don’t lie, steve.

so, the field assembly cd release shows at phog and the fm lounge both happened. on the same day. i played three different sets in the space of about six hours. i actually got through it all with more energy than i was expecting to have, and didn’t really feel it all catch up with me until i got home after it was all over, when just brushing my teeth started to seem like a herculean task. but let’s start from the top and work our way forward.

SET # 1 (at phog)

michou opened in the form of michael hargreaves and stefan cvektovic. good stuff. really nice, tight vocal harmonies. there was a funny moment when michael asked how everyone was feeling, and the response was pretty much dead silence until i let out an inappropriate high-pitched cackle. the audience consisted of what seemed like roughly a dozen people…maybe even somewhere near twenty. and it didn’t get any larger. but i kind of liked that; it had a nice way of diffusing a lot of the nerves, and the people who were there made for a really respectful, attentive audience. for this field assembly set the band was just adam, dean drouillard and myself. i got to dig in a bit more and play meatier things than i would later on in the full band set, so that was fun. singing the harmonies in just about every song was a little awkward…i’m used to doing that in maybe two or three songs at the most. i couldn’t really tell if my pitch was on or not. it felt kind of wobbly to me. but i wasn’t that nervous, i didn’t play anything ugly on the piano, and all in all it felt good. it was the first time i’d played with dean, who’s a really great, tasteful musician. he did some tasty things with melodic feedback while playing a very pretty red gretsch guitar. funny to think that i was almost seduced by a vintage gretsch last summer, but soon found myself swayed by the infinitely cheaper teisco instead. also worth noting is the fact that tom and i were both wearing our CJAM t-shirts from the last pledge drive. as the kids like to say, “represent!” people still say that shit, right?

after the show at phog the full band met up at the fm lounge and set up the gear for sound check. i played a few bugle blasts for good luck and got to listen to matt rideout playing some tasty latin-jazz sounding things on one of my funky old acoustic guitars. we played a bit of “eye of the tiger” during sound check, which was fun. sound was checked. things were done. max joined the party and we did our own sound check as the doors opened and people started to trickle into the place. then a few of us went off to the pourhouse to grab a bite to eat before the show. i’d never been there before, but the combination of a pretty waitress with a fun personality and a sexy salad made for a winner in my book. back at the fm lounge, there were suddenly quite a lot of people there. strangely, i didn’t really feel nervous at all, which contradicts just about every experience i’ve had playing live in any capacity since high school. maybe part of it was because the show at phog had gone well and i felt sufficiently warmed up. i don’t know what it was, really.

SET # 2 (FM lounge, aka “the fish market”)

max and i took to the stage for what was the first proper live show i’d played that didn’t involve being a sideman or backing someone else up since…2005. we opened with a pretty radically re-worked bruce springsteen song that only die-hard fans of the boss would have recognized. i threw in a melodica solo. it felt good. what’s funny is that the set list had originally leaned pretty heavily on covers, with something like a 60/40 ratio in favour of other people’s songs. one by one the covers ended up being discarded until suddenly all but one of the songs were my own, and almost all of them came from AN ABSENCE OF SWAY. i’m not sure why it turned out that way, but it’s amusing to me that i ended up unwittingly defeating my own attempt to hide behind obscure cover songs. an intended improvised instrumental piano piece completely fell apart before it could really go anywhere, probably because i was trying to juggle three different sets of music in my brain and something had to give, but i was able to shrug it off and move onto the next thing. i have no idea how it happened, but i actually felt pretty comfortable up there on-stage. a lot of the credit should go to max, who’s a fantastic musician and a great guy to have in your corner when you’re unsheathing your musical genitals in a public setting. there was a lot of improvisation going on in some songs, and with some people that could have been disastrous, but with max it felt comfortable because the connection was there. but even vocally i felt absurdly confident…i pushed harder than i have in a long time—not screaming or anything like that, but really full-on belting some things without relying on the falsetto and backing away from the mic, and it felt like i could do pretty much anything i wanted with my voice during our set. my vocal cords were there for me. thanks, guys. i know i mistreated you in the past, but thanks for sticking with me.

