Sunday, March 23, 2008

Eli Yael!

All the way from Paris France via Eretz Yisrael...

Gary and Yael Naim, Paris | Click to enlarge


Yael Naim at the Bowery Ballroom last Wednesday night delivered one of the most soaring, uplifting concerts I've attended since I caught Joanna Newsom at Pop Montreal a couple years ago...she bounded out onstage with an infectious grin, her long black tresses flying, dressed in a fetching purple number with holes cut in strategic places (she is quite the babe, let's face it) and for the next hour or so mesmerized the packed to overflowing crowd (house had sold-out ages ago) with selections from her eponymous new album, just out on Atlantic/Tot ou Tard here...

The crowd ecstatically responded as One from the get-go, there were palpable waves of excitement coursing through the BB, and Yael was in superlative Voice throughout--she has one of the loveliest voices I've ever heard, such fantastic control and range--and she was Right There throughout, opening with her song "Paris" in Hebrew (a language which sung by Yael sounds amazingly soulful and seductive to my ears), finger picking her guitar, caressing her piano keyboard (girl was classically trained for 10 years), delivering a set that included material from her first album "In a Man's Womb" all the way to her current massive hit single "New Soul", the Mac Air Book theme, now poised to crack the Top 50 of Billboard's Hot 100 chart any minute--it's been downloaded over 550,000 times on iTunes in the US alone to date, making it the biggest ever French single to hit America since Paul Mauriat's "Love is Blue" (true)--(didya know the whole "Love is Blue" theme was lifted directly from the second and fifth movements of Prokofiev's "Lieutenant Kije Suite"? Me, I always preferred Jeff Beck's version)...

People were shouting "We Love You!" through her entire set, whooping it up in a celebratory party mode, cheering mightily after each song like they new every note (maybe they did, album's been out on import since last fall)...Yael played some new songs as well too including one haunting, emotionally wrenching composition near the end that brought tears to my eyes, as Yael produced a high, keening wail over Afro/Indian percussion--a song that brought one to brink of the Abyss, and then wafted one over to the Other Side, effortlessly...

In fact, I was misty-eyed throughout, to see a strong, assured woman I've known and admired for many years, who has struggled and persevered in this Money Jungle (as the Duke so elegantly put it) without the benefit of even indie label support (she recorded most of her new album on her own dime in her flat in Paris on a hard drive, with the help of the excellent percussionist/bandleader/producer West Indian born David Donatien, who did a phenomenal job capturing the essence of Yael Naim's heartfelt, whimsical, and tantalizing musical persona)--to see her now reap the rewards of all that sacrifice and hard work is incredibly gratifying to me (and to Caroline, who fell in love with Yael the instant she came out onstage)...

My only regret is that she didn't play "Shelcha" from her new album, I fell in love with this song when she played me an early version in her Paris apartment back a couple springs ago, after cooking a delicious dinner for me (musical savoir-faire is but one of her gifts )-- lease check out this song, it moves me so much every time I hear it (in fact I just selected it as one of my Top 15 Celebrity Picks for Rhapsody)...

The local media chose not to cover this show (because Yael got too successful too fast, thanks to the exposure from Apple? Six years spent in limbo between albums is a mighty long way down rock 'n roll, folks)--but the bloggers at SXSW (where she performed 2 well-received shows last weekend), and in New York (hehe), managed to get the word out just fine--as did Conan O'Brien, who rushed onstage after Yael's performance on his show Thursday night to hail her as "amazing!"...

After her set there was a lovely afterparty downstairs in the bar area, where label brass including Tot ou Tard's Vincente Frerebeau mingled Yael and her crack ensemble (her band is excellent!) and some of their old friends--including beautiful Israeli ambient dance chanteuse Anath and her guy, Chilean keyboard whiz Pablo Vergara, also Israeli singer Din Din Aviv who is currently on tour in the States...

Seems like female Jewish singers are taking over the world (again)--Amy Winehouse kind of kicked things off in a big way (you could say!) last year, the sensational Barbara Streisand came out of retirement to tour again...and the superb Carole King (one of the greatest songwriters of all time) was spotted as a guest on Stephen Colbert's show this week looking and playing magnificently as ever (her album "Tapestry" is about to be re-released)...

