. . . Settling back into the Appalachian-American pace of things.

Saturday night I all but fell asleep in front of the TV watching season 2 of Mr. Show. I had been fighting to stay awake for the better part of a whole episode. This Will to Remain Awake vrs. The Need For Rest placed me deep inside a nearly-dreaming and super suggestive state of perception. When I turned off the DVD player and "real tv" popped on I just couldn't fucking believe what I was seeing.

*(At this point I must discuss the curse I'm under, still, after several years, cast on me from the shear girth of exposure to live music. Playing show after show, practice after practice, opening bands, house music, all of it . . . every last stinking note, has turned me into a real hard target for the spell that music employs. Like baking for a baker, building cabinets for a carpenter, writing poems for a novelist, it's not so much an unappreciation as much as an inability to seperate craft from fiction. Too involved in the process. It takes a completely exceptional circumstance to goad me into that place where music stops being a bunch of folks with instruments and tuners and chords and equiptment for their equiptment, and families back home and places to sleep that are not their own, and love on hold, and pets that miss them and a full bookshelf far far away. . . etc. Past all that, there is another way that music settles in the brain as a message beyond our comprehension, communication beyond communication. The form of it hypnotizes and soothes and pulls you outside of your body and into some collective balance with everything around you. Vibrations and waves form alternate time. Tone has mass. "Visual" takes place inside as opposed to out and hearing rules the world of sight.
Anyway, I've got quite a tolerance for the stuff. It takes a great artist to get me there (**cough, cough**Rasputina**cough**. . .) and it's a mixed-kinda-blessing-thing 'cause when it hits it hits hard and I think I maybe appreciate it a little bit more).

. . . So, yeah, late night. . . half-asleep, "real" tv pops on. . . .
and what I see is a fucking bedlaam of energy taking over a crowd of people. At first I assume it's the latest war-induced hysteria. People are in complete disarray and shaking and jumping at each other, NOT MOSHING!! And not moshers, real people. Old people, young, black, white, rich, poor. . . nothing ties this group together visually. Then a stage. A man seated (but not sitting) in front of a lap-guitar and then I realise there's music! He's sideways now, kicking his legs high in the air like a chorus girl. Then he's up!!! Skipping frantically across the stage, feet a blur. The bass player looks uncomfortably like Dave Chappelle with a six-string bass, but he's singing/screaming in a Geddy Lee-esque whistle of a voice. The drummer is unseated next to his set, then he's down again, then he's up!! Buddy on the lap-guitar is now ripping shit up!!

And everybody is dancing like they're on cocaine. Everybody!!!!

Turns out it's a guy named Robert Randolf and this is his Family Band. Credentials?:

Guy's played with:
Fountains of Wayne
The Blind Boys of Alabama
Sawyer Brown
Ringo Starr
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band

Appered on tributes to Jimi Hendrix and boasts two tunes on an Ozzy Tribute.

this year, aquired tour slots with both Santana and Dave Matthews.

I just don't know? Not really my type of thing, but the live shit was so much the real deal. Check out their tune "I don't know what you came to do". It just blew me out of the fucking water's water.

He's for real. In a years time, everybody will know who he is.

and,
Caught the movie Chuck & Buck. Written by, and starring Mike White, producer of everybodies favorite show, Freaks and Geeks (oddly enough it also stars Chris Weitz who wrote Antz AND the nutty professor II). Shoulda' starred crispen Glover. Check it out.