Category Archives: fabulous ones

fabulous ones, those that have just broken a flower vase

Come all ye rambling boys of pleasure…

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PART 1 OF 3 – Two days ago, Famous Orchestra bassist Riley Broach went on YouTube looking for video footage that people might have uploaded from our shows this past weekend in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. What he found instead was a cover of our song “Ich Bin Berlin (The Sundown Song)” from a seemingly unlikely source: a band called the Rambling Boys of Pleasure who make their home in Ghent, Belgium. The song appeared on our CD Everything for Everyone.

Here’s the video, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_IwkDzgu6U:

The information they provided with the video says the following:

I’m puttin’ on my sunday best! I’m puttin’ it to the test! Een cover van The Viper and His Famous Orchestra. Stijn op ukulele, Clo doet percussie, David op bas en Godfried op gitaar. Nu nog een beetje oefenen op onze stage presence. 🙂

Which, using a Dutch-English online translator (Dutch being the closest thing I could find to Flemish as far as online translators go), I can render thusly:

I’m puttin’ on my sunday best! I’m puttin’ it to the test! A cover of The Viper and His Famous Orchestra. Stijn on ukulele, Clo doing percussion, David on bass and Godfried on guitar. Now we just need to work on our stage presence. 🙂

As Riley wrote in posting a link to the video to his Facebook profile: “Woah! Stop the phones, halt the advance, turn down the lights!” Trombonist Rob Henn’s comment was representative: “Holy crap. Where did you find this? WTF????”

Rob then himself posted a link to his profile, noting:

This is the most bizarre thing I’ve ever seen. I may even mean that literally. I believe it to be the first cover of a song by The Viper and His Famous Orchestra — and it’s by a group in Belgium. I assume they found our CD online somehow, …randomly, and then covered it. I s*** you not. A group in Belgium covered a song by an obscure niche band from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. We live in an internet world.

And the song itself is a pretty niche song even within the Viper repertoire: a late 1990s period piece about semi-urban sprawl and the increasingly far-flung commercial/entertainment districts of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. How these Belgian ramblers found and then figured out the song is something I’ll take up in a later post, along with my subsequent communication with at least one of the Rambling boys. For now, I’ll just confirm that they did find our CD online “somehow”; and that I know how, and that it is indeed an internet world.

And learn all about the IRL bonus track (part 4 of 3) here.

fabulous ones, innumerable ones

July 10 and 12 set list

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Rob, Riley, and Ryan practicing for this weekend's shows.
Rob, Riley, and Ryan practicing for this weekend's shows.

The Viper and His Famous Orchestra played two shows this past weekend in Chicago, our first shows with the full band since 2002, and our first shows to feature a significant amount of new material since 2000, when the Viper up and left for Ankara, Turkey.

Thanks to all who came, or told others to come, expressed an interest in coming, expressed regrets about their inability to come, expressed regrets about their ability to come, expressed no interest in coming, told others not to come, or walk-ran quickly away the moment we started playing. We had a great time playing and catching up with a lot of our favorite people this weekend. That includes each other: Ryan Jerving, Edward Burch, Victor Cortez, Rob Henn, Kenneth Rainey, Riley Broach, and Bill Whitmer (who leaves for Scotland on Tuesday).

Both shows were a welcome challenge and a lot of fun, not least for the wide-ranging and moving sets that Edward Burch played at each of them with various stellar collaborators (LeRoy Bach, Steve Frisbie, Kenneth Rainey, John Peacock, and Riley Broach).

We hope to see you August 7 and/or 9 in Champaign-Urbana at Mike ‘n’ Molly’s. Meanwhile, here’s what you would have heard this past weekend, and the keys in which you would have heard it:

Friday, July 10, Hotel SnS (house show)

  • Ich Bin Berlin – C
  • Hey! Rounders / Superbowl Shuffle – C
  • Das Kapital – A
  • Good Morning Irene – G
  • Whispering – C
  • Think about Your Troubles – Db
  • Drunk Bus – Am
  • They’re Knocking Down Our Home – E
  • Neapolitan – A/Bb
  • Ballad of the Henry 55 – F
  • My Seafaring Lassie – C
  • Pretty Is as Pretty Does – C
  • Benny Lava – Cm
  • Wanna Be Startin’ Something – B
  • Winnebago Bay – G
  • Last Call Waltz – F

July 12, Great Performers of Illinois 2009 festival, Millennium Park

SET #1

  • The Viper’s Blue Yodel no. 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd -G
  • I Left My Liver in Libertyville – Bb
  • There Is a Tavern in the Town – Eb
  • Das Kapital – A
  • Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been…Blue? – F
  • Fillmore & Buchanan March – C/G
  • Winnebago Bay – G
  • Good Morning Irene – G
  • Whispering – C
  • Think about Your Troubles – Db
  • Pitfall – F
  • Let’s Go Fishing – F
  • Heyse Latke Kalte Latke – D
  • Drunk Bus – Am

