Blogging and My Band

I am new to blogging per se, though I am not at all new to writing. They are indeed different disciplines. I once upon a time had a haughty attitude toward blogging, viewing it as a lesser form of written communication than writing op-ed for newspapers.

Before the stranglehold was placed on Seacoast Media Group, I had a weekly column under the auspices of seacoastonline.com, and when I would field a comment on my column in which the commenter would refer to me as a blogger, I would always take care to articulate the distinction that no, I was not a blogger, I was a columnist. I am slowly, kicking and screaming, embracing this new, or if you are young, old form of written communiqué. Now that I am one, I respect the blogger. It’s kind of like Mark Twain’s whitewash chapter in Tom Sawyer. Once you are doing it yourself, your tendency to recommend it goes from zero to sixty in a second.

So, blogs are legitimate, though let me say here, as a slave to nomenclature, the word blog should rather be articulated as ‘blog. It is an abbreviation of the word weblog. Just as don’t is an abbreviation of then expression do not, the omitted ‘o’ being substituted with an apostrophe. But I digress.

The tradition of blogging is real time communication of events and observations as they transpire. The aim of this blog is to participate in that tradition. Boy, I really am capitulating. So what did I do last night? I had a gig and it was fabulous. In 1980, the band The Substance was formed in York Beach, Maine. I was the front, singing and playing trumpet, with my brother on second guitar, the amazing George Mason on lead guitar, and Paul Chadwick on bass and harmony vocal. Our drummer was a jazz player named Dave Whittle who was amenable to the rock and roll we were stuffing down his throat. It was mostly original songs that I wrote with the assistance of one or more of my band mates.

We began playing together again this year with a different drummer, rehearsing once a week, learning new material and doing some fresh writing, but spreading the lead vocal duties around much more liberally. My brother has been fronting his own bands, George has been singing more, and Paul, the best singer out of all of us, has been living and playing with much more dedication and focus than he ever did back in the crazy old days. The gig was a block party on Plum Island, just off the coast of Newburyport, Massachusetts. It was pretty magical. We played two sets to an audience that ranged in age from three years old to eighty years old, including my mother who clocked in at 78.

We are playing and singing better than we ever have and I have to say I am really proud of this project. We have some gigs booked for later in the summer and the year, and I hope to develop this into a songwriting factory and a powerful thread in the vast tapestry of entertainment here on the New Hampshire seacoast.