Volunteerless Joe Romeo plays City Tap

Joe Romeo at WXDU, March '09

On Saturday night, I went down to our local purveyors of liquor and live music, The City Tap, to watch Joe Romeo play.


The Carrboro, NC-via-New Jersey singer-songwriter's band (the Orange County Volunteers) broke up a few weeks back, so he was there alone, basically with a guitar. Of course, it's hard to keep any band together when your guitarist is needed for a European tour (Scott McCall/Tift Merritt). I guess the drummer had other plans, too.

It was a strange set of mostly covers: Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, Bruce Springsteen's "Atlantic City". He played maybe three songs from the record, including "It Could Have Been", which was as powerful as ever. He also played the two songs he debuted on WXDU's Dirty Laundry radio show, around the time of the Local 506 record release show. "Villain" was one. "The Youngest Girl in the Old Folks Home" is still incomplete, he told us on-mic, "because they're not finished until they're on a record, and I'd rather it be a picture than a coffin." Whether he meant that song or his music in general, I don't know. Where does he get this stuff?

Later, the murmurings from Joe were that he might be doing any or all of the following: move back to Jersey, live with some friends in the south of Spain and write a novel, buy a car and tour around solo.

But he did mention tentative players will play with him in the future, but they hadn't rehearsed in time for this show. There's also a woman who plays violin that he's really excited to sing and play with. Either way, it's unlikely the band will be known as anything but Joe Romeo.

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FYI:

Joe Romeo: www.myspace.com/joeromeomusic

Dirty Laundry: www.wxdu.org

Blinking Line

You know how it is. You start talking to a stranger in a bar, one who's had a serious head start, and you're liable to hear some bizarre things. On Saturday, at Bull McCabe's, Gee mentioned that he owned a copy of REM's single "Radio Free Europe." A few minutes later, he handed me a business card with his url, email and phone number. Well, look what he posted on that url today.

Rebecca

Trangle Trip: March 14, 2009

Oddly, I was in all three parts of the Triangle within 24 hours. But instead of being tiring, it was a whole lot of fun.

Here's how it went. (I live in Durham, but since I mention it later, I'm not counting it in the beginning.)

Chapel Hill-- Technically, driving the 15-501 to Chatham County takes you past the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Orin and I were outside both Orange and Durham counties hunting for rental houses. Pittsboro and Bynum still look possible, but the two places we were shown won't work. The first one didn't look like it had been renovated since it was built in the 1930's, and was tiny. The second was ridiculously huge and out of our price range anyway.


Raleigh-- This was a birthday party for a friend of a friend at a sports bar in Briar Creek, and I had to remove my Tarheels hat(it is a handful of miles from RTP, which is in Durham). We ate wings and fries, then headed to Frankie's, a restaurant combined with one of those midway gaming/mini-golf/go-kart type places. A guy in our group won an Ipod from a machine.


Afterwards, we huddled in the rain by the birthday girl's car and munched on store-bought, chocolate cupcakes with tiny, sky-blue Tarheel pennants stuck in the top of them.


Durham-- Bull McCabe's,an Irish pub downtown, has started experimenting with putting on live music. This weekend they got a jump on St. Paddy's Day with a fundraiser for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Bands started playing at 4pm, and didn't stop until nearly 1am!

I was able to catch two bands: a Carrboro band called Schooner (think Pavement meets New Order) and the debut of my friend Jeff Hart's band, the KinKsmen. I'm glad I did. Even though the rain hadn't let up outside, a good portion of the crowd stuck with them, from the first chord of "All Day and All of the Night" to the last strains of "Waterloo Sunset". It's a tight group!


And what did a ten dollar raffle ticket buy you? A chance at a European soccer jersey... and a chocolate cupcake, of course.
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FYI:

All things...
Jeff Hart
www.myspace.com/jeffhoo

Schooner
http://www.schoonermusic.com/

Bull McCabe's
http://www.bullmccabesirishpub.com/

Something to say

Something to Say— William Carlos Williams on younger poets, ed. Breslin, James

I’m reading a book about the poet William Carlos Williams, and how he influenced younger writers in his era. This is a collection of his short essays, letters and –mostly—reviews of books by poets born after 1900. His reviews strike at the edifice of modernist poetry, of T.S. Eliot and the people who came after him; it made me like Williams right away, since I could never understand Eliot’s mystique.

Williams had a distaste for poetry trying to make a statement, or to champion political ideas, or treated like an ornament you show off to your acquaintances. I welcome these ideas. But I think he made a mistake when Allen Ginsberg’s Howl came around; he tore into it. Williams didn’t know what to make of it.

I visited the North Carolina Room at the Durham County Library again. Glancing through the poetry shelves, I saw a familiar name. Randall Jarrell. Until I got home to look at Something to Say, I thought he was the subject of one of the poet’s reviews. Actually, Jarrell was a magazine reviewer Williams had scolded (in a letter to the periodical) for writing a sophomoric review of a handful of young writers’ books. The letter's footnote says so much about Williams; eight years later, the “sophomoric” Jarrell edited and wrote the introduction for a volume of Williams' poems.

News 14 Carolina - Weather Blog: Fall Foliage Pictures

These photos weren't taken right where I live, but they're from NC. I think they're gorgeous!

News 14 Carolina - Weather Blog: Fall Foliage Pictures

Why McCain Still Has a Chance to Win

from the Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122031196249888759.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries

Free Future Kings show, downtown Durham Thursday!

reposted from trianglerock.com:

Thursday, August 21

Savage Knights
(http://www.retroactivedynamics.com/)

Future Kings of Nowhere
(http://www.thefuturekings.net/)

CCB Plaza (aka The Bull's Balls), Durham

These Thursday-afternoon shows at the CCB Plaza get started early, like around 5:30. Savage Knights are a Raleigh band who're equally at home covering the Melvins, and Ethiopian jazzman Mulatu Astatke. Future Kings of Nowhere are an acoustic pop-punk band from Durham, whose fans are tied with Red Collar's for the title of most-fanatic.
-Ross Grady