This was our most ambitious show. audio essay to come CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS February 9th-21st, 2004: Chashama @ Times Square It's hard to say if this was a Motorsoft show or a Rockwell show. It followed the rough Los Angeles show. The storefront on 42nd Street where it was held is not there anymore. It was run by a group called Chashama. They host shows in building about to be demoed to make way for skyscrapers. Anita Durst, part of the real estate magnate Durst family, makes it happen. I'm in her debt for letting us play through what's left of a New York that is being cleared for the New New York, the one where smoking is no longer allowed in Bryant Park, which once upon a time was known as Needle Park for it's high junkie population. New York in 1977 is a mirage now. I don't want to dwell on it here but Rockwell proper has a lot to say about it with his new single, "Something's Missing" which you can get from breaksandtakes.com. Susan Short collaborated on the window installation. She'd already begun to build the puppets at the center of Motorsoft's video from "Dancing Bears". The window was split up into three parts-the right side was Susan's, the middle belonged to Motorsoft/Rockwell and the left side was for the novel, with a generous video contribution from Stephanie Linsday. But by the end Susan's hands were all over the window. She made the entire window, which was twenty feet long, gel. Part of the Novel's side of the window were 3-d puzzles of the Chrysler, Empire State and Citicorp building that I built and then singed with matches-my futile attempt at being controversial. You might thing a singed Chrysler Builder might get a rise or at least a reaction post-Sept 11th, but no one really noticed. One of the nicest compliments I ever got came from a concert promoter, a very cool guy but involved with elaborate productions, high end industry stuff-he came across the window randomly (I know him through the NSDJ's) and said it why he moved to NYC, to come across installations like ours in the middle of the city. I did four performances a day as Rockwell, running my gear through a mixer and then out to the street through big speakers. This was before I became a tour guide, so it was a test standing in the window, which might as well have been a dunking booth, playing for the public without a downtown/Brooklyn filter. It was cold and hard to hold a crowd, though lunch hours were good. We did one official show. Friends huddled together and made it work, even after a delay that involved finding another mixer (thanks, Steve). I worked with a drum machine then, so it was crude, but cool and easy to manage. Thanks a bunch to Susan for participating. The Postcard the drew us to L.A. Aside from that sign in the distance it's kind of hard to find a landmark in this town. The "clerks" who sold Gibb the famous flight suit. Rockwell Danny and Gibb before the first L.A. Show. Recreation of the only visual documentation from the Los Angeles show. A strange meeting. January 13th & 14th, 2004: Los Angeles Are there vampires in the Hollywood Hills? I vote yes and I'm inclined to believe they sunk their teeth in the side of Motorsoft's neck. We did not come back to JFK the same as when we left. I'm not going totally into it here, and it's water under the bridge, but let's just say here's one show I'm glad we have no photos from. Actually, it was two shows. Only the first one was a disaster. Los Angeles is strange. You get to Hollywood & Vine and there's nothing there; you wonder why it's famous in the first place. That's a testimony to the Hollywood myth making machine, but I felt like the town was somewhere I was not. It's not transparent like NYC; it's behind closed doors. It also goes to sleep pretty early, mostly because of film and television. I came out first. Gibb followed me by a day. Danny came out for the shows. Hanging out with Gibb was fun, particularly on the third day when he disappeared for a little while, bought a flight suit in an army-navy store, and re-emerged out of his mind. I've never seen him, or anyone, so giddy in my life. Maybe lyrsegic acid was soaked into that flight suit; we spent the next day driving around Los Angeles and Gibb cracked himself, and me, up. He couldn't stop laughing. I was ready to take him to the hospital. Eventually he came down, which was a relief and to this day he doesn't know what hit him in a Los Angeles. Maybe L.A. has comedy vampires or something. Much of the week was spent constructing the set for the first show, to be held in a loft in downtown Los Angeles. The L.A. promoter the Shout guys were working had all of us running around praying there even was going to be a show. For some reason he took a liking to me, an affection that was notably lacking when it came time to pay the band and we all walked away from the whole Los Angeles affair very much in the hole. The set was not going to be as elaborate as the Fez or Shout show but it consumed a lot of my week. My friends Greg and Dakota let me build it in the backyard of their place in Venice. Also, I forgot to mention that part of the gig was to put up a diaroma in the window of Star Shoes, which is a club we were going to play on the second night. Steve