Are You Dave?

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!

Our first anniversary gig! Wow, a lot has changed from last year, but a lot felt oddly familiar…

Different: We had a drummer this year!
Same: We were still stuck in the basement.

Different: No Maiken.
Same: One of us rushed in at the last minute (Kipley, this time).

Different: We had to assemble and run our own sound gear this year. (Big ups to Trey Ordaz of Garden Street Music for all his work!)
Same: We totally rocked the house, yo.  

Everyone in the band agrees that we sounded good, our songs are really tight and well-developed and our performance is constantly improving. We all also agree that the crowd size was disappointing this year. I don’t know if that’s part of the overall trouble HFA is having with membership, or if it was naptime, or if we were just too loud. Oh well.  

Kipley’s wife was expecting baby #2 that week, and as the day wore on and Kipley hadn’t arrived, we all just assumed the time had come. We started preparing for a Kipley-less show; we’d even made an alternate set that was heavy on Dana and Dave’s tunes, just on case. The Big Kahuna rolled in with plenty of time, however. Turns out it was just really hard to find parking.  (And I’m happy to report that the baby arrived safe and sound just a few days later). 

Once again, Ken Chen was there taking pictures, check ‘em out! We’re sepia-toned!

Here’s my latest schedule:

• March 1: TFL at Cabin Fever - our official first anniversary gig!
• March 6: Solo gig at J.C. Fridays, at Made with Love Organics in Jersey City
• March 9: Gordys purim show at the synagogue
• March 15: TFL Family Beach Party at “Shades,” 720 Monroe
• March 21: TFL at Liberty Science Center in the IMAX theater!
• April 24: TFL at All Saints’ spring bash
• May 1: TFL at HOPES (tentative)
• May 30: TFL at the Waterfront Museum
• June 14: TFL at Kiddiepalooza on Pier A
• June 4: Pete Seeger 90th Birthday tribute featuring some of Hoboken’s top musicians!
• June 7: TFL at the OLG Fun Fest at Church Square Park (tentative)
• June 14: TFL at Kiddiepalooza on Pier A
• July 28: Music Together at the Shipyard 
• August 4 : TFL at the Shipyard
• August 6: The Gordys at Sinatra Park 
• December 6: Annual holiday show with Howie at the Hoboken Historical Museum.

I’m especially excited about the Pete Seeger thing; I’ll be sharing the stage with some of Hoboken’s top musicians, including the amazing Boo Reiners and Elena Skye (the Demolition String Band), The Cucumbers, Abbe Rivers, and Jim Mastro of the Guitar Bar. Jim has agreed to do “Turn, Turn, Turn” with me! I’m utterly psyched. 

Notice also the end-of-summer crunch: Music Together, Fuzzy Lemons and Gordys shows, all within a two-week span. I LOVE it when that happens! LOVE IT!!!!!

I recently posted that things are quiet. That’s no longer true. Here’s how my gig calendar is already filling up for 2009 [updated 2/17/09]:

Today was our year-end Holiday Extravaganza, and it was, to say the least, epic. And the best part was, we didn’t have to do a thing other than learning a couple of holiday songs.

Our awesome friends at Garden Street Music have started a children’s choir, and we’ve been excited about the possiblity of collborating with them, perhaps inviting them to sing on one of our recordings, for example. I’m not sure how the conversation came about (Kipley tends to be the prime mover in cases like these) but we wound up inviting the choir to sing with us at our final Fuzzy Friday.

Well, that ripped the lid off of a giant can of worms. Not only did we have to find a way to rehearse with the choir (and learn their songs and teach them ours) but word got out that our final Friday had become this big Holiday Event. Our other awesome friends, the Hoboken Family Alliance, had been casting about for a Holiday Event of their own, and so they reached out and offered to underwrite the Lemons performance and make the whole thing a free HFA event, with cupcakes and stuff downstairs while the Lemons did their thing upstairs.

Not being content to invite the entire HFA mailing list, I had to open my big mouth and invite the local Brownie troop, too. Many of the kids who’d been in my Music Together classes 4 to 6 years ago were now Brownies, the perfect age to enjoy the Fuzzy Lemons.

So on the big day our li’l church was PACKED. It was great. It wasn’t easy coordinating the children’s choir, and we didn’t get a lot of rehearsal time with them (and they’d never really sung with microphones in front of a big crowd before) but their director had really whipped them into shape. We started the set with their 5 songs (mainly because the thought of trying to herd them together and bring them on stage in the middle of the gig was a nightmare), and I think they performed wonderfully.

