Monday, October 19, 2009

The last Monday...


And so it is.
It came and
went very ceremoniously. It was something of the circus you might have imagined. But it was, as Karen Springer adequately described, church for a lot of us. The Good Reverend and his Choir were giving their last sermon at Toad. If the powers that be would have allowed us to, we would have closed down Toad and sang our way over to Atwoods and just spent the week there. People cried relentlessly at the end. There were also engagements made. There was a woman from Germany there by her self on her last night in Boston. Nice choice, lady. She probably made life long friends. I know I have.

Come see Tim Gearan and his band over at
Atwoods 877 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 617.864.2792
$5 cover.
Good food, great people.
http://www.atwoodstavern.com/index.php

Saturday, September 5, 2009

Alone pt. 2


It's been challenging for me to not tell who or what is in the shots here as part of the "Alone" series. But that seems to me to perhaps be part of the point. To leave it as it is and not tell too much about who it is or where it was taken. This shot continues to strike me in a variety of different ways each time I view it. As of this writing, I see a caged animal. Much like an animal in distress as it is being captured in it's natural habitat. Often times in the pictures you see of animals being trapped they seem to be trying to ward off the tools that are doing them wrong. A lot of the time their own young are there or the other members of their pack. In this shot I can picture ropes being thrown around him and this is the moment where he realizes that it is hopeless. He seems to be crying out to his maker "Why have you forsaken me?" In a way, that is, to me, exactly the moment I saw. We express ourselves as humans in so many ways. But certainly in times of distress, we cry.

High Holidays


Let me start by saying that Jake Brennan and my brother Scott are heterosexual men. But they are also gay for each other. Or maybe one is gay for the other and that's where it ends. The whole High Holiday concept was to be a series of performances based around holidays (obviously) with the first one to be on Valentines Day (which is where I met Christoph Krey from McAlister Drive) then Easter, etc. Well, it turned out to be just one show. But boy was it a swell show. So anyway, Jake and I got to talking about what he wanted to do. I told him the whole thing sounded really pretentious and, also, really gay!! But I'm a Janovitz and an attention whore so I was surely not going to pass up another opportunity to be a part of something really lame. The Valentines Day show was all about the crooners. Did I mention that the set list would be all covers? I thought it would make sense to call Paul Q. Kolderie and get into Camp Street Studios and get Jake and Scott in suits in front of an old tube microphone. The suits might have been Jakes idea, but all the cool stuff was totally mine and I just thought that needed to be clarified. So Paul Q was amenable to the whole thing and that's what we did in early February on a snowy evening. One of the more entertaining things that happened right off the bat, for me anyway, was that Paul Q's dog took a big chunk out of Scott's calf and he was bleeding pretty heavily when I got there. He was scared and kept asking me to call our mom. You can imagine how much this amused me. I mean, how often do you get to see a grown man, and your brother no less, crying like a little girl? But, at my behest, he managed to get to his feet long enough to have his picture taken. But Scott is a Janovitz through and through and, as he once put it in regard to being the center of attention "...I relish it..." So, in suits that were too small for them and a rabid, feral dog running amok, we snap a few frames and the result was rather satisfying. And blood was shed!!!





Alone



When you spend countless hours staring at the same image, zooming in to get into certain parts of the picture, you realize there are often several different images in any one image. When shooting a wedding, I turned to snap a shot of two of the flower girls. I zoomed in to do some burning and dodging on the arm you see here. Inside this whole picture was something I would have otherwise not seen at all. And so was born "Alone." An ongoing series (I hope, or else I'm going to seem like an awfully pretentious tool) of pictures inside a picture. But there is more. I know...the suspense is killing the reader. I started to realize that no matter how many friends and family members we surround ourselves with, ultimately, in a way, we are alone. In this shot of Timmy he's surrounded by band mates and the whole of the club full of onlookers, but in this moment he is alone. He is on a journey inside his weird little head of whatever the hell the brain drags up to the surface and to his hands as he plays his guitar. It's a beautiful thing, if you ask me. A friend once said in response to me asking what he was thinking (because he had this shit eating grin on his face all of a sudden) "I'm not telling...I'm going to die a million miles an hour with every thought I ever had..." This struck me because, no matter how much we share with another person, we can never truly be able to know their experiences as they see them.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Mondays at Toad


What can I say about Monday nights at Toad? A lot, actually. For the last 15 years, Tim Gearan and some of the best musicians and people you will ever encounter, have been playing there free of charge. And on every one of those nights these boys deliver. And on the few nights where they weren't delivering in the way I know they are capable of, they still put to shame every other show in town. And this is less of a show where as it is an opportunity to experience an atmosphere filled with soul. Timmy is a blues man and he's the real deal. We got to talking one day about the music in the '90's when we started talking about Buffalo Tom and as Timmy put it "I had my nose to the blues grindstone." Timmy takes liberty with traditional arrangements like virtually every other artist does, but he goes a bit further with it. He finds some way, some piece of it that had always rang a chord with him and tells his story through his words. He'll take a verse or two and in the second half you hear his story if you are paying attention. Every time I walk into these rooms to see the likes of Tim, Dennis Brennan, Duke Levine, Kevin Barry, Lou Ulrich, Scott and John Aruda, Paul Ahlstrand, Andy Plaisted, Mike Piehl...the list goes on and on in this town...I want to get down on my hands and knees and thank whoever I should for not only being able to see them play, often times for no charge, but also for the privilege of being able to call them friends. I realize the latter may make me biased about the former, but ask anyone worth their salt who is not friends with them and they will say the same thing.

And sadly, as of the end of September, it will all be over. 15 years...FIFTEEN YEARS!!!! That's quite the accomplishment for any musician to be able to fill a room to capacity each week. Lou Ulrich and I were talking a couple of Monday's ago and he told me that they played during the March 31st/April 1st blizzard in 1997 and there were about 30 people in attendance. I remember where I was that night and, knowing what I know now, I wish I had been at Toad. Lou, who was living in Watertown at the time, told me it took him two and a half hours to get home and that it was totally worth it. These guys are not getting rich doing this and never have. I'm not even sure it pays a whole lot of bills. But what's important is that they love and live it.

If you do only one thing this fall get your sorry ass down to Toad before it's too late.

Tim and co. will be moving to Atwoods in East Cambridge for Friday nights beginning in October. $5 cover, good food and great people.