Old News: 2009

Merry Christmas from The Slow Poisoner

My guinea pig Coco played percussion on my new Christmas song. His jingle-bell jangling has not been edited or enhanced; just pure rockin' guinea pig-ness. Click HERE to hear our recording of SANTA CLAWS (December 8, 2009)

Two Tow-Tappin' Times

Hailing from Medford, Oregon, Justin Gordon and his crack band the Wrecking Ball fashion fine alt-country, and I'm pleased to be playing with them at the East Bay's premier purveyor of peanut butter and jelly.

Mosquito Bandito is a renowned one man band who hails from Wisconsin and releases distorted blues singles on the "Boom-Chick" label (vinyl 7" only). The 1 Man Banjo, a member of local troupes the Extra Action Marching Band and Hobo Goblins, cuts a fine figure in his striped long johns as he sings about ghost trees along with his expert plucking. Opening the show is Shovelman, who has mastered the means of playing songs on a converted shovel/guitar through electronic looping devices for a singular effect.

Rocktober Spooktaculars!

October is the season for slow poisoning, and I've got four freaky shows plotted:

On Friday the 9th (my birthday!) I'll play my 201st gig, at the Red Victorian on Haight Street. The show starts at 7:15 and the lineup is SHARON HAZEL TOWNSHIP, TIM WILKINS, JOE RED, MYSELF, MAHNI-XAN, and ERIK MASKOL.

On Thursday the 22nd I'll be at Johnny B's in Medford Oregon, opening for Joe Buck and the .357 String Band!

Friday and Saturday, 10/23-24, I'll be attending Bizarro Con in Troutdale, Oregon, just outside of Portland, where I'll be reading from my new book "Slub Glub in the Weird World of the Weeping Willows" and probably playing some music too.

Then on Tuesday Oct. 27 we'll be having the 3rd annual Haunted Laundromat Spooktacular at the Brainwash in San Francisco from 7-10pm. Special guests will be Wish Inflicted and The American Professionals, plus there's the Brainwashing Booth, a game of pin-the-eyeball-on-the-shrunken-head and plenty of candy, costumery and creeps!

The Slow Poisoner's Summer 2009 Casketeering Tour Diary

Santa Monica, California: Before heading off to Tennessee I played a warm-up show in southern California, set up by the demented doctors and nurses of Surgeon Marta. After my opening set the lights went out and a group of medical professionals rolled in a hospital gurney (stolen from the set of E.R.) draped in a shroud, which was whisked away to reveal none other than Michael Jackson, who rose from the dead to the strains of "Thriller" and moon-walked expertly across the floor of Club TRiP.

MJ had passed away just days before, and as Chane of Surgeon Marta happened to be old friends with celebrity impersonator Sam, who had a glittering outfit sewed by his mother, this tribute came together in the nick of time and filled the room with love.

Then Surgeon Marta took the stage with guitars shooting sparks and played a bloody good set, highlighted by the gory vocals of The Chainsaw Surgeon and Nurse Vivian Raine. Dr. Shoe-Man Lou played a blistering solo on his iPhone, fed through the pickup of his guitar. Afterwards we hung with a broken-winged crow named Edgar whom Chane and Vivian had recently rescued after a nasty fall and were nursing back to health.

Nashville, Tennessee: Two thousand miles over, I started my tour in the heartland of the honky-tonk, where the local paper described me as "swampy three-chord ghoul-rock," which is fairly apt. Having successfully smuggled my Miracle Tonic and Enervating Elixir past airport security again, I took the stage at the Springwater Supper Club as an opener for Tommy Ache and the Terrible Mistakes. Some of the Mistakes work for a local lighting company and brought the strobes used for Jessica Simpson's tour into the tiny dive bar to illuminate their shenanigans, which involved stripping down to jockstraps and cavorting with an inflatable sheep on stage. I would expect nothing less in Music City, USA.

Russellville, Kentucky: The next gig was at the Logan County Public Library in Russellville, Kentucky, where the opening acts were all traditional gospel singers. I had my banner of the worlds' largest shrunken head hanging behind them, which proved to be a surreal juxtaposition with an elderly lady performing Christian hymns on a zither. My own set went fine although my composition "Thundering Fists O' The Lord," did seem to divide the audience. Afterwards, a minister jotted down the following on my mailing list: "Romans 10:9, 10:10, 10:13."