Then we launched into our own holiday-skewed performance, including “You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch” and our very own version of the Dreidle song among the standard Lemons chestnuts. With Dave Entwistle in his accustomed place at the board, I felt like we had a very good sound. Maiken was conspicuously absent, and we were all very sad to lose her, but at the same time the lack of keyboards left the sound much more raw and guitar-oriented, which I rather enjoyed. But then I’m the lead guitarist so I may be biased.

Overall I was thrilled that we were finally reaching our audience, kids between the ages of 3 and 7. We’d seen a lot of infants at Fuzzy Friday, and I think people are starting to realize that a Fuzzy Lemons show is NOT a Music Together or Musicology class, or a puppet show with Mr. Kipley. We’re a rock band, dudes. It’s just too bad that this was the last Fuzzy Friday; I think we need to jump right in after the holidays to capture and hold that audience. Cabin Fever in February (another free HFA event, and the place where it all started) will probably be our next opportunity.

The only really upsetting part ofd the day was the fact that our CDs didn’t arrive in time for us to sell them at the show. They were sitting in the lobby of my building when I got home afterwards. Razza-frazza-muzza-wuzza. We could have sold a hundred of them and financed our next recording session in one shot.

Oh well.

Dave

With all the craziness of the election and such, I haven’t posted a THING about Fuzzy Fridays!

Kipley hit on the craaaazy idea to do a whole series of shows, back-to-back, for 8 weeks, as a way to (a) develop our material; (b) expand our audience; and (c) hone our performing skills. The church where we’ve been rehearsing was open to the idea, so we opened the doors and Fuzzy Fridays was born. Eight Fuzzy Lemons shows, every Friday at 3:30 in October and November (excepting holidays) and a big Holiday show on Dec. 5.

It’s been a LOT of fun and a huge challenge. Setting up our stage, complete with backdrop (including lights and other decorations), running soundchecks, then playing a 45-minute set, then breaking it all down again, EVERY week… it’s a workout! But I think it’s been very fruitful. We’ve debuted some new material, revisited old material to see how to keep it fresh, and for the week before Halloween we added a whole batch of Halloween tunes (including an original that Maiken wrote!).

We’ve been extra-blessed to once again have Dave Entwistle doing sound for us. We’re hoping that, by the last couple of shows, we will have tweaked the sound well enough to attempt to make a recording of the set. We’ll see if that pans out. 

Fan response has been pretty good, judging by ticket sales: 10 families the first week, 20 the 2nd week, and up into the 30s for the last three shows. We have three left: Nov. 14, Nov. 21 and the holiday show Dec. 5. Here’s a video snippet from the Oct. 17 set:

Nov. 21 will sadly be our last gig with Maiken, as she’s celebrating the holiday season by moving to Sidney with her husband. We’re crushed, but eager to get her into the studio to record a bunch of her material before she moves so we can milk every possible penny out of her keep her music alive with us even after she’s gone around the globe.

Speaking of the studio, our new friends at Garden Street Music will be joining us on Dec. 5, our last gig in the series, with their youth choir! It’s going to be fun to sing “Rudolph” and other favorites with a choir. Meanwhile, word of the event has spread and this particular Fuzzy Friday has suddenly evolved into a giant HFA holiday brouhaha! They’ll be doing snacks and such downstairs at the church, while the Lemons rock it upstairs. Everyone will get goodiebags, and I’m sure there will be giveaways and all the other fun stuff you can expect from the crazy crew at the Hoboken Family Alliance. So check it out!

Going Green: The Lemons perform on Earth Day, 4/26/08

The Hoboken Family Alliance is a solid organization that provides support and information to families with kids of all ages. And they run some popular events in town, too. Cabin Fever is one. There’s usually an Easter-egg hunt too, but Easter was so early this year that it was just too cold and too close to Cabin Fever. Yet people clamored for a spring event, and so the HFA Earth Day celebration was born. (That’s my version of events. I also recall that we were booked for this event pretty much from the get-go, thanks to our close ties to the HFA. Feel free to correct me if I got the story wrong.)

They took over Columbus Park, set up booths for town vendors, hired facepainters, and assembled the town’s P.A. gear in the pavilion for The Fuzzy Lemons–our first outdoor show, it should be noted. We got to play a nice long set, with the reliable Scott Weiner doing sound for us. I think it was one of our best shows, certainly the best we’d played to that point.