SET #2

  • First Round Polka – F/C
  • Randolph St. – D
  • Hey! Rounders / Superbowl Shuffle – C
  • Benny Lava – Cm
  • Next Time I Drink – E
  • Surplus Labor – E
  • Neapolitan – A/Bb
  • Ballad of the Henry 55 – F
  • My Seafaring Lassie – C
  • Ich Bin Berlin – C
  • Wanna Be Startin’ Something – B
fabulous ones, those that from a long way off look like flies

Lean with it, rock with it

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Here’s a scratch recording that I made for Edward Burch to practice along with, to get the Run-DMC-style vocal interpolations I want to do with him on the first verse of “Drunk Bus”

http://theviper.wikispaces.com/file/view/drunk-bus-first.verse.mp3/80335421
(click here to download the mp3)

“Drunk Bus” is a song by Macomb, Illinois-based rapper Tre-P, and it falls into my favorite category of songs: namely, songs about the details of local public transportation, particularly buses.* In this case, that bus is the eponymous free shuttle that would take Western Illinois Universities from the clubs back to their dorm late at night. Here’s Tre-P, in full flash animation:

Watch for the secret interpolated shot at 1:46.

* Cf. The Viper and His Famous Orchestra, “Ich Bin Berlin” (on the Champaign, Illinois MTD bus route up North Prospect to the Meijer grocery store, “where parking’s the only sound”) and “Ukulele Rhythm” (about riding on the Blue bus–the 4W bus–that went from my place on Hill St. in Champaign to the International Cafe on Wright St. in Urbana where the orchestra and I would sometimes play of a Friday afternoon in the late 1990s).

fabulous ones, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that tremble as if they were mad

My seafaring lassie will smile on the Bard of Armagh

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"Bard of Armagh" ballad sheet

In putting together 5 shows for the summer that will require two complete sets, and doing it with an Orchestra that resides, Famously, in 6 different cities in 3 different states, I’m spending a lot of quality archive time digging through old file folders (manila and electronic) and old hard hard drives to dredge up or create reference material — lyric sheets, chord sheets, lead sheets, arrangement notes, scratch recordings, etc. — that I can pass on to everyone else via email and, now, via the wiki I’ve started putting together for the summer for just this purpose.

Thankfully, the rest of the Famous Orchestra appears to suffer from the same archive fever that I do. And now all kinds of great material is starting to show up on the wiki: lyrics to Tre-P’s “Drunk Bus” contributed by Ed Burch, chord changes for “Winnebago Bay” and other songs contributed by Riley Broach. And this: a page of sprawling handwritten notes for “My Seafaring Lassie,” developed in situe as we were pulling together this then very fresh piece of hardtack for a couple of shows during the summer of 2002 (I’d finished writing the song on the treadmill on the cargo ship on which my wife and I crossed the Atlantic Ocean on our move back from Turkey just weeks before).

Here’s the notes:

Seafarin’-transcript.pdf

And, just for reference, here’s a recording of “My Seafaring Lassie” from a solo show I did in December 2008 at the Home Grown Coffee House in Accokeek, Maryland:

http://theviper.wikispaces.com/file/view/seafaring-lassie.mp3/77638953
(click here to download the mp3)

The contributor of the notes is Rob Henn, as will be apparent from what he calls the “admittedly trombone-centric (but still helpful!)” transcription of this arrangement. What I really like is the economy of these notes — there’s a lot being recorded here, and it’s a little bit of a fly thing all on one page: everything from the basic structure of the song, to snatches of lyrics, notes on vocal harmonies and punctuation, built-in contingencies for live playing (all those question marks!), bits of melody transcription, and references to inside jokes (such as our use of the “Picardy 3rd” to end the song).

At the tail end of the piece, you’ll also see:

Assorted phrases, Irish brogue talkin’, whatever…
— On my signal, I sing, “And she’ll smile on the bard of Armeagh! (Armeagh!)”
All, very lock-step in rhythm, “And she’ll smile on the bard of Armeagh!”

This was about as inside as jokes get. It could be excused only by the vaguely Irish (though, truthfully, English West Country) feel of the song. And the joke was basically this: Rob Henn had once had a dream in which, I think, The Viper and His Famous Orchestra were playing; and we either had to sing, or were watching, some Irish music performance in which the “bard of Armeagh” line cited in the “Seafarin’ Lassie” notes were sung. Rob had vividly remembered the lyrics, the melody, and the end-of-chorus turnaround from his dream, and so was sufficiently astounded some weeks later, while at the Hideout in Chicago, to discover a flyer for an upcoming performance BY the Bard of Armagh, which turned out to be the moniker sometimes applied to the late and great, hearty and hellish Tommy Makem — though I can’t believe it was actually Tommy Makem who was coming to the Hideout.*

So — to rip off Peter Stampfel here — we put it in the song! And sang it! And closed the song with it! Hurrah for The Viper and His Famous Orchestra! Hurrah for Rob Henn! Hurrah for Isaac the Bartender! And Hurrah for the Bard of Armeagh!

