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by Konchok Rangmos, a simple monk
Twenty Seven and Forty
Like the day we’d gone to the old Ritz and stood in line for tickets to the MTV New Year’s Eve show, then gone back to Hoboken to gather our guitars and Nesmans gear to return uptown yet again, this day was sunny and relatively warm.
Strawberry Fields was very crowded at 1:30 and would remain so. I walked around a bit and then sat or stood on a bench. Mark Hudson, producer and performer on many of Ring’s recent LPs, paid respect in the early afternoon.
Eric and Naomi--the Meetles--appeared, pulling a drum set, bass and portable amplifier behind them and set up by the acoustic guitar players already in song. After awhile I walked closer to them, talking to a fellow with a nice Taylor and very cool “Hard Day’s Night” strap he said he’d bought in London, one time when he was in the U.K. to play the Cavern. The Cavern! How’d you make that happen? I asked. He said he’d been over there many times and they knew him, plays solo acoustic stuff like Laurence Juber, he said.
{Gary, a homeless man who lives on a bench in Strawberry Fields, who had taken it on himself to arrange and ‘maintain’ the mass of flowers, pictures, poems and such on the mosaic.}
The man strummed his Taylor, I got my cheap Fender out and another player offered to put the gig bag on the bench with a bunch of others—over at Gary’s crib—and eventually got near the ‘center,’ where Eric, Naomi an electric guitarist and several more acoustic players were. Eric and I were talking a lot, despite the sudden appearance of one of the grizzled veterans of David Peel’s gang, who stood directly between us, and he told people how we’d met here in 1995, when I played and we sang all afternoon and into the cold night. Naomi knew the bass parts very well, and to my amazement pulled out a little flute and played the solo to "You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away."
The park was more crowded than I'd ever seen it as the shadows got long and darkness fell, so that it became difficult to stand and play without hitting people in front of me—like David Peel’s associate, armed with his tambourine.
But for a time, every song surprised me in its tightness and power. Eric was playing the parts perfectly; Naomi was solid on the bass, the electric player did a good job on solos, and the acoustics made for a strong solid rhythm section. And literally hundreds seemed to be singing, and many of them very well! Some sang harmony parts, some very well at that. The songs seemed to get better and better, and the young beautiful women and their JAH certainly helped as it always did in music making, and despite breaking the fourth string about halfway through, it was all good.
A candle flickered in the window of a dark room, near the top of the Dakota.
It is my great honor to introduce Mcleod Ganj. The first C-Doobie Records release to be recorded in out in-house studio, the Pleasure Machine, Mcleod Ganj offers this five-song EP, imminently available at a computer near you. Slightly reminiscent of Lowdown Payment, to this listener, Mcleod Ganj brings more Britpop to an equally heavy and more agile band. We do hope you'll join us at Arlene's Grocery on March 6.
Click here for the Mcleod Ganj EPK. Be our friends here: myspace.com/mcleodganj and myspace.com/cdoobie
"If We Did It," the new single from Travis McGee & the Revelers, reaches mix stage this month, more to come as the project nears fruition. Likewise for Hunting Bigfoot, who are slowly working out the EP tentatively titled Peasants with Shotguns.
India, India, I'm going back to India.
January 14, 2008
The Under Assistant East Coast Promotion Man: rain@c-doobie.com
"The Forbidden Zone was once a paradise! Your breed made a desert of it, ages ago."
--Dr. Zaius