It’s been a long time coming. But here are the set lists for the shows on which Ryan Jerving (the Viper) sat in on guitar with DeKalb, Illinois legend Otis Ball and the Chains. This was part of a two-day “DeKalb Rocks” event in Chicago and DeKalb that brought back together a number of great bands from the punk and post-punk 1980s scene in DeKalb, including Blatant Dissent, The Subverts, happy hunting, and others.
I was a Chain! Otis and I were friends from my days in the late 1980s Madison band Kissyfish. Our bands played together surprisingly often, given the geographic distance, and it was always a good time. Otis is a great rock ‘n’ roll songwriter and it was an honor to share a stage with him again.
Saturday, August 22
The Abbey Pub, Chicago, IL
We Will Rock You
Amy
I Enjoy Being a Boy
Borderline
Walk On Water
Dianamal*
I Am Otis
Sunday, August 23
Otto’s, DeKalb, Illinois
Hot Day*
Fire Needs Oxygen*
She’s Not Dumb/Dianamal*
Everybody Knows*
I Enjoy Being a Boy
Amy
Lonely Little Vampire (a Kissyfish song)
Paperback Grotto/Walk On Water
Birthday*
Charles Manson’s Birthday
* Ryan Jerving didn’t play on this one
Several photo albums on Facebook are devoted to the two-day event, if you can access them.
PART 3 OF 3 – The Viper and His Famous Orchestra have been in touch with the Rambling Boys of Pleasure of Ghent, Belgium. And I’m here to report the results.
Plus, guess what? Three years in the future, there will be a surprise Part 4 of 3. Don’t miss it!
The Viper loves a girl in Moscou. Ghent, Belgium. Ghent’s city center is a car-free area.
One of the first reactions that we had to this discovery was a sense that we really should get in touch with this band: 1) to let them know how glad we were that they’d taken the trouble to learn and play this song, and 2) to find out how this bit of trans-Atlantic cultural exchange had come about.
Our bass player, Riley Broach, was the first to post a comment to their YouTube video, writing:
“Wow! That’s awesome Rambling Boys! We’re flattered that you covered us. If we are ever in Belgium we’ll have to perform together.?”
To which TheRamblingBoys replied:
“We’d be happy to have you? and Ghent is a lovely place to be. Thanks a lot for the encouragement, didn’t see that one coming :-)”
Then I wrote, then percussionist Victor Cortez wrote, and then even Viper-affiliate Don Gerard wrote (to plug Steve Pride & His Blood Kin). And to all, the Ghent Ramblers replied with good grace and humor.
By this point, I thought it’d be fun to actually interview these rough and rowdy Rambling Boys. And so I tracked down Stijn, the ukulele player, to ask if he was prepared to suffer the indignities of my questions via e-mail. He was, and here’s what transpired. (The following is edited for concision, coherence, jokes, and to throw in some good stuff from communication that took place outside the scope of this e-mail exchange. In other words, this is not journalism even a little).
THE VIPER: First, about you and your band. How long have you and/or The Rambling Boys of Pleasure been playing?
RAMBLING STIJN: We first got together somewhere in November ’08. It took me more than a month to get together a few musicians. First there’s the trouble in finding people who like roots music (that isn’t blues), and secondly there’s the trouble in finding musicians who can play an instrument that’s not a guitar.
TV: Are all of you from Ghent?
RS: We’re all from Ghent, although we used to have a dobro/steel guitar player from Antwerp as well, who needed more time to focus on his kids. We’re still looking for a worthy replacement, although there is some speculation that he’s actually the only dobro player in Belgium.
Really, if you’re looking for a band in Belgium and you don’t want to play speed metal, you’re out of luck.
TV: Though I suppose there are worse things than wanting to play speed metal. In your postings to YouTube, besides our song, you’ve also posted recordings of Al Jolson’s “Back in Your Own Backyard,” Roger Miller’s “England Swings,” Nora Bayes’s “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” and Hank Williams’s “Hey! Good Lookin’.” Have you always played such a range of American pop/folk material?