and Pedro were very cool to hook that up for us. It wasn't a big window, but that worked in our favor. It's the one thing I wish we had a photo of. The only photo we have from the Los Angeles trip is one Gibb took of the television. (I'll try to find it and post that.) Let's cut to the chase, to the first show in downtown L.A., the one on the loft. I spent a couple of hours on the set, but that was misspent energy. What I should have been paying attention to was what kind of sound we were going to have that night. An L.A. band was supposed to lend us their equipment but they had not shown and so Parchment Farm from S.F. offered and we accepted. But that's not exactly like having a soundcheck and once a show is underway there's no stopping it to tweak your sounds. How bad was our sound? Danny couldn't hear his own snare drum. This may have been one reason we missed our cue in Dancing Bears-when the song goes from chants to slow jam I planned to jump out off the mini stage and dance around with the Bears flag. We were only supposed to do the chant once, but it went two times around-after, that is, I'd already jumped down into the audience. There wasn't much point in dancing around to the fast chant without looking like a goon. I opted for stepping back onto the stage and repeating the jump off. Let's not reflect too long on how that looked. It didn't get better. Mostly it was the sound problem and communication within the band. We were playing on borrowed equipment and the promoter, who must have been a cokehead, didn't even give us a sound check. This is one time I blew it, not insisting on some kind of line check, at least. I got preoccupied with the set. We all felt besieged on stage, except maybe Steve, who was playing rhythm guitar for half the set. Later he told me he didn't remember much from the show at all. We cut the set short, I tore down the set in a huff. The L.A. band that promised us their gear stumbled in just as we were finishing up. We got in the rental car, drove a couple of blocks, pulled over and fucking wondered what had just happened to us. It hit me the next day. Maybe it was fatigue. Even the Chateau Marmont (one spot in Los Angeles we all loved) did not help. We had a show that night at Star Shoes, the thought of which made me want to freestyle flee. A bad show is bad in many ways-not just for the show itself but for the feeling that follows it and how those feelings color your next performance. I proposed to the band that we do only one song that night, but Gibb & Danny wanted a full set and did well too keep my black cancer of a mood contained. Steve took us to a house in the Hollywood Hills that afternoon, to visit a woman who was somehow involved in the music industry. It had been Cole Porter's mansion. Great view of the city. She actually looked like a vampire, pale and gaunt with impatient gestures. Finally, we were glimpsing the real L.A., the sinister one, the one I came to see. The Star Shoes show that night was a recovery. Danny and Gibb say it was a good show. It wasn't a disaster. I blew my voice out. I met cool, new people, particularly Sebastian Mlynarski, who later helped us out big on the Tendency for Ascendancy show. We flew back early the next morning and arrived to one degree Fahrenheit. Somewhere along the way I lost my big Russian hat. When I arrived at the big gates in front of the garage the lock had frozen shut. I spent ten minutes trying to get it open with no gloves before I fled the scene and found a place to sleep for the night. October 4th, 2003: Kon Tikki, Williamsburg The performance part of this show (just Danny, Gibb & myself) was mixed. We were playing from the storefront out to the street and that night there was a cold rain. We didn't have much time to consider what the point of doing a show in a box was so the show didn't get a chance to take advantage of the setting. I also made the mistake of constructing a curtain so that we'd play one song, the curtain would go up, five minute intermission, and then we'd do another song. Good strategy if you're playing to a roomful of junkies on the nod, but it's not so hot when you've got a group of people getting cold and wet. The show on the whole, however, was an art exhibition first, a performance second. It gave Gibb, Danny and I a venue to show the visual work. Kon Tikki was Leo Koening's social club turned art gallery that was towards the street from the garage and right next to the big rot iron gates you see on the Motorsoft album cover. Gibb already had a solo show in the space; his focus is as a painter and a sculptor so it was easy for him to step in. Danny also has a background in sculpture and film, but had not done much of the former in awhile. His Shanta & The She Bear is a great and led to his own solo show at Kon Tikki, "Christmas in July". That was when we took over the storefront and put on shows, including Motorsoft associates Susan Short and Andy "Deep Seats" McCarty. I showed the flags, which was easy. Collectively we worked on the front window, which had the same brick-a-brak-rocococ mash of the Motorsoft cover. It's important to note that Danny and Gibb were a big part of arranging the elements on the front cover of the Decline & Fall of All Y'All