one of the highlights for me was probably “capricorn cloves”. i brought the bugle with me, but when it came time to play it with one hand while still playing piano with the other, i discovered the mouthpiece had fallen out when i had inadvertently kicked it over on the stage. there was a bit of a pause while i fixed that, and then started making drunken elephant noises. people applauded my bugle “solo”. really. it was the craziest thing. i can’t even play that thing. on the album the song gradually fades out on a jazzy piano/fake upright bass vamp, but we decided to stretch it out and completely improvise it live. i played the bass line for a while and comped a bit while max played a long, ridiculously sexy bass solo. then he picked up the bass line and i did a little exploring of my own. and then, in max’s words, we “went to hell”; i broke the tonality and he created a gigantic, dissonant swath of noise using his upright bass and a delay pedal. i didn’t know you could get sounds like that out of that instrument. it was pretty nutty. i played some dissonant piano runs underneath that, and then we eventually brought it down to a more melodic, muted close. it’s fun completely messing with a song like that. likewise, “water to town” was basically rewritten as an entirely new song. the lyrics were unchanged, but the music was completely different. i wonder if anyone familiar with the album recognized what we were doing there.

either way, the audience response was pretty crazy. people seemed to be into what we were doing, and it was a nice feeling to have a genuinely positive live experience playing my own songs after so many disasters and so much indifference in the past. thanks to max for being my partner in musical mayhem (you might be seeing an album from the two of us before too long), thanks to adam for having us open the show, and thanks to everyone who came out and showered me with gifts of floral-smelling undergarments. or applauded. same thing, really. thanks to all you folks who came over and said nice things to me after the show, too. my head grew at least six sizes before the end of the night. standing up is difficult now, but it was a nice ego stroke nonetheless.

SET # 3 (same place)

normally after you play a show, you get to relax, and if someone else is playing you can hang out and listen. i got about five minutes to take a breather, and then i got back up on-stage for the full-band field assembly show. it was like some kind of windsor supergroup…adam fox at the helm of it all, dean drouillard on guitar, adam rideout-arkell on guitar/bass and matthew rideout on drums and percussion (both of yellow wood fame), eric arner on bass, guitar and glockenspiel, stephen hargreaves playing hammond organ sexiness (along with the processing of said organ sexiness) and percussion, and my hairy self playing piano/wurlitzer and glockenspiel. that’s right—i got to play a real wurlitzer electric piano live. fun times. while there was a whole band full of singers up there on the stage, i ended up covering almost all of the vocal harmonies, which again wasn’t something i was expecting going into it, but hopefully it sounded alright. i haven’t done enough of that in a live setting to judge how good my pitch is when i’m harmonizing with someone else’s voice. at home with no amplification it’s fine, but once a p.a. system becomes involved my confidence in my live harmonizing skills takes a hit to the nether region. in any case, it was fun, and my first time playing in anything as large as this seven-piece band. everybody got their moments to shine like sinead, and adam r. played some especially nice lead guitar on the instrumental track. stephen and i also had a nice moment during “old spell” where i was dancing around since there wasn’t much for me to do between glockenspiel cues, and we did a bit of a spontaneously choreographed dance routine during the instrumental break following one of the choruses. jumping back and forth between playing wurlitzer and piano in a few songs was fun too. i’m really glad i got to meet all of the guys who were in the band…they’re all great people and great musicians. thanks to adam for inviting me to be a part of it all, and also to ryan fields for doing a great job making everything sound as it should. another hearty thanks goes out to ron marston for taking all of these great pictures and letting me post some here. to that end, here are some more:

all in all, it was a fun night. insane, but fun. congratulations to adam on the successful release/launch of his first album under the “field assembly” banner. everyone who doesn’t have a copy should go buy one at dr. disc or from the man himself, because i said so. support!