RS: Can’t speak for the other band members, but I fell in love with country music, and swing after that, by listening to Dylan’s Nashville Skyline, which was pretty much all we listened to at the student newspaper when I worked there during my first year at college.
But Hank Williams is probably the reason I’m still playing and making music today. A lot of musicians go through a phase where there realize that they – well – suck, and ask themselves “why am I still playing?” Hank had some great melodies and lyrics and worked with great musicians (Don Helms!) but in the end the chords and the lines are dead simple. That was very encouraging for me, and it also made me realize how much music is a social affair and that people don’t care how slick your solos are.
TV: Nothing harder to achieve than simplicity.
RS: Playing country music if you’re not from the States can be a bit weird though. I wrote a song a while ago that started out with “Way down yonder where I was born / Between the fields, the cows, the grasses and the corn” and it’s really hard to sing that with a straight face when you’ve never been near a farm for your entire life. But it’s great fun nonetheless.
TV: Probably the only thing harder to achieve than simplicity is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’re set. So how did you decide which of your songs you would post to YouTube?
RS: I said: “Guys, I’m sorry, but I’m really not going to record more than six. I’m already enough of a recluse as it is, without having to edit and mix a whole batch of songs.”
TV: Let me ask about the instruments. You have a guitarist and ukulele player (Godfried), an upright bass player (David), and yourself on ukulele, guitar, and clarinet. And then there’s a multi-instrumentalist named Clo who plays, variously, a shaker, a tiny xylophone, and, on “Shine on, Harvest Moon,” something that your video information calls an “ovenrooster.”
RS: Yes, the “ovenrooster.” We actually have a washboard around somewhere, but didn’t have it handy when we recorded Harvest Moon, so Clo just decided to get an oven grate from the kitchen and play that instead.
TV: Most people who find our CD online are ukulele players looking for ukulele music. But in one of your YouTube responses, you suggested that you began to play ukulele after you found our Everything for Everyone CD.
RS: I remember thinking, after listening to Everything for Everyone for the first time, “I must have an ukulele.” So I got one. I have an irresistible urge to buy and try to learn every instrument that catches my fancy. Which usually fails horribly, but I guess the ukulele stuck. Currently I’m trying my best to get a few notes out of a clarinet.
TV: When I was trying to figure out what you were saying in the information that appears along with your videos on YouTube, I assumed, from what little I know of Belgium, that the language you were using was Flemish. The closest I could find to an online Flemish-English translator was one that did Dutch to English. And that worked pretty well to translate things like “Nu nog een beetje oefenen op onze stage presence” into “Now we just have to practice our stage presence” (which isn’t true, by the way: you guys look great!)
RS: Flemish is really just the variety of Dutch that is spoken in Belgium, but it’s the same language that’s also spoken in The Netherlands and in Suriname. The difference between Flemish and the Dutch spoken in The Netherlands is somewhat greater than the difference between, say, a Jersey accent and a southern drawl. Maybe the difference between American and Australian English would be a good comparison. Including the fact that hearing Australian English probably makes you cringe.
TV: No! Americans LOVE hearing Australian English! It’s an accent we all like to think we do pretty well, too. So why is your English so much better than my Flemish?
RS: Because people who don’t speak English have a reason to learn it, whereas I would absolutely discourage you from ever trying to learn Dutch. Simple as that. It might surprise Americans, but most of the people I know have read more English literature (in the original language) than they have Dutch. E.g. The Daily Show is very popular over here as well.
TV: In the last blog post I did, I discussed how hard it would be to figure out the lyrics to “Ich Bin Berlin,” for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that our liner notes for the CD included the lyrics, but after having run them through an online translation engine twice: first English-to-Russian, then that same Russian translated back into English. So how did you do it, especially given how local to Champaign, Illinois our references are?
