August 4th gig at The Palms

Thanks to Jeff Ray for stepping up tonight. Cat plays fine! Everyone dug him. The band opened with "Just Kidding," then into "Higher Ground" (Rochon took a crushing bass ride), and when Jerry got to the gig from his Wayne Brady set he had Jeff stay up to play on Nathan's "Come With Me." All very impressive.

Will be blogging incrementally. Dumped 136 shots outa my camera plus an AVI clip of Little Miss Uninhibited (below), who simply could not restrain herself. She was dancin' all over the room all night. Little does she know she's fixin' to get blogged, LOL! The video clip is uploading to YouTube right now, as I'm goin' through my pics.

Loosen up, ma'am. C'mon, lemmee see ya shake a tail feather...
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BTW- DR. LENNY IN THE HOUSE!!

You know it's gonna be special when Lenny is back.

More Jeff...

Bro'... I remember when BobbyG had hair...

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1976. The Zappa Years. "...and Dagmar, was his na-i-a-iy-ame...the whiskers sticking out from the underneath of his pancake make-up, nearly drove you in-sa-i-a-iy-ane..."

Uh, sorry, flashback.

Seriously, Jeff is an A-List cat. He came back up to finish the night with the guys on "System of Survival." I'm gonna feature him in the lineup on the upcoming Santa Fe podcast "Friends of Santa Fe, Volume 3."
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OK, 2:40 a.m., the YouTube clip has finished processing. Take it away, m'dear...



I think the clinical word for this is "exuberance." I think she was auditioning for Cirque du Soul Trilogy.

This other chick came up and joined her at one point. I thought for a moment they were gonna go all girl-girl on us.

UPDATE

The foregoing bit of poking fun actually provides a convenient segue point with which to quote an apropos extract from a highly recommended book I just finished, Daniel J. Levitin's "This is your brain on music":

"When we ask about the evolutionary basis for music, it does no good to to think about Britney or Bach. We have to think about what music was like around fifty thousand years ago. The instruments recovered from archeological sites can help us understand what our ancestors used to make music, and what kinds of melodies they listened to. Cave paintings, paintings on stoneware, and other pictorial artifacts can tell us something about the role that music played in daily life. We can also study contemporaneous societies that have been cut off from civilization as we know it, groups of people who are living hunter-gatherer lifestyles that have remained unchanged for thousands of years. One striking find is that in every society of which we're aware, music and dance are inseparable.

The arguments against music as an adaptation consider music only as disembodied sound, and moreover, as performed by an expert class for an audience. But it is only in the last five hundred years that music has become a spectator activity -- the thought of a musical concert in which a class of "experts" performed for an appreciative audience was virtually unknown throughout our history as a species. And it has only been in the last hundred years or so that the ties between musical sound and human movement have been minimized. The embodied nature of music, the indivisibility of movement and sound, the anthropologist John Blackring writes, characterizes music across cultures and across times. Most of us would be shocked if audience members at a symphonic concert got out of their chairs and clapped their hands, whooped, hollered, and danced as was de riguer at a James Brown concert. But the reaction to James Brown is certianly closer to our true nature. The polite listening response, in which music has become an entirely cerebral experience (even music's emotions are meant, in the classical tradition, to be felt internally and not to cause a physical outburst) is counter to our evolutionary history: children often show the reaction that is true to our nature. Even at classical music concerts they sway and shout and generally participate when they feel like it. We have to train them to behave "civilized." [pp. 257-258]

Yeah. I Feel Good. I Knew That I Would...
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BTW, there was a fan from Minneapolis in the crowd tonight, sportin' a serious video camera. He asked if he could shoot -- 'no problem' -- and said he'd send me some stuff. That oughta be way cool. Stay tuned.
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More shots. Jerry Lopez doing "Si Te Vas."

Gotta be one of the very finest songs ever written, and the way he sings it, OMG! Can't wait 'til they record the new CD, it is gonna be off the hook.

OK, random photo essay time.

That last shot above would have really worked were the lighting in the back part of the stage adequate, to illuminate Pepe better, even were he just top/back lit. I try to put y'all on the stage, from every angle I can manage without getting in the guys' way.

Thanks to all who came out tonight. Another great, roaring house. Without you, we are nothing.

Fat City Horns are off early in the morning for performances in Chicago with Bette Midler this week. Gil told me they had to be at McCarran around 7 a.m., ugh.

Finally, for now, I leave you with a sweet summer poem (click the image to enlarge).


TUESDAY UPDATE

I stay in contact with my late Dad's roomie at the nursing home in Melbourne, FL, where Pop was confined 'til I brought him to Vegas in May 2007. John is a quadraplegic who types into his laptop with a thingy he holds in his teeth. He sends me funny stuff all the time. Case in point today:

This morning on the Interstate, I looked over to my left and there was a woman in a brand new Cadillac Doing 65 mph With her face up next to her rear view mirror Putting on her eyeliner.

I looked away for a couple seconds and when I looked back she was halfway over in my lane, still working on that makeup.

As a man, I don't scare easily. But she scared me so much, I dropped my electric shaver, which knocked the donut out of my other hand. In all The confusion of trying to straighten out the car, using my knees against the steering wheel, it knocked my cell phone away from my ear, which fell into the coffee between my legs, splashed, and burned Big Jim and the Twins, ruined the damn phone, soaked my trousers, and disconnected an important call.

Damn women drivers!!

LOL!