It’s a good thing that the recording went well yesterday because the live shows we did Tuesday night were ROUGH. It all started for me at the in-studio radio appearance on Ray Wylie Hubbard’s show. I called Ray before the show and decided I didn’t want to haul my acoustic guitar down there because afterwards I would be racing back to Austin for the Neal Pollack Invasion appearance at Stubbs -- and I didn’t want to leave my Old Gibson laying around a bar all night.

Ray Wylie was nice as hell (as usual) and told me that I could use his acoustic. I drive about an hour to the station. When I arrive, Ray hands me this beautiful new acoustic guitar that a luthier friend of his recently designed for him. It's in some obscure fingerstyle blues tuning and, get this, in addition to being a new guitar and having new strings, IT HAS NEVER BEEN IN STANDARD TUNING. It was made expressly for Ray’s delta blues style guitar chops (Ray uses a different guitar for his more standard folk, country or rock tunes).

Poor Ray has to retune his new guitar. And poor me, I have to play a guitar that goes out of tune 3 different ways every 3 minutes. I am usually unflappable on radio appearances and needless to say this was not the case tonight. By the end of each of my songs the guitar was in a different tuning than when I started. Let’s just say I didn’t feel very musical.

But I toughed it out and Ray was funny and charming as hell anyway. I still had a good time and made a mental note to ALWAYS use my own guitar. I know this already, but I get lazy about lugging instruments around. But hell, if someone is taking the trouble to broadcast my performance across Texas, I should be able to figure out how to bring my guitar to the station!

So I hightail my ass back to Stubbs and arrive in plenty of time for the Neal Pollack Invasion set. "The Swollen Circus," as this show is referred to, is the brainchild of Michael Hall and Walter Salas-Humara. Walter is the primary cog in the band The Silos (whom I have loved since their 1987 release entitled CUBA) and he had produced my 2nd record Lunette back in 1999-2000.

A LITTLE SWOLLEN CIRCUS HISTORY:

I think that as a result of having worked with Walter I was invited to play the Swollen Circus two years in a row back in 1999 and 2000. It is a pre-SXSW kickoff show that had exclusively taken place at a legendary little bar on Guadalupe Street called The Hole-in-the-Wall. It’s at Stubbs now because sadly, the Hole-in-the-Wall closed down. Walter and Michael invite 10-15 acts who are down for SXSW and each band does a 3-song set. It’s always great talent, with people like Ryan Adams, Gurf Morlix, Steve Wynn, and Jo Carol Pierce having made appearances in recent years.

So Neal Pollack was convinced we should do rootsier tunes for the Swollen Circus and save the Punk/Garage stuff for the SXSW showcase on Saturday. This, in my estimation, is a mistake - mostly because the Neal Pollack Invasion is NOT a roots band and IS a garage/punk band. Go figure?

The NPI hit the Stubb’s stage after Kev Russel’s set (Russel is from the great Austin band the Gourds). We are doing our Lou Reed styled dildo-juggling midget song: Memories of Times Square, and two Springsteen parodies including Jenny in the Car 1979, a raunchy variation on The Boss’ Cadillac Ranch where Pollack fits about every Springsteen cliché possible into a 3 minute song. Now, I am a Bruce fan and I think the song is pretty funny. However TWO Bruuuuuce parodies in a row makes us seem a little lacking in vision. Then, when we add in Neal Pollack’s otherwise hilarious 4-minute spoken-word story-intro where he does an imitation of Bruce (talking in his whisper-sincere LIVE-concert-story voice) about how long the band had been together and how we all met on the streets of Jersey in 1973, well, then it just fell apart.

The real problem last night was that without any context about The Neal Pollack Invasion or Neal Pollack’s Satire-Novel Never Mind the Pollacks, I think we just sounded mean and unfocused. If we had done a couple of other styles of music (a la Ramones, Minutemen) then we could have communicated Neal’s intent, even without a literal explanation that what he is doing is satire. That’s my take anyway, but I CAN say that based on the feedback of many of my industry friends in the audience - the crowd just didn’t "get it." Plus, on a personal note, I hated the house guitar amp I was using. I had a guitar tone that maybe sounded like 50 crappy solid state amps, with the distortion cranked up to 11, laying face down with all the speakers blown. I was the reluctant master of a crackling intermittent farce of a guitar army. . . .

Michael Hall, bless him, still loved our act.

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