Plus--a show based on Russian Jewish New York wunderkind Laura Nyro's astonishing body of work played in NYC recently... Laura--my alltime favorite-- had one of the greatest stone soul voices of all time, writing hits for Streisand, the Fifth Dimension, Three Dog Night, and Blood Sweat and Tears while still in high school, songs that broke all rules of the time, mingling Tin Pan Alley with jazz, blues, r &b, and swinging girl group savvy, with lyrical subject matter touching on drug addiction, feminism, same-sex love...check out "Wedding Bell Blues", "And When I Die", "Stoned Soul Picnic", "Stoney End"...

and of course..

"Eli's Coming"...

xxLove


Gary

ps Check out this clip from national Israeli TV of my friend and collaborator, the super-talented and lovely Ninet Tayeb, the first winner of Israeli's Pop Idol program, performing and recording an unreleased song I wrote with Jeff Buckley ("No One Must Find You Here") here in NYC with me recently.

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Sunday, March 16, 2008

Fest Up!

Writing now from lovely Estoril outside Lisbon..what a crazy week, playing two more or less consecutive festivals on 2 different continents..feelin' good, feelin' happy (feelin' bout half past dead, too :-)...but that will change after I get some shut-eye)...

Highlight was Thursday night's Blues em Coimbra Festival, where I had a superb gig playing before before 500 wildly enthusiastic folks, mainly students (medieval Coimbra is a student town), performing both solo and with Portuguese instrumental dudes Dead Combo. (Check out this article about the appearance Portugal's national newspaper Publico.)

But my gig performing live with "The Golem" silent film in Toronto as part of Canadian Music Week 2008 last week was no slouch either--it was chosen as a Top Pick of the Festival by the Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper (see the article here).

And playing as part of the Guitar Hero panel there, in the company my pals Prof. Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult and Clash producer) and Prof. Dav Levitin (author of "This is Your Brain on Music") was Big Fun for sure...

Traveling to and fro though was the only major snafu...major blizzards in the northeast forced the cancellation of my flight from NY to Toronto, and I barely managed to squeeze standby on to another plane, which did deliver me to Toronto just in time for a meet and greet at the fabulous Royal York Hotel, where I started running into old friends from the music wars, including the French Music Export Office's Robert Singerman, Dan the Man Seligman and his entourage from Pop Montreal, Razor and Tie's Michael Caplan (whom I first met working part-time at Cutler's Record Store in New Haven when I was at Yale--he was working in the singles dept.), and Erik Gilbert, major domo of my new digital distributor IODA...I have to say that Neill Dixon and Verle Mobbs of CMW did an outstanding job putting together such a hugely expansive enterprise, it was all thoroughly organized and the CMW staff were really on their toes alert and competent and super friendly...it was a real pleasure to be taking part in it all...outside the snow fell steadily but inside all was buzzing and thriving...

My gig at the Royal Theater went off like a dream, I was working with a new color tinted (not colorized) "restored" print of the film and had quite a reception from the crowd, which included Sandy Pearlman (who reminded me in the Q and A afterwards that we had spent a fascinating afternoon many years ago at the Jewish Museum in NYC perusing their "Golem--Man, Myth and Magic" exhibition), McGill University Schulich School of Music Dean Don McLean, and Dan Seligman and his parents...afterwards while I was loading out of the theater with my gear and about to hop into my ride I heard a voice yoo-hooing me which turned out to belong to none other than legendary outre Canadian chanteuse Mary Margaret O'Hara, who was out on the avenue taking a stroll with her brother Marcus, Mary recorded the vocal on my song "Poison Tree" many years ago and some other tunes as mine as well (we were introduced by Kip Hanrahan on his "Darn It!" album project putting the words of the late Canadian poet Paul Haines to music), she looked great as we hugged over a snow bank (haven't laid eyes on her since Nick Cave's Meltdown Festival in 2000 at Royal Festival Hall in London, where we both played as part of a Tribute to Harry Smith, curated by Hal Willner), Mary has a truly amazing voice, and a spellbinding presence...and we have to stop meeting like this :-)

