Are You Dave?

Trick or Treat, part deaux! We performed our Halloween set at the Elks for the annual Garden Street Music bash, and it was a great time, as always! Each year, we share the stage with GSM’s students, and watching the teen and pre-teen rockers is a real treat. (Especially since many of them used to be in my Music Together class!)

One particular highlight stands out: A dance class had been working on “The Time Warp,” and was going to dance to a playback, but we had it on our set list so they got up and danced along to us instead!

In lieu of payment for this show, we’ve got credit for studio time with Dan. Sometime in the winter or spring we’ll be going back into the studio to record a new album! I can’t wait!

~ Dave

Trick or Treat! After a few weeks off, we did our 2nd annual Halloween show at the Knit today. I snatched up matching “Sgt. Pepper” jackets for myself, Justin and Chris at a Halloween store, and I must say we cut dashing figures. (Ask Dana about the text she mistakenly sent her pastor when she was shopping for a matching costume.) Lots of kids at the show had dressed up as well, and we had a ghoulishly good time.

I my last gig diary entry I mentioned that we’ve become a very flexible band. We’re able to pull out Halloween tunes such as “Monster Mash” and the Scooby Doo theme with little difficulty. Come summer, we’ll rip out “California Sun” and similar surf-themed songs. We’re a non-stop Kindie rock machine!

~ Dave

Happy Halloween! It’s time for our annual fright-fest and this year we haunt the Knitting Factory!

But first, a note: Last time we played here, Brandon Miller was our drummer. That turned out to be his last show with the Fuzzy Lemons. He’s decided to hang it up (for now) and we’re sad to see him go. Thank you, Brandon, for your awesome musical contributions to the band! To The Moon sounds amazing because of you.

Back to the band: We spent the last few weeks of September rehearsing with a cool young drummer names Chris Moran. Chris teaches drums at Garden Street Music, and when Dan McLoughlin heard we were drummerless he hooked us up. Chris dove in head-first and learned our tunes in two whirlwind rehearsals, including a batch Halloween tunes. And not only did he rock the set at the Knitting Factory, he did it in a Teletubby costume!

I love Halloween because the music is so goofy. We did “The Monster Mash” in full-on camp mode, of course, but the rest of our spooky set was pretty cool, come to think of it. “Five Little Pumpkins” has a righteous Bo Diddly beat (I play slide guitar on it), and our surf-rock version of the “Munsters” theme was gnarly, to say the least. And I can’t wait to record and release “Hallowalloween,” our first holiday-themed song (penned by Maiken DuBois, who has given her blessing to record it). With luck, it’ll get picked up and played every Halloween from now until, well, ever.

Playing in costume is fun and challenging. Dana had nowhere to clip her wireless receiver on her Crayon costume, and my top hat made guitar changes a challenge. But it’s so COOL to be up on stage all dressed up!

Watch this space for photos from the show!

~ Dave

I’ve never figured out just why I love Halloween so much. Maybe it’s because it was my mom’s favorite holiday when we were kids. She spend hours crafting amazing costumes for us. Or maybe it’s the costumes themselves, playing dress-up and taking on a different persona for a little while. Or maybe I’m just working through the childhood trauma of having to go into this one neighbor’s house and get candy from a bowl clasped in the arms of a corpse in a coffin… I still shudder at the thought. It’s quite possible and even likely that my love of Halloween is nothing more than sweet, sweet payback.

In any event, Hoboken is the right town for me. Entire blocks will go nuts with the decorations, cobwebbing up their stoops and decorating every window with ghosts, ghouls, goblins and, this year, McCain-Palin signs (eek!). The stretch of Bloomfield Street between 12th and 13th streets becomes an after-dark block party, with music, costumes, crazy decorations, candy for the kids, and adult beverages for the over-21s. I’ll probably never be wealthy enough to live on that block (oh, such gorgeous brownstones!) so if you can’t join ‘em, the saying goes, beat ‘em.

My original plan was to get the houses on our side of the block to all join in on decorating and celebrating, Bloomfield-style, but I just couldn’t get my act together in time. In fact, I hadn’t even started decorating by the 2nd week of October. But a few trips to Target, and good ol’ Spencer’s at the mall, were enough to serve up some inspiration.

The Creepy Cafe was born.

The centerpiece was our charcoal grill, which I dragged from the back yard and situated out front. Hidden inside was a little fake fireplace: a red glow and simulated flames (created with the awesome technology of thin fabric and a fan). “Cooking” on the grill I put a couple of phony severed arms, and even a leg. Fake bones strewn around the grill added to the cookout, and an enormous cleaver, saw and meathook (cool props from Spencer’s) served as the grillmaster’s tools.

Oh, I was off and running. I brought a small table and two chairs from the back deck and set them up near the grill, with a creepy old tablecloth and a skull for a centerpiece. My beloved wife, who wholeheartedly supports my bizarre Halloween habit, added some drippy fake blood (including handprints that went up on the window) and a black rose for extra morbidity.

The Creepy Cafe by day

Other props included a candle in a skeletal candlestick, and a fake-rat-in-a-mug that kicks it feet and wiggles its tail when it detect motion. Back-lighting the whole thing was 400 little orange lights. On the night itself, I hooked up a strobe light, fog machine, and iPod with Halloween playlist (”Werewolves of London,” “I Put a Spell on You,” that sort of thing). The Creepy Cafe was ready.

[to be continued]