Sure, we had Covid. Covid?? Didn’t I do this already? Yes, but yes. I had Covid. And then Gunnar had Covid, but there was still this deadline for Bushwick Book Club, the DC chapter who had selected LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS by Ryka Aoki as the featured book for their first (and hopefully not last!) collaboration with This Could Go Boom (a DC area arts non profit that supports gender diversity in music who had their first MUSIC FESTIVAL this summer!).
So yes, I was slightly to mostly out of my mind, but I had to write a song and submit a video for this show, because I said I would. And it’s funny. Not a lot of people would understand this, but a gig’s a gig.
I remember decades back (I was still in my Murderizer days), I went to go see a friend who is a jazz drummer play a gig at some bar in the East Village. I remember afterwards, he was struggling because he’d just had a hernia operation. That day. THAT DAY. But here he was playing this gig, because he said he would play this gig. And a gig’s a gig. You don’t back out for anything. Not for a death in the family. Not for a cold or a divorce coming on. Not for a hernia operation.
Needless to say, I packed his drums into my 1994 Toyota Corolla that everyone said I was crazy to drive in the city (of course “everyone” did not play an accordion or drums), and I gave my friend Steve a lift back home with all his equipment, because he was a musician living his life, and who am I not to help another friend/musician in NYC living his life with a hernia operation and everything. I play the accordion *and* drums, so of course I’m going to help a musician friend in need.
A normal person with a normal job would have called in sick on the day of surgery. But I remember recognizing that night that I belonged to a different sort of people–the kind who will always do everything they can (and more than anyone will every know) to make their gig. You don’t back down from the gig. The show must go on and all that shit. It’s for real. I remember when I and my whole theater company from NYC was undergoing gastro-intestinal shock and trauma in Kyrgyzstan. Did any of the vomiting/diarrhea/shakes/fever stop us from completing that run of the show? Of course not. It wasn’t even considered. They just put another puke bucket behind the curtains.
So.. this is the long way of saying this is the video of the new song created by me and Ed (BECAUSE WE SAID WE WOULD) for LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS by Ryka Aoki for the DC Bushwick Book Club collaboration with the first THIS COULD GO BOOM Music Festival.
F-Covid and anything that thinks it can get in the way of #songsaboutbooks
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