Later that night I joined Sandy and Don for a great feast in the hotel and I was seated next a guy who looked vaguely familiar to me although I couldn't quite place him, he was intense, super articulate, funny, and very engagee as the French say, in a very Left way, an Obama guy to boot :-)...turns out it was John Nichols, the guy who had moderated that very instructive and eye-opening panel on impeachment with Naomi Wolf and Amy Goodman at the Culture Project a few months back, which I described in this here blog, John is a writer for one of my favorite periodicals, The Nation, and he really is quite a phenomenal ball of passionate energy and intelligence that doesn't quit, an old friend of Sandy's...and Sandy Pearlman--what can I say? Certainly one of the most brilliant minds (the truth is) Out There, Sandy put together a penetrating panel examining at the Guitar Hero and Rock Star gaming phenomenon, and got me to play a fantasia on "Don't Fear the Reaper" live in real time vs. a charming girl from the Gaming Company operating the plastic guitar whatzit which triggered the original song artifact itself (turns out Buck Dharma's famous Reaper solo was pieced together out of 36 separate takes, so saith Dan Levitin)...I had to cut out directly upon the panel conclusion to run to the airport so as not to miss my plane back to NYC, only to find that yet another blizzard had started up...and so we were delayed an endless 3 hours on the ground while the airport engineers repeatedly sprayed the entire plane with orange gunk to de-ice the wings and engines...airborne at last, I was home for about a half day before it was time to trek out to the airport again...

and then it was another 3 hour delay on the tarmac, this time due to who knows, the weather was okay in NYC...finally we were aloft and had quite the bumpy 6 and a half hour ride to Lisbon, thank God for the refuge of my iPod Nano, a great way to seal out the world in times of stressful situations beyond one's control...big favorites this flight were pre-1968 Stones (the British version of "Aftermath", particularly), Nino Rota's soundtrack to "Fellini's Casanova", and gossamer pre-war Shanghainese symphonic pop fantasies from Chow Hsuan and Bai Kwong...yeah!

I was met at Lisbon airport by Teresa Santos, a very savvy and cool woman who runs the Coimbra em Blues Festival with my pal Paulo Furtado, a/k/a the Legendary Tiger Man...we drove a couple hours north to Coimbra and I apent the next day or so soaking up the good vibes there--what an elegant and fascinating city, medieval architecture, Roman ruins nearby, really beautiful cliffs overlooking the river below...I was treated to a 4 star hotel and copious amounts of delicious food courtesy of the Hotel Flur de Coimbra, whose chef served up a different fantastic Portuguese delicacy daily (their motto in English, as printed on the menu, is "Slow Food Spirit")...

On Tuesday, Dead Combo (To Trips and Pedro Gonscalves) arrived from Lisboa and we began to reharse our set...having never played together before it all came together surprisingly well, and quickly too, we hunkered down in a rehearsal room in the beautiful old Teatro de Gil Vicento, where this festival has been featured for the last 5 years running, and over the next 2 days worked up beautiful new bluesy versions of some of their music (exotic spaghetti western meets fado confections) and some of mine ("Hugh's Graveyard Stomp", for one--featured by the way in a very moody, ambient treatment by UK electronica whizzes the Dark Poets on our new album "Beyond the Pale", out this week on Some Bizarre Records...and also a new one of mine, "Suspiria"--a tribute to Italian horror cinema giallo maestro Dario Argento)...To, who has an incredible touch on fingerpicked semi-acoustic guitar, moved over to small percussion, rattles, and echoey harmonica on this one as fed through a variety of fx boxes..and Pedro held down the deep bottom end with bowed upright bass that made your solar plexus, nay your entire being, hum along in sympathetic vibration...

The gig was amazing. Dead Combo began wih a couple numbers from their forthcoming new albhum and then I joined them for a third on my National steel. We then went through a mix of originals and covers of "Grace" and "Mojo Pin"--all to thunderous ovations from the crowd, who were quite animated and vocal in their exhortations.. and then I did a solo set of blues on my steel which ratcheted things up even more tightly wound...then To and Pedro came back out and we finished with a space jam at the end of "Grace" which left the crowd screaming for more..we closed with "Hugh's Graveyard Stomp" as an encore...and then I chnaged my sweat drenched clothes and went out to shake hands with all these buzzing students, mucho autographs and cd transactions ensued, it was a GREAT NIGHT, indeed! Thank you Paulo Furtado, curator of Blues em Coimbra festival for the last 5 years, who has brought such diverse and excellent artists as Little Axe, Heavy Trash, T-Model Ford et al to Coimbra over the years, for bringing me to Coimbra, and for giving me such big props in the press (he was quoted as saying I was one of the best guitarists of the last 40 years...jeez!) I only wish Paulo would have sit in and jammed on our set (folks, this guy is amazing!! Try and catch his one man band The Legendary Tiger Man any way you can...)

I regret I couldnt stay for the rest of the Coimbra Blues festival, I especially wanted to see Afrosippi, an Afro/blues fusion group from the Delta, with whom I hung out with a bit in the run-up to the gig...but I had promised my friend Rui Silva, the Portuguese music journalist, that I would be in Lisbon on Saturday to play at his book release party for his new book about The Doors, which he's worked on over the last 7 years...