Later that night I took a stroll down to the old graveyard with head librarian Mark. On the cemetery grounds, the caretaker's house bears the image of a female silhouette in the window; local legend maintains that a century before, a young girl was struck dead by lightning at that window after she blasphemed against our Lord aloud, and her likeness has been etched into the glass ever since. That is the Thundering Fist of which I sing.

Huntsville, Alabama: Being from San Francisco where summers require thermal underwear and umbrellas, summertime Alabama felt to me like I had fallen into a volcano, so I was glad to take refuge behind the big black curtains of the newly renovated Flying Monkey Arts. Also on the bill were the Barnstormers, who evoke a lovely lonesome doom country psychedelic cello sound.

I had to be in Baton Rouge early the next afternoon for a radio interview, so I set out on the nine hour drive at midnight and slept by the side of the road somewhere in Mississippi, where I had a nightmare that I was riding in a car driven by Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra was holding a newspaper to the roof to keep rain from coming in. Does that make me Sammy Davis, Jr.?

Baton Rouge, Louisiana: My next show was at Babel Con, a science fiction convention, which was a first for me. The hall was filled with pointy-eared Vulcans and medieval queens and various lectures were taking place, including one titled "Filking with Cedric" that I dropped in on. I expected something vaguely disgusting, but found instead a bearded gentleman in a wizard's tunic strumming gently on a mandola (ancient ancestor to the mandolin) and singing songs related to the space western television show Firefly. Apparently I had "filking" confused with "felching" and "furries" - "filking" is folk music with a fantasy or science fiction theme. Later Cedric performed a hypnosis demonstration in the Hospitality Suite that had me convinced that he is, indeed, a wizard. My performance in the convention hall was made memorable by my being joined onstage by a tribe of green-skinned belly dancers - Orion's Slave Girls from Star Trek, but for the purpose of my set they became swamp gals.

Houston, Texas: Super Happy Fun Land is situated on the outskirts of Houston, and proudly sports the world's largest collection of Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls. This is a terrifying sight, with their red yarn hair and beady little eyes piled all the way to the ceiling, some of them curiously naked. On the bill with me was Mosquito Bandito, a fellow one-man-band, who had failed to materialize on two previous occasions when I'd tried to see him. Rumor has it that he hitchhikes to his shows, blowing across the musical landscape like a demented tumbleweed. The man was there in the flesh, however, and his hellish distorto-blues was a true tonic for the soul. His companion Uno Lady also made beautiful music, singing operatically into a box of glowing wires.

New Orleans, Louisiana: Ever a fertile source of musical and lyrical ideas, I came across the words to an ancient voodoo chant in one of the gris-gris shops in the French Quarter. The words were in a Creole dialect far removed from the King's English; when I set it to music and performed it, I was warned by a gentleman with a shock of white hair that I was "calling down the spirits."

Mobile, Alabama: Bands on tour have different ways of breaking up the monotony of long drives between gigs. Myself, I've made a habit of being pulled over by the police, which keeps things interesting. The Estrogen Highs, a band from Connecticut that I played with in Mobile, engaged in a different diversion; they had taken to listening to "Panama" by Van Halen over and over and over again. At least 17 times, by their count. Interestingly, they didn't really like the song - in fact, they seemed to dislike it - but they had become obsessed with understanding it, debating furiously among themselves what the lyrics were and what the meaning was. Their own intriguing, angular set of indie noise-rock bore no resemblance to cheese-metal however. My own set seemed to go over well, as one young man literally traded me the shirt off his back for a CD (it read "Air Force" and was emblazoned with some sort of angry bird).

Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The next show was a Steampunk party presented by the crew of the Clockwork Cabaret radio program/encephalopodcast - Phineous P. Moneyload and the Darling Davenport Sisters, Klaude and Emmett. A game of pin-the-shipwreck-on-the-kraken was played, and a corner of the venue was reserved for patrons to be photographed posing behind painted cut-outs of green fairies and seafaring squid. On the bill were Hellblinki, whose hypnotic clown cabaret and sinister vaudeville evoked old-world weirdness of the first order. After the show Klaude brewed up a concoction of lemonade and absinthe, which lulled as gently to chartreuse sleep.