RS: Google search and google maps were my friends when trying to figure out what on earth this song was about. Which in turn led to a very fruitful afternoon browsing wikipedia-articles about public transportation in Illinois and aquatic life in the Great Lakes. You know how these things go. It’s easy to understand in a superficial way: check if there is a Neil St. in the Champaign-Urbana area and find out where N. Prospect is, check wikipedia to make sure MTD is really the name of public transportation in Illinois and so on.
TV: My previous blog post commented on how close you really were on most of it.
RS: I’m surprised my transcript is that accurate 🙂 I heard “The tide and the shore if” as “and the timing assures it” though. And I’m sitting on the sofa, sipping some gin, whereas the rest of the band would rather sit there with Cindy and Jean.
TV: Ah! When I was writing that part of the song (it was written in pieces, years apart), a show called Melrose Place was on TV on Sunday nights [correction: Monday nights] between 7 and 8 p.m. Two of the characters were sisters named Sydney and Jane, and I was especially fond of Sydney’s character. So I’m “there on my sofa with Sydney and Jane / They won’t make me happy, but I won’t complain.”
RS: Melrose Place, would’ve never guessed that reference.
TV: However, I also like the way you heard it as “sipping some gin,” which is actually also historically accurate to my Melrose Place routine at the time! (And it reminds of the Kinks song “sipping on my soda / sitting on my sofa.”) And “the timing assures it” is actually a very nice variation: “My Sundays are yours if the timing assures it.”
How hard was it to convince the rest of your band to learn this impossible song? And what kind of reaction, if any, have your fans had to it?
RS: It’s a favorite. We like it, and people who hear it like it. It feels incredible to hear three wholly independent verses at a time, and it’s fun to do as well. It took us quite a few rehearsals to get it right without getting distracted by what everyone else was playing and singing, but it was very much worth the practice.
TV: That’s all I’ve got. Thank you for playing our song. We’ve really enjoyed your version and the sense of living in a time when bands across the world from one another can find ways to make connections. If you are ever in the States and in the Midwest, please let us know.
RS: Thanks for the very warm response, it really means a lot. I’ve passed it on to the rest of the band.
As reported in the previous post, we discovered last week that The Viper and His Famous Orchestra had been covered and the result posted to YouTube by a trad jazz band out of Ghent, Belgium operating under the name of the Rambling Boys of Pleasure. I described our amazement that, as our trombonist Rob Henn put it, “a group in Belgium covered a song by an obscure niche band from Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.” O! brave new online world, that has such covers in it.
In this post, I want to talk about how the particular song choice is even more bewitching and bewildering. And we want especially to commend the Rambling Boys–who I hope to interview for my final post on the subject–on both their ambition and accomplishment in troubling themselves to cover the song known as”Ich Bin Eine Berlin” (or, alternately, as “Ich Bin Berlin (The Sundown Song)”). Of all the Viper songs you might attempt to learn and sing, this is the one for which we’ve strewn the most obstacles in your path.
Here, for reference, is The Viper and His Famous Orchestra recording of “Ich Bin Berlin” from our studio recording Everything For Everyone:
The problem isn’t the chord progression. It’s a fairly common set of changes for early jazz style tunes (I think I took it most directly from the George Formby song “My Ukulele”) ((2022 edit: I don’t know that that’s true!!!)). And the song just runs through these changes four times, with one 4-measure break in the middle and a pretty standard turnaround at the end.
But those lyrics. Oy! Let me count the ways.
First, you basically have to learn three separate songs. The “Berlin” of the title refers, not to the German city, but to songwriter Irving Berlin. And Berlin pioneered the Tin Pan Alley gimmick of fitting two distinct melodies/lyrics to the same set of chord changes–usually one long and langourous, and one chopped and raggy–first sung separately, and then contrapuntally layered over one another. You’ll hear this in “You’re Not Sick (You’re Just in Love)” or “Play a Simple Melody” or “Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil.” (If you’re not familiar with Berlin’s stuff, think “I’ve Got a Feeling” by the Beatles.) But that wasn’t complicated enough. So we went Berlin one better and devised THREE separate melodies/lyrics: one fast, one mid-tempo, one slow-and-low-that-is-the-tempo–and all of them going on at once and on top of one another.
