicate what they did and you can’t do anything new either.” But then I thought of the way NJ’s governor has cut education budgets, and I thought of the the Hoboken teacher who e-mailed me about the possibility of the Fuzzy Lemons bringing music into the school system, and I thought about the intense racial issues that are rocking Arizona this week, and I thought “Hell YEAH I can do this. I MUST do this.”

Kids today face the same lack, the same ignorance, that their parents did a generation ago. It’s my duty and my privilege to sing with them the way that Bill and Suni and even Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie did before me. And it’s an exciting time to be doing so because we have so much support and such a growing, vibrant community.

Whew. After that, the panel on Venues seemed like an anticlimax, so I had a Coke on the patio with some folks instead. The Fuzzy Lemons have played some pretty diverse venues, from theaters to bars to outdoor festivals to parking lots to seaweed-strewn beaches, and we’ll even be at a zoo this summer, so I think we’re pretty well covered in that department. I spoke to the guy from ZooGlobble about reviewing our CD, and he said he already had it and did we have anything newer? which is surprising and disappointing because the durn thing just came out 5 months ago. Not sure how to respond to that.

I did slip a CD to Kathy O’Connell for her radio show, then introduced myself to Boogie and Coach from Rocknoceros (finally). They’re just as friendly as my sister described them (they’re from her neighborhood in VA), though we did catch ourselves using some salty language. From there we embarked on a colorful discussion about which band member had the worst mouth, and in fact we think that the way we comport ourselves behind the scenes would make an entertaining panel discussion next year.

The last panel was about PR and it was another daunting one, as Beth Blenz-Lucas, a high-powered PR agent from Sugar Mountain PR, listed her amazing clients and described how awesome they are and how incredible anyone has to be to even make her interested in representing them. It was a bit of a turn-off, honestly, and quite a reversal from the experience we’ve had with the good people at Pressler Collaborative, who are excited and eager to help us BECOME the kind of clients that Ms. Blenz-Lucas would deign to notice. Also, I happen to think that we’re that amazing already, and anyone who disagrees with me is obviously a philistine.

But that panel closed on a high note as Mr. Ray reminded us all that we’re in a diverse and supportive community. Someone asked the panel “What should we be called?” As in, Children’s Music? Family Music? Clearly a genre title that includes the Sippy Cups, Uncle Rock and Sugar-Free Allstars is going to have to be pretty encompassing. Mr. Ray suggested “Kindie Rock,” which is kinda cool. Then he admitted that he has owned the kindierock.com domain for two years now.

I wasn’t able to stick around for the performances after the last panel, sadly. It’d been a long day and I really wanted to get home to my wife, who was under the weather, and my adorable child–who has since come down with a fever also. Next year the Fuzzy Lemons are going to buck for a slot in the showcase.

I think KindieFest was a vital event and a huge success and I look forward to seeing what comes out of it, and to going back next year!

~ Dave

Kindiefest is a huge three-day conference in Brooklyn for folks like me: musicians with a family-oriented groove. Last night was the kickoff reception and keynote; I’m trying to read my scribbled notes from the night to see if I can make sense of them.

I rolled into Littlefield in Brooklyn at about 7:00 (after some frantic photocopying of the Fuzzy Lemons’ press material). The party had already spilled out onto the patio! It was a gorgeous evening to be sharing a beer with two hundred of your colleagues and peers.

I squeezed through to the registration table and immediately struck up a conversation with Ashley Albert of The Jimmies, who was in line right behind me. I’ve been hearing about The Jimmies for a couple of years and we just checked out their videos on WiggleNation last week–I congratulated her on how amazing they looked.

Then I made my way to the bar and met some members of a band called The Not-Its, from Seattle. About that time, Dan Zanes wandered in off the street, with his unmistakeable suit and hair. Not long after, the organizers called everyone in for some opening speeches, followed by the Keynote. I found my friend Erin Lee Kelly and followed her into the conference hall (actually a nightclub).

Dan Zanes gave a quietly inspiring speech. He started by admonishing everyone in the room to check out Pete Seeger’s “Incomplete Folksinger,” which lays a clear foundation for everything we do as family musicians. He described an experience I’m sure most of us share: going to the record store and being horribly disappointed by the Children’s selections, which mainly consisted of cartoon tie-ins. He compared that to his own childhood experience of growing up listening to those classic Folkways recordings of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, et al.

He spoke of his surprise upon learning that people were much more interested in the tape of songs he made for his new daughter that they were in his latest album of pop songs about drinking and old girlfriends. And he described hanging out on the playground with West Indian nannies and sharing music with them (in my own career I’ve been blessed with a similar crowd) and how things just sort of grew from there. The importance of finding other musicians, diverse musicians with different backgrounds and influences, cannot be overstated. He spoke of the vital questions to ask people: “Where are you from?” and “What did you grow up singing?”

The diversity is important because kids and families want to be able to relate to what’s up on stage; kids of all backgrounds want to be able to look at the musicians and hear their music and find a piece of themselves. Further, he spoke of his goals: “My goal is to build bridges, it doesn’t matter if I know how or not.” And, just as those old Folkways records came with all the lyrics and chords printed in the liner notes, he reminded us all that that the music we make should inspire people to make music themselves.

It was a lovely speech and he closed by encouraging us all to keep building this community. Sure, we could all view it as a competition for market share, but the best music comes from the heart and encourages folks, rather than showing off.

After that, two hundred eager community builders headed for the bar. A side note, there’s a lovely little microbrew called SouthHampton that I quite enjoyed over the course of the evening.

From then on it was schmooze-o-rama time. I brought a dozen Fuzzy Lemons press kits with me and handed eight of them out to various bloggers, labels (including Putamayo!), a radio show or two, and even a reporter from Time. I plan to hand out the rest today. In return I came home with a goodie bag full of postcards, CDs and stickers from a bunch of other artists.

The first folks I bumped into at the bar were familiar faces: Paul Helou, whom we’d met at Great South Bay last summer, and Mark Lipsitz of Bar None Records. I introduced them to each other and we all swapped ideas for venues and such.

I tagged along with Erin Lee off and on over the course of the night, meeting a bunch of folks in her (not inconsiderable) circle. I jotted down some notes: I met and/or schmoozed Recess Monkey (very cool guys from Seattle), Jessie Atwell, the creator of Wigglenation, musician/videomaker Michael Rachad, Bill Childs of Spare The Rock (a radio show!), and members of Justin Roberts’ band, the Not Ready for Bedtime Players.

Members of Brooklyn-based King Pajama shared a laugh with members of Philly-based The Cat’s Pajamas, while Sara Hickman, State Musician of Texas, laughed at just about anything that moved.

Mr. Ray held forth on the advantages of creating your own music program as a source of ongoing revenue; Patricia Shih held court in a comfy chair, surrounded by fellow musicians (she claimed she was only sitting because her feet hurt but she sure looked like the queen bee); and I negotiated World Peace by pointing out that Putamayo’s Mona Kayhan, of Iranian descent, was engaged in a warm conversation with Israeli horn player Oran Etkin.

My work thus complete, I went home.

~ Dave