The weather was beautiful and I loved the way our sound floated out of the pavilion to the playgrounds and greens outside. 

I’m going to let the video, shot by our dear friends and loyal fans Jessica and Eric, speak for itself:

My first gig of 2008 was at the Hoboken Family Alliance’s Cabin Fever event at the Elks Club. I’ve played there the last three (?) years as part of the Music Together ensemble, alongside my fellow teachers (including Lisa, Marina, Pete, Catherine, Joi and John, among others). But for whatever reason, we couldn’t rouse a contingent of teachers to put together a show this year. 

Along came Kipley Wentz, musician and puppetmaster, who was also on the HFA’s list of invited entertainers. He and Dana Harrison (who teaches a class called Musicology in town) had already written and performed some songs together, and they invited me to sit down with them at the Frozen Monkey one rainy winter afternoon to talk about the possibility of joining forces. We agreed that, rather than fighting for space at Cabin Fever, a Musical Summit was called for, a meeting of Hoboken’s many and varied kiddie entertainers. We put out the invitation to all of the Music Together teachers, as well as Adam from Music for Aardvarks, Karen Kuhl, Sally Robertson and others. 

We wound up with myself, Kipley, Dana, and Maiken DuBois, who had been performing puppet shows with Kipley and on her own. My memories are hazy, but I recall them coming over to my tiny apartment for a couple of rehearsals, where we recorded Dana and Kipley singing their original tunes and I taught them “Skunks in My Shoes,” at the time my only original composition for kids. Kipley thought he might play bass guitar, since Dana and I both play guitar and we had no bassist. That sounded fine to me until he called a couple of days later and asked if I could recommend a good learn-to-play-the-bass book.

I gave the recordings to my friend Justin Michael and invited him to sit in on bass instead. Justin and I have been playing together in church for a few years now. I think he only had a couple of weeks before the gig to get caught up, but it’s not like we had a huge head start over him.

The HFA billed us at Cabin Fever as “Kipley, Dana and Dave,” but truly the Fuzzy Lemons had been born by then, and this was our inaugural gig. I got to the Elks Club with about 5 minutes to spare–I was doing a birthday party in Weehawken before the show (something that will constantly dog most of the Lemons as we try to book gigs around our party schedules); big thanks to Shana Lee for the ride back to Hoboken! Ken Chen’s fabulous photos of the event reveal that I still have my earmuffs stuck up on my hat–I didn’t even have time to take them off before we started. Later I asked Justin why he didn’t tell me they were up there and he said “I though they were there on purpose, that’s part of your look!” Looking back now I think that’s a cool idea, but I’d have to get myself some big funny fluffy earmuffs. Back then I was just embarrassed and annoyed. 

The Fuzzy Lemons debut at the Hoboken Elks Club, Sunday, February 10, 2008

Big ups, by the way, to Justin and to Scott Weiner for setting up all the gear. Scott’s been doing sound for the town for a long time, and he’s always friendly and professional. He has since moved on to other things, but he still hangs out at shows; it’s always good to see him. And Justin is used to being my guitar tech; he’s helped me out the last 2 summers at Gordys concerts (The Gordys rewarded him this year by making him their bass player–I’ll post all about that at a later date).

After the gig, the band’s e-mails started flying (we’re notorious with the e-mail). Kipley wrote:

Great job today, guys. I had a lot of fun and from what I can tell we all received great feedback. I certainly got some great comments and I guess when we listen to the recording it’ll be clear what worked and needs work. For me, it’s going to take some getting used to… it always sounds and feels so much different when we perform than it did in practice.

And Dana chimed in:

I had a blast today too.  I need a tambourine 101 class though.  I have a NASTY 2×4 inch bruise on my right leg. 

No victory comes without its scars. Overall I think we did just fine for a first gig–lots of mistakes, technical issues, and the town almost NEVER provides enough monitors (those are speakers pointed at the band instead of the audience, enabling us to hear ourselves and each other over the din!). You’ll notice in Ken Chen’s photo that not one of us is making eye contact with the audience. Or smiling. We had a long way to go in the audience-interaction department.

But the songs are great, we have a nice fat sound with multiple guitars, plus keyboards, horns and a mandolin, and lush 4-part harmony.  I think the audience had a good time, down there in the Elks’ basement. I really felt like, imperfect as it was, it was the birth of something new. The heart of the Fuzzy Lemons started beating that day.