Second, if you’re living in Ghent, Belgium, I can’t imagine how you’d make sense of these lyrics, even if you managed to hear them apart from one another. I wrote this song in the late 1990s at a moment when many of my daily activities as a graduate student living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois–grocery shopping, going to a movie–were taking me farther and farther to the sprawling edges of town as developers bought up one-time cornfields on the cheap and turned them into grocery megastores and cinema multiplexes. I’d never needed a car to get around before then. And the first part of the lyrics registers how weird I felt when I realized that I was on an MTD bus headed up North Prospect into a silent sea of parking lots just to purchase the staples of my existence at the new Meijer’s. The rest of the the lyrics are filled with equally exotic local references: chomping on Sno-caps at the Savoy 14 theater on South Neil St., watching sisters Jane Mancini and Sydney Andrews having it out every Monday night on Melrose Place when I couldn’t be bothered to leave the apartment, etc.
Third, if your first language was Flemish and you went out and bought the CD on which we included “Ich Bin Berlin,” Everything for Everyone, because you thought the liner notes would help you figure out the lyrics, we’d have to offer you our sincerest apologies. Because you’d be out of luck. We had, in fact, included the lyrics to all of our songs. But in our bid to be ever more inscrutable, we’d used an online translation engine to first convert everything from English to Russian, and then re-convert everything from the Russian translation back into now-fractured English. So, for example, a line like…
I’m putting on my Sunday best / I’m putting it to the test
…became…
I must drape my form in best garment which I possess, garment which I usually reserve for church on Sunday. I test them.
With all of this stacked against them, we can only commend the Rambling Boys of Pleasure on what seems to be a flawless rendering of the song as we composed it, right down to the opening cough. I think there’s maybe an “if you’d only calm down” where an “if you’d only come down” is intended. And Stijn, the Rambling ukulelist, has informed me that the line about “Sydney and Jane” has remained an obscure object of desire. (He’s elected to sing about sitting on the sofa “sipping some gin,” while others in the band “would rather sit there with Cindy and Jean.”) But those are very, very minor differences. Indeed, they may even be improvements, in a Peter Stampfel kind of way.
So let’s hear it for the Rambling Boys of Pleasure! Let’s hear it for Ghent! And let’s hear it for North Prospect, South Neil, and REO Speedwagon Way!
P.S. Here, for anyone else who’d like to take a crack at this song, are the actual English language lyrics and the basic chord changes.
1st part
When the sun goes down on North Prospect far from the old downtown. I’ll be sittin’ pretty on a bus that’s Prospect bound. If you call my name you’ll get no answer where parking’s the only sound. But I’ll be there you’ll see on the MTD just a-hopin’ the sun’ll stay down.
2nd part
My Sundays are yours if you’d only come down My Fridays and evenings — negotiable My phone number’s listed / I go to bed late You know where to find me / On Monday nights between 7 and 8 I’m there on my sofa with Sydney and Jane They won’t make me happy / But I won’t complain My Sundays are yours if / The tide and the shores if My Sundays are yours if you’d only come down
2nd part (alt.)
My Sundays are yours if you’d only come down My Fridays and evenings — negotiable My phone number’s listed / My machine’s always on I’m even on e-mail / It’s viper@aol.com* I’m at the same address that you used to write I’m home every morning / And most every night My Sundays are yours if / The tide and the shores if My Sundays are yours if you’d only come down
3rd part
I’m putting on my Sunday best I’m putting it to the test This town ain’t — no town ain’t — like heading for the Neil St. side of town I’m Savoy bound I’ll be stomping I’ll be Sno-cap chomping Don’t bother to call or write I’m stepping out Tuesday night Far be it / From me, it Seems a shame to say it See you [C-U] on the weekend Then’s / When / Friends can Stop and set it down
* It’s not actually viper@aol.com. Try ryanjerving@gmail.com or our actual band e-mail yes.this.is.the.viper@gmail.com.
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.
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.