And so last night I performed live at the giant ultra moderne FNAC store in the giant ultra-moderne Colombo mall of Lisboa, alongside Darryl Read, a UK poet and rocker who,s just released a new poetry and music album with Ray Manzarek, and Rui, a very sweet and charming young guy who has produced this amazing tome on The Doors, a real labor of love, chockablock with rare photos and interviews, "Contigo Torno-Me Real" (You Make Me Real), Edicoes Afrontamento...it's a book the size of the bloody Manhattan Phone Directory, handsomely illustrated and bound, I'll post a link to it here soon and maybe reproduce some pages--a must-have for any fan of one of the greatest bands of all time.

While Rui read, I played a solo guitar fantasia on the music of The Doors, summoning the spirit of Jim, Ray, Robbie and John, centering around "The End", "End of the Night", "You're Lost Little Girl", "Love Me Two Times"...I love this music...then Darryl and I rocked out on "Roadhouse Blues" and "Five to One"...and the large Saturday night crowd in the FNAC, who'd been gathering around me and listening avidly as I set up and improvised for an hour or so before the start of the actual presentation, began lining up for autographs...

My old friend Shu Guerra is summoning me now to go to dinner for my last night in Portugal, have to dash...

Love

xxGary

3 Comments:

Blogger schlep said...

A chance meeting with Mary Margaret O'Hara! You certainly lead a charmed life, even with the airport hassles...
New album? Du tell.

3/18/2008 9:00 AM  
Blogger schlep said...

Oops, mea culpa, a more careful re-reading reveals, not your new album but Dead Combo's!

3/18/2008 11:13 AM  
Blogger Gary Lucas said...

I have a bunch of new recordings just out actually, Schlep--including Wild Rumpus (me and DJ Cosmo)'s new twelve inch single "Purple Somersault" (in stores now, you can also get it on iTunes) and a new album with UK electronic duo The Dark Poets on Some Bizarre entitled "Gary Lucas Vs. The Dark Poets--Beyond The Pale" released March 23rd...and several albums in various stages of completion, including a Gods and Monsters live DVD "One Man's Meat" with my supergroup which includes Jerry Harrison, Billy Ficca, Ernie Brooks, Jason Candler and Joe Hendel...and a studio album "The Ordeal of Civility", produced by Jerry Harrison...also a new Fast 'N Bulbous album we're recording next month here in NYC...and a new album with lute master Jozef Van Wissem...so I've been a busy boy, y'know?

all the best

Gary

3/18/2008 12:49 PM  

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Saturday, March 01, 2008

Nu Soul (Benign Fiesta)

I'm a tyme study man...and I have been parsing the milliseconds/burning the midnight scamp over the last couple weeks since my last entry, lots to report and so little Timetimetimetimetimetimetimetime (cue Les Freres Chambres right about now)...

Some very very high points--the incomparable Michel Legrand at Birdland on Sunday night, Richard Porton was the only able-bodied soul I could corral (I'm an old cowhand) into forking over 50 bucks plus to see this truly living legendary French soundtrack composer/songwriter/jazzman, whose music I love in the main and was first exposed to at a tender age up in the 'Cuse at a double bill of (get this) Jacques Demy's "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg", coupled with Sidney Lumet's "The Pawnbroker"--talk about day for night!--here he was backed by Ron Carter and Lewis Nash and he mainly stuck to his greatest hits, whuppin' the pearls with some beautiful embellishments...at the end I fought my way through a bevy of what seemed to consist of mainly French fans and matronly housewives to have a word with the master, I introduced myself with no mention of my musical background, thanked him for a magnificent concert, and told him how much I loved his score for Joseph Losey's "Eva" (1960), just about my favorite film and whose soundtrack was recently reissued...also Godard's "Bande a Part" (which mention of made him wince, for a second--check the anecdote for May 29th here)--after which he looked deep into my eyes, mano a mano, sighed wistfully, "Ahhh, that was so long ago..."--then clasped my hand firmly and said completely non-facetiously "Thank you Monsieur, for the honor of letting me shake your hand!" (yes)...I tipped my hat to this genius of music and strode out onto a chill 44th street with Richard...