cover, shot by Jonah Freeman & Eillen Quinlan. Of all of our productions, the album cover is at the tops. Rock doesn't have much of a life in the art world. But Kon Tikki was far enough off the map not to read as art world and it was very cool to see how much this show brought in the neighborhood. Mario the butcher across the street showed my objects he had in his basement for us to borrow and everything head was pure Motorsoft aesthetic-Moose Heads and garden gnomes. Gibb's got a one-man show in Paris this May and Danny is a commited sculptor, audio or visual or both. My own interest are in print & web design, which as solo Rockwell I'm getting more opportunities to push. March 19th, 2003: Fez It's a shame we don't have any pictures from this show because it was our finest. The Fez is no longer with us, but in its time it was a first class downtown venue, with the same feel as Joe's Pub. Low ceiling, a nice broad stage and seating service made it a premier jazz club and years before I was lucky enough to see the Mingus Big Band play-James Carter, a rising star, blowing hard and practically falling into my lap. The good part of being in charge of your own production is that you become preoccupied with it leading up the show-it keeps your head away from performance anxiety. We were also fresh from the Shout show, which was a success. My biggest concern was getting enough people there to make it worth the Fez's while. It wasn't a problem, thanks to my friends, particularly John Johnson. We were near capacity, which was just under a hundred people. But were getting ahead of ourselves, because the first step was erecting the set. I found out soon after I arrived that day that the ramparts and the curtain set was too tall for the room-I'd incorrectly measured the ceiling by a good four inches. Even with things running smoothly I didn't have much time to spare once we were let into the Fez at five in the afternoon. I ran down the block, purchase a saw and was able to saw the set down to fit, but this was not done with it until people were coming into the club. The curtain was essential because of the sequence of the show: fifteen minutes of me reading from my novel and then the band, but the band would begin just as I would up and just as the band hit the first hard chord I'd pull the curtain down. Did it work? You bet your ass. I first came in front of the crowd to introduce the sequence of the night. We handed out a program for the night, with a snippet from the novel. The introduction felt good, but as soon as I was done with it I had to decide when to go ahead and actually do the reading. The reading was over two songs by a forgotten, but great, band named Valium Aggelium. I stood back by the sound board-the sound man repeatedly asking if I wanted to get going, me putting him off, him asking again until finally I thought, "you have to start somewhere". As the reading neared an end, as the band began to mummer Motorsoftly and I grabbed the curtain string. What a great curtain drop that was. The band was just awesome that night, everyone playing as far out on a branch as was possible, and we had guest Dancing Bear Blaze on our side. I can't recall too much from the music part of the show but that I was sweating like Meat Loaf playing a pig roast and that it was over fast. We did an encore but I wasn't really sure of the reception. Even when Danny and I went backstage after the encore we weren't sure how'd it'd gone. A few minutes later we felt the love, though, and that's the one show people still come up and talk to me about now. P.S> That was the night the war with Iraq began-not drawing a correlation, just forgot to mention it earlier-the bridges to Manhattan had been shut down due to terrorism scare. < CHECK OUT THE PHOTOS March 9th, 2003: Shout @ Bar 13 I'm a big fan of Steve and Pedro, the Notorious Shout DJ's, leaders of the Sunday Stalwart Shout at Bar 13. I happened upon the party years ago looking for a place for a first date with my Ex-German Foxy Frau Annette. I love dancing and Shout is a seven year dance odyssey. There was always stiff competition from Brian and David and assorted dance transients Sunday nights at Shout. Blaze and Donna and Tracy were always the perfect dance companion there and the first two later incarnated themselves as the bear in the Dancing Bears Motorsoft moment. Most dance parties last a season in NYC, so Shout at 7 is a real accomplishment. The NSDJ's have a broad vision and that includes hosting bands. Bar 13 is good room -- not too big, not small and a band can get some energy with the crowd. It was, in of itself, an important show, but I also saw it as run up to the Fez show, slated for a week later. As a committed dancer, I wanted the show to be brief, to open up the dance floor early and hopefully get people psyched on the larger Motorsoft show. This show was just after the Great White fire in Rhode Island (when a pyrotechnics show lit the ceiling on fire and hundreds died trying to escape). It worried me because I'd been a fairly elaborate (for a one-off) set-taking the ramparts from our last show and adding poles so that there could be a curtain that would drop when I let go of the rope. So I would stand in front as the band chugged into