Big moose came down from the mountain this past weekend as The Viper and His Famous Orchestra played 5 sets over 3 days of shows in Champaign-Urbana, with two sets by Edward Burch (with Sarah Hennies and the rest of us) thrown in for good measure. (I should also note the charming set by C-U’s own The Duke of Uke and His Novelty Orchestra on Friday night as part of the whole The-Jivey-Name-and-Possessive-Adjective-Orchestra orgy.)
Detail of coloring contest page
If you missed our kid-friendly Sunday afternoon show, you missed out on our Presidential Coloring Contest. But it’s not too late: you can still download and print out the PDF of the coloring sheet, complete it (as you complete me) and mail it to Ryan Jerving / 2171 N. Hi-Mount Blvd. / Milwaukee, WI 53208. When I get a chance, I’ll upload any entries I receive to this space and to our new Facebook fan page.
My personal thanks to those who played with the Viper on these and our other summer shows: myself, Edward Burch, Riley Broach, Rob Henn, Kenneth P.W. Rainey, and Victor Cortez — with a special shout out to Jerald Shelato who joined us the rest of us Wildcats on Sousaphone and jug for the Sunday show. And a big thanks to those who gave us an excuse to spend the weekend in our old stomping ground: Matt Mitchell and Elizabeth Majerus for staying married for 10 years, and Mike Murphy of Mike N’ Molly’s for not forgetting about us for almost as long.
Below, I’ve reconstructed the set lists, as best as I can in the dim, receding light of the angel of history’s rear view mirror, the reflection a large catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage as the debris grows skyward. This, is what we call progress?
August 7
Mike N’ Molly’s, Champaign, Illinois
SET #1
I Left My Liver in Libertyville
Pretty Is as Pretty Does (as perf. by Angie Heaton)
Das Kapital
Winnebago Bay
Good Morning Irene
Drunk Bus (Tre-P)
Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been…Blue?
Fillmore & Buchanan March
Heyse Latke Kalte Latke
My Seafaring Lassie
Wanna Be Startin’ Something (Michael Jackson)
SET #2
First Round Polka
Randolph St.
El Ultimo en Saber / The Last to Know (Viper/Kennett Brothers)
Let’s Pretend We’re Married (Prince)
And Sometimes Dmytryk
Out Along Upon the Prairie
Hey! Rounders
Ukulele Rhythm
Love Song of Kalua (Marty Robbins)
Benny Lava (Prabhu Deva / Buffalax)
ENCORE
Protest Song (Neil Innes)
Flower (Liz Phair)
Last Call Waltz (Viper/Tangleweed)
August 8
Anniversary party for Elizabeth Majerus and Matt Mitchell, Urbana, Illinois
Ich Bin Berlin (The Sundown Song)
Fillmore & Buchanan March
Let’s Pretend We’re Married (Prince)
First Round Polka
The Pirate Song (?)
Dance Any Way You Want To (?)
My Little Grass Shack (hapa haole standard)
Good Morning Irene
What Time Is It? (Summertime) (High School Musical 2)
DMSR (Prince)
Winnebago Bay
Drunk Bus (Tre-P)
August 9
Mike N’ Molly’s, Champaign, Illinois
SET #1
What Time Is It? (Summertime) (High School Musical 2)
Winnebago Bay
Das Kapital
The Pirate Song (?)
The Huki-Lau (hapa haole standard)
Fillmore & Buchanan March
I Love a Girl in Moscow
Wanna Be Startin’ Something (Michael Jackson)
SET #2
First Round Polka
Randolph St.
Good Morning Irene
Dance Any Way You Want To (?)
Watching Junior Drive (Jay Bennett and Edward Burch)
My Seafaring Lassie
Tavern in the Town (trad)
My Little Grass Shack (hapa haole standard)
Benny Lava (Prabhu Deva/Buffalax)
Last Call Waltz (Viper/Tangleweed)
the kind of music your great-great-great-grandparents warned your great-great-grandparents about
The Viper & His Famous Orchestra 