On Saturday night Gods and Monsters played the best concert ever, in my estimation, at Bowery Poetry Club, the guys were on fire, they never improvised like that before, sound was pristine, everybody was really listening to each other and locked into a deep groove throughout that didn't quit, Billy Ficca was so rock steady, Ernie Brooks and he held down the bottom end and wouldn't let go, Jason Candler and Joe Hendel absolutely soared flanking me on both sides with their horns, Joe's keyboards astonishingly Manzarek-like in parts...and I had 3 divas in tow: Aishlin Harrison served up a beautiful rendition of "It's So Easy" in a duet with me on acoustic guitar; Felice Rosser was a surprise guest and bigmama'ed her way shimmying across the stage in paroxysms of ecstasy on a vocalese scat through our version of Abdullah Ibrahim's "Bra Joe from Kilimanjaro"...Danny Fields, Steve Paul, Jerry Roche, and my pals the Polish Consul General Krzystof Kasprzyk and the fabulous Monika Fabijanksa from the Polish Cultural Office made a surprise pop-in. Kris knows an impressive amount of rock and roll history and is a great guy, Monika programs some of the best cultural offerings to be found in NYC on a weekly basis (check out the upcoming Kieslowski retrospective on CUNY TV, which she helped put together)...

and the final surprise of the evening, the ne plus ultra of the night, was an appearance by Ninet, the first winner of the Israeli version of "Pop Idol" 5 years ago, a huge star over there (check out her MySpace page) and a big fan of my songs with Jeff Buckley--her manager Rotem Vahnich contacted me last summer about hooking up to do some songs with her, and she'd flown to New York to meet me after playing in LA, I had dinner with her and her entourage at Prime Grill, an excellent kosher steakhouse/sushi joint (!) on last Thursday night directly after attending Giorgio Gomelsky's birthday party in his loft (where he screened a rare print of "Thau in Love"--great underground music biz spoof starring my pals David Johansen and Alan Vega--as well as the incomparable, eponymous Marty Thau), Ninet looked stunning with recently shorn hair which she had tinted a beautiful shade of purple the next day, I did a 3 hour rehearsal with her on Friday concentrating mainly on one of my as yet unreleased Jeff Buckley collaborations (the epic "No One Must Find You Here")--and she was so brilliant on it that I invited her to sing it with me on Saturday night...and thus we closed our Gods and Monsters set with me bringing her on in all her purple finery, and we duet-ed, and she was really amazing!! Brought the very full house down in fact...

Clip from Israel's national TV network of Gary and Israeli Pop Idol winner Ninet performing and recording Gary's unreleased song co-written with Jeff Buckley, "No One Must Find You Here", filmed at the Bowery Poetry Club and Looking Glass Studios NYC March 1st and 2nd 2008


The next day we went into Philip Glass's Looking Glass Studios to cut a demo of this song with the lovely Ichiho Nishiki engineering...and it was something else...we're working up a fully orchestrated arrangement for Ninet's next album, and she is going to post it soon on her MySpace site-- so check for that!...Ninet will be performing next with me in Paris at the Hard Rock Cafe on June 3rd as part of the annual French Tribute to Jeff Buckley, alongside many other fantastic singers (including my old friend Elli Medeiros, the Uruguayan/Parisien French icon and face of the first French punk band ever, The Stinky Toys, later scoring solo with a massive hit over there with her song "Toi Mon Toit", check this archival clip of me and Gods and Monsters jamming with Elli at my 20th retrospective show at the Knitting Factory in NYC here.

The night before on Friday Caroline and Richard and I traipsed up to the French Embassy on 5th Avenue and 78th Street for a gala party honoring the Film Society of Lincoln Center's annual "Rendez-vous with French Cinema" festival which is on now, the erudite FSOL director (and a big Captain Beefheart fan!) Richard Pena was there, along with honorees including director Claude LeLouch (I have long wanted to record my version of Francis Lai's exquisite theme to "Un Homme et Une Femme", arranged for acoustic guitar and voice)...also the radiant Sandrine Bonnaire, who was so terrific in Agnes Varda's "Vagabond (Sans toi ni loi)" (Sandrine spoke at a screening last night of her spell-binding documentary about her autistic sister, "Sabine", at the Alliance Francaise here, which was hosted by the Alliance's delightfully enchantee film curator Marie Losier--who also was at the French Embassy party on Friday night)... and last but certainly not least my old Yale friend the erudite film scholar, author ("Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust"), television host (for IFC, at the Cannes Film Festival), and director of Columbia University's undergraduate film program, Annette Insdorf--Annette and I go waaaaay back to my very first appearance in Europe, playing the lead guitar in the European premiere of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass" in Vienna with the Yale Symphony Orchestra in 1973, she was one of the featured singers and hoofers in the production and did a star turn on Lenny and Steven Schwartz's "God Said 'Let There Be Light'"...I recently dug up a video copy of the Austrian broadcast of our production courtesy of my friend Klauz Totzler of ORF (Austrian National TV), who found it in their archives at my behest, and transferred it to DVD for me--and I immediately gave a copy to Annette (Tony Award winning costume designer William Ivy Long is next on the list, and of course, the then YSO director John Mauceri)...btw, Klaus did an interview with me about my 30's Chinese Pop album "The Edge of Heaven" (possibly my most popular album to date) a couple of years ago for ORF in Vienna in their new modern art museum, submitted for your approval here.