Motorsoftly and just as the song was about to kick up I would drop the curtain. This made getting to a show was a real production and getting there I had to go right to work constructing the set. It didn't turn out to be a problem with the staff of Bar 13. After all, no flames were involved. My real concern was whether the curtain would drop when I pulled the string-it was in a knot that was to slide out and free the rope. The night before the show we had practiced and I tried the trick and the knot tightened, bringing the ramparts onto their side. For me Motorsoft was not satire, it was a creation from a different place-Spinal Tap moments were fine for practice but not the performance. (Just for the record, Motorsoft was meant to be funny-but arch opposed to ironic, where there's humor but not parody, indulgence not criticism.) The band energy was high that night. So was the crowd's. I can still see in my mind Steve and Pedro up on couches in the back waving us on. There's also a great shot of Gary Keating if you check out the photos we have in the VISUALS section. DEXEMBER 13th, 2002: Valley Forge This was our first show in over a year. Motorsoft was not meant to be a hard-touring band, but still, this was an awful long stretch. Since the first show I'd moved into a garage in Williamsburg behind Leo Koenig's short live and nil-fated social club, "Kon Tiki". Leo is nothing if not industrious but it was going to prove a difficult living situation, mostly because m*f*e*r Nature. That garage got ice cold, like a meat locker, particularly that despotic winter and I would not emerge the same person as when I entered. The garage had virtues, though. It was stand alone, which meant we could practice anytime we wanted to. We could also put on a show in our place. Amazingly, we never received a noise complaint from our neighbor. Either they were the most tolerant people on earth, had long ago lost hearing, or we were blessed by Mario, the butcher across the street and left to our own devices. You see the gate that led into our garage on the cover of our album. It's a pretty impressive way to enter a show. The garage was tricked out -- satin ramparts with big cut out letters and blue lights. The flags were hung from the rafters. The Lust For Strife flag was connected to a sword I bought on Ebay. When I pulled on it brought the flag up from behind the Wurlitzer organ. We had a bucket we lowered from the ceiling filled with letters and photos from the band. It was a good show and the garage was a great size for a show. Sound wise we suffered from a lack of PA-we used an old one our friend Nawi scored from a youth center in Philadelphia. It wasn't a long show, maybe seven songs, which was an important part of Motorsoft-lots of design to the show, but brief in span. Random notes: Marike Daimhaus, now of Duchess, premiered with the band that night, playing the midsection of Motorsoftly and singing on Follow Me Down. Danny threw up after the show, just stepped out into the driveway and puked. Gibb's brother Pete had his Porsche 914 parked in the driveway and it got scratched that night. A party followed in the social club. My sister and her husband came to the show and the garage was packed. It was raining, and kind of cold, I think, but someone might correct me on this. We packed all of Gibb's painting into my small bedroom September 26th, 2001: Leo Koenig Inc. Our first show was in a unusual venue constructed in Leo Koenig's Gallery in Tribeca. This was directly following September 11th and the getting below Canal Street had just become possible for non-residents. Machine Gun national guardsmen periodically broke into Leo's Gallery to direct everyone out because some crank or another had called in bomb threats. The show at that time was by the Austrian collaborative "Gelatin". A few years earlier they had pulled of a stunt on the WTC-removing a window and stranding just outside the buildings. Motorsoft benefited from their collective genius-allowed to play the night of September 26th in the small amphitheatre they constructed entire of discarded doors. It went right to the ceiling of the gallery and so was entirely closed off. This meant the audience was above, looking down at the band in the pit. Gelatin themselves had a private viewing box and I'd say they whole theatre seated fifty or so people. It didn't collapse, but it wasn't impartial to creaking and groaning under that weight, particularly when the PA went on. PA are difficult. In a little wooden theatre like that it was basically impossible because it doubles as a feedback chamber. By design Motorsoft is meant to be loud. It's a wonder any vocals got through and probably for the best because that most did not as I was, after all, in the infancy of a vocal career that has yet to distinguish itself. Performing is like being shot out of a canon sometimes. It starts, it happens and then it's over and you're not even sure what happened. The fair-haired band behind me played great, and looked great and the reception was positive. I'm told the structure swayed with the amps. My sister was down for this job, which made it particularly nice for me and I'll always appreciate Leo's, Gelatin's and Deb Warner's (the night's curator) hospitality.