Time of the Season

I always liked the Zombie's song "Time of the Season". I am not sure why. It always reminds me of driving around  with the windows open in the summertime ( hey, In the Summertime by Mungo Jerry. - we had a fun time doing that up at Wavy's place recently complete with a kazoo section). Anyway check out the Zombies as they are still happening with the main players including Rod Argent.

 The time now for the Thugz is getting ready for our annual "Jerry Garcia Celebration". It will be our 16th annual such event. The first was at the Blue Heron with Sylvia on piano, Melanie on flute, Dan Abers (original thugz bass) and myself. It's mainly an excuse to play a lot of Jerry & G.D songs as our band has been so heavily influenced by them. We don't really try to sound just like the originals as in a tribute band. We take the songs chord progressions, lyrics and a few of the licks and attempt to do our thing with them. That style of playing is completely strange to many musicians. We have had many players sit in or try to join the band but they just don't get it. it's often completely the opposite of what bar bands, etc. do. Tightness and precision are not things that we do. 45 minute sets and requests to "put your hands together" are foreign to us. Sometimes things don't work but often something special happens in the middle of an improvised section that makes it all worth it, at least for me.   We try to make things different every time, even if only minutely. Take any song, reduce it to chords, melody and basic rhythm and try to play it in an extended improvisational style. That's what we like and that's why we can play together for so many years.

 Anyway, we are still at it at least for right now. By the way - we don't call our concert "Jerry Day" anymore because the guy in the city who started one got pissed. Whatever, his show is a bunch of rigid clones in my opinion. So here we go again. This time we will have Andre, Chris, Stephanie, Rick Cutler and myself with Drew working the sound board. The outdoor setting at Rio Nido is perfect and also the scene of some historic Dead shows and events. You can hear a cut of primal Dead from Rio Nido on the album "Fallout from the Phil Zone" (Phil Lesh).

 At our Jerry show last year i did have a tough time. About 3 minutes before we started a staff member passed me the phone and my sister in law told me that my Dad had just passed away (he was 94). We played anyway and I was able to continue because of my passion for the music and the support of my thugz family.  This year has found us with many changes and a world in turmoil. We are gonna play and do our best to celebrate and hopefully heal even if just for a few hours. truckin' on.

 The Thursdays at Northwood have been going pretty well. Right now we are playing there every couple of weeks but it is still a work in progress. A couple of things the band likes: the room is now carpeted. It makes it harder to dance but the sound is so much better. previously the room was so echo prone that it was almost impossible to play. We made a lot of alterations to our sound and set up but it was never very good. We simply could not hear each other no matter what volume we played at. The other big plus is that we are able to set up in a better spot in the room and we can drive up and load in very easily. The old management made us cart everything in from the front parking lot on dollies. It was a real pain especially in the rain (the rain in Spain?

 We also recently returned to Twin Oaks in Penngrove which is now owned by the Hopmonk people. They are still getting things together but we had a good time playing out back. We had Russ Kerger on Sax & keys and Dan Norris on Trumpet, flute and digeridoo. It gave us a much expanded choice of instrumentation. Soon Stephanie will be back and her great vocals and cool uke playing will push things up another notch.

 Enough rant for now. Thanks for supporting our band!

3 comments