Last Wednesday night I had the pleasure of taping 5 solo acoustic numbers for the legendary Steve Paul's newest venture, the internet podcast channel DowntownTV.com, for their new program "The Latest Show on Earth", hosted by my young protege and bandmate (and babe magnet) Joe Hendel--it's a smart, witty, charming and shambolic show airing at midnight 4-5 nights a week, whose inaugural programs boasted appearances by Stephen Merritt, Andrew WK, one of the guys from the Moldy Peaches, and myself--all soon to be archived on their website. Check it out, Joe is a really talented host, raconteur, and musician, and the show is hot, fresh and finding it's sea-legs fast...

Lastly, I want to alert y'all to the upcoming NYC debut appearance of my old friend the superbly gifted Yael Naim, a French-Israeli chanteuse who lives in Paris, and who seems to have seduced the whole world with her song "New Soul", which is currently the #1 iTunes download (and also the theme of Apple's Macbook Air campaign, which hasn't hurt matters at all)...

I first met Yael in the late 90's in the company of her friend Anne Warin, both of whom were starring in the long running French musical "Les Dix Commandments"...and we hit it off straight away, Yael is a genuine, friendly and extremely warm and generous soul (not to mention possessing a voice that can induce frissons effortlessly)...

On 9/11, I was midway through a European solo tour, and was staying in Paris for a few days engaged in promoting my 30's Chinese pop album, which had just been released in France...that night a circle of many of my closest French friends came over to my hotel in Montmartre, where we stayed up for hours watching CNN and the endless footage of the twin towers coming down, we were crying and commiserating with each other, I was also a bit frantic as I'd been unable to get through to talk to Caroline as the phones were down to New York--thank God I eventually reached her mother in London, who had spoken to her shortly after the first tower had collapsed, so I knew she was okay...anyway Yael helped really soothe me and calm me down that night, I will never forget that of course, we bonded very deeply...

A couple years ago I visited her in her flat in Paris when I was playing at the Sunset Jazz Club, she was working on an early version of her current hit album (on tot Ou tard in France, released March 18th on Atlantic here), and she invited me to play some steel guitar on a few of her new tracks...I thought the music and songs she had played me, which she had recorded all by herself on a digital recorder in her flat-was some of the most beautiful music I'd ever heard, I came back raving about her new music to everyone I could--but these things take time, alas...and I'm so glad that finally, Yael's time is now :-)

Yael will be making her NYC debut at the Bowery Ballroom here on March 19th, and Caroline (who loves her music very much also) and I will be there to cheer her on...

Off to Toronto tomorrow to play the Canadian Music Week 2008 with "The Golem" at the old art deco Royal Yorke Theatre on Thursday, and to participate on Friday in a panel on Guitar Heros and Game Theory with McGill University's Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult and Clash producer) and Dan Levitin ("This is Your Brain on Music"--great book!)...

Then I'm off to Portugal on Saturday to play with my pals the spiffy latino noir rockabilly rumbero kings Dead Combo, at a blues festival in Coimbra curated by Paulo Furtado, Portuguese cult artist supreme known far and wide in that great land as the Legendary Tiger Man Paulo and I formed a mutual admiration society in Brussels last summer playing a festival with DJ Cosmo (btw, our new Wild Rumpus single "Purple Somersault" is about to drop any day now as a 12 inch vinyl release on her Bitches Brew label)...also doing an instore at the Lisbon FNAC in the company of Portuguese music journalist Rui Silva to promoter his new book about The Doors, "Contigo Torno-Me Real" (You Make Me Real), Edicoes Frontamento, for which I was interviewed talking about Jim Morrison and The Doors and their inspiration to me and Jeff Buckley, also my adventures trying to find Jim's grave at Pere Lachaise in Paris while I was staying with Elli Medeiros many years ago, which I related in a previous blog somewhere (find it, amigos)...

As Duke Elliington remarked-

I love you madly!

xxGary

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