Tag Archives: Accokeek

those that tremble as if they were mad

Hanukkah with the Viper, pt. 1

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I’d been thinking that the right and proper thing to do this holiday season would be to upload and post some version of the Hanukkah song that I’d written and have been performing all year with the Paint Branch Ramblers, “Heyse Latke Kalte Latke” (hot latke cold latke). But when I went to track down the file on my hard drive, I discovered that I had at least enough material for 8 days of blog posts.

A great miracle has happened here!

So I’ll start below with a live version of the song as recorded at our recent December 6, 2008 show at the Home Grown Coffee House in Accokeek, Maryland. (Here, we pair it with Bill Monroe’s “Jerusalem Ridge,” taking you from diaspora to homeland in just under 3-and-a-half minutes).

Please wait until sundown to listen. And for the best possible effect, some white noise produced by the sound of latkes frying in the background would be nice. Add a plop of applesauce. Then, for each of the next 7 days, please return to this blog for a little more of the musical gelt, Viper style.

download the mp3

NOTE: If you’d like to hear more of the Ramblers, you can find the complete set of recordings from the show on their own blog. To start, you might begin with my hand-chosen “best of” from the show.

innumerable ones

Set list for December 6, 2008

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Set list for the Viper’s 20 minute set between two longer sets by the Paint Branch Ramblers at the Home Grown Coffee House in Accokeek, Maryland. For more details on the evening and for the Ramblers set lists,  see here.

This was my last performance as The Viper before I leave the Washington, D.C. area — where I’ve lived for the last 5 years — to return to the Midwest, and specifically to move to Milwaukee. So it was fitting that I played at the venue where I first played in the area 5 years ago and which is one of my favorite places to play: great acoustics, a great audience, and a great staff of volunteers from the neighborhood that always make the night a lot of fun. This is one of the things I’ll miss the most about the area.

SET LIST

  • Viper’s Blue Yodel no. 6.02 x 10 to the 23rd (a Mole of the Blues)
  • Capital
  • Think about your Troubles (Harry Nilsson)
  • And Sometimes Dmytryk
  • Time of the Leaving / I Will Always Love You (Dolly Parton, sung for the Paint Branch Ramblers)
  • My Seafaring Lassie

I hope to put up sound files over the next couple of days from the hi-tech but lo-fi recording I made at the show (essentially, a mic set up to capture the room sound that ran through my TonePort UX2 interface and into Audacity on my computer, which gives me a chance to equalize the sound a little bit on the other end).

For now, this snippet of me yodeling over the “First Round Polka” with the Paint Branch Ramblers will have to do.

download the first-round-polka-yodel