* Though a quick search turns up that Tommy Makem was, in fact, scheduled to play in Chicago’s Irish American Heritage Festival in July of 2002. And, in fact, “The Bard of Armagh” turns out to be an actual Irish ballad about a travelling 17th-century harper named  Phelim Brady, recorded at least once by Tommy Makem, and — the resonances start to pile up pretty thick here — set to the tune used by a song occasionally performed by The Viper, “The Streets of Laredo,” though there is no “smiling upon” going on in either song)

fabulous ones, innumerable ones, those that are trained

Learn to play the Viper way

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About a week-and-a-half ago, I took the plunge into ensuring my ukulele kung fu legacy by posting an ad to Craigslist, Milwaukee offering “Guitar, ukulele, mandolin lessons” at what are, I must say, very reasonable rates. I have received a smattering of replies, but so far nothing definite (though I have been busy learning Hannah Montana’s “Fly on the Wall” in preparation for one possibility).

If you’re in Milwaukee, and want to learn to play the Viper way*, give me a ring. Here’s the text of the ad, as I just reposted it earlier this afternoon. As you’ll see, I tempt would-be students with free mp3 samples of my playing in action. Feel free to sample yourself!

GUITAR, UKULELE, MANDOLIN LESSONS

Do you play a stringed instrument? Want to?

Challenge your playing by working with a teacher who can draw on more than 25 years of professional performance experience in rock, country, traditional jazz, bluegrass, jug, and other old time styles.

I can help you develop your skills and a broader sense of music theory on acoustic or electric guitar, ukulele, mandolin or, really, any instrument that you can pluck or strum. (And some you can’t — I’ve provided audio examples of my playing on various instruments below.)

I am willing to teach all levels, but am especially suited to working with intermediate-level musicians seeking to become competent on unfamiliar instruments or in unfamiliar styles (e.g., are you a metal shredder who wants to play in a traditional bluegrass band?). I can also help you learn to better accompany yourself as a singer or songwriter.

My rates are $20 for a half-hour session, $30 for an hour, or $45 for sessions up to two hours long. I am located in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Milwaukee, and am willing (within reason) to travel to meet you. Call me at 414-231-3148 and stop letting that instrument collect dust.

EXAMPLES OF MY PLAYING VARIOUS INSTRUMENTS / STYLES

Feel free to right-click and download any of these mp3 files.

  • Mandolin – “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke” / “Jerusalem Ridge”This is a klezmer original semi-instrumental paired with a bluegrass standard by Bill Monroe. You’re hearing me play the lead on a Turkish-manufactured mandolin with a banjo body. The band I’m playing with is Maryland’s own Paint Branch Ramblers, caught in rehearsal.
  • Baritone ukulele – “Pennies from Heaven”Solo instrumental performance in a kind of cocktail-bar-jazz style on this pop standard. A baritone ukulele is tuned like the top four strings of a guitar (D-G-B-E) and learning how to play it is a relatively painless transition for most guitarists.
  • Electric guitar, baritone ukulele, and yodeling – “Last Call Waltz”Another original semi-instrumental in a loose honky-tonk waltz style. Wait for the bridge to hear the electric guitar (about halfway through). And, yes, I can teach you how to yodel. The band is an Illinois supergroup drawn from members of Tangleweed, the Kennett Brothers, the Corn Likkers, and the Viper and His Famous Orchestra.
  • Banjo ukulele and jug – “Everybody’s Truckin'”Ukulele accompaniment (and some singing in the middle – that’s me on the hi-de-hos) on this traditional jazz / western swing standard. Listen for the uke, jug, and comb trio in the middle, brought to you by the magic of multi-track recording. The band is the Paint Branch Ramblers.

* Incidentally, this way of framing my pitch (not the one I use in the ad itself) is taken from a famous accordion teacher in Madison, Wisconsin, on whose estate sale I worked as a young handyman for the Bethel Resale Shop in the early 1990s. His name was Rudy Burkhalter, and along with the dozens of accordions he left behind, there were piles and piles of flyers featuring a bespectacled, crew-cutted, pre-teen with a piano accordion and the invitiation to “Learn to Play the Burkhalter Way.”

I just looked him up, and it appears that there is still an annual “Rudy Burkhalter Memorial Accordion Jamboree,” last spotted at the Oregon High School Performing Arts Center in Oregon, Wisconsin (just outside of Madison). As this site notes:

Rudy Burkhalter (1911 – 1994), an immigrant from Basel, Switzerland and the upper Midwest’s foremost Swiss-American traditional musician, opened an accordion school in 1938 with his wife, Frances, teaching throughout south-central Wisconsin. Once a week, the two would travel to Monroe, New Glarus, Darlington, Dodgeville, Watertown, Beaver Dam, Richland Center, Reedsburg and Baraboo, advertising two months of free lessons as well as furnishing the accordion. Eventually teaching up to 500 students per week, with classes of 20 to 40 students, countless people in Green County learned to play the instrument.