Cayce, South Carolina: There's nothing finer than a summer Sunday corn BBQ with pagan overtones, and that was the order of the day at the Immaginarium, the house/venue/art project of Mister Jefferson Mayday Mayday. Jefferson's ambient duo Apollyon filled the rooms with flashing green laser light, lounge music was played at warped speeds and ghosts wandered the Native American trail and Civil War battlefields in the back yard. A woman traded me a picture of a boy she'd found in a tree in South America for a CD; now his small, staring eyes haunt me as well. I fell asleep in an attic with a black light filled with fluorescent stuffed animals, which came alive in the wee hours and serenaded me with cloying hymns. (August 19, 2009)

The Slow Poisoner Summer Casketeering Tour 2009

I'll be heading out shortly to strum and sing in the warm wilds of the southeastern states: (7/15) Nashville, TN: Springwater Supper Club (7/16) Russellville, KY: Logan County Public Library (7/17) Huntsville, AL: Flying Monkey Arts (7/18) Baton Rouge, LA: Babel Con Science Fiction Convention at LSU (7/20) Houston, TX: Super Happy Fun Land (7/21) New Orleans, LA: Neutral Grounds (7/22) Mobile, AL: Alabama Music Box (7/24) Chapel Hill, NC: Nightlight Club Steampunk Party (7/25) Columbia, SC: Big Summer Corn BBQ (7/27) Marietta, GA: Swayze's. (July 10, 2009)

Slowly Poisoning Santa Monica

Next show is on June 27th, with Surgeon Marta, Dead and Lovely and Keli Raven at Club TRiP! (June 13, 2009)

Slow Poisoner's Spring Round-up

The photo above is from May 23rd, at the wedding of Kris and Kat from Ragwater Revue. Earlier in the day I had officiated their marriage ceremony, my first as a minister, courtesy of the Universal Life Church.

May has been a month of unusual gigs - on the 17th I played a set at Psycho Donuts in Santa Clara, which sports a sanitarium décor, complete with padded cell and cashiers in nurses' outfits; they serve confections titled "The Bipolar" and "Massive Head Trauma." There were sign-carrying protestors picketing in front of the shop, claiming the store to be insensitive. Myself, I wore a straightjacket as a cape while I played.

Then yesterday I made an appearance at the Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Other attractions included a giant fountain made from Coke and Mentos, a fifteen-foot mechanical giraffe, and a life-size game of Mousetrap. I was on an outdoor stage and had to compete with the sound of a nearby steam engine.

Speaking of steam engines, I recently taped an interview with Klaude Davenport for The Clockwork Cabaret, a sterling steampunk encephalopodcast hailing from North Carolina. You can find it here (it's number 67, "A Salute to the Slow Poisoner"): http://clockworkcabaret.podhoster.com/

The Clockwork Cabaret will also be presenting a live performance with myself and the Hellblinki Sextet on July 24 in Chapel Hill, NC. This will be part of my Slow Poisoner Summer Caskeetering Tour 2009, which will take me to 8 of these United States! (May 31, 2009)

The Shrieking Through The Desert Tour Spring 2009

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I will be heading out through the parched dusty wastes come April, making stops throughout California and Arizona. The Phoenix gig will coincide with an exhibit of my paintings which I call The Slow Poisoner's Budget Art Show. Here are the dates: (4/2) The Doll Hut in Anaheim with Lynda Kay! (4/3) The Trunk Space art show in Phoenix! (4/4) Sundance's in Prescott, Arizona with The Vooduo and The Mission Creeps! (4/5) The Radio Room in San Diego with Zombie Surf Camp! (4/6) Pappy and Harriet's Pioneertown Palace with The Voodoo Organist! (4/7) The Ding-A-Ling in Los Angeles! (4/8) Plea for Peace Center in Stockton with Outlaw Dance Society! (February 16, 2009).

Truck Drivin' Music

I have an original track on a compilation of truck drivin' songs puts out by Roctober magazine in Chicago. My number is called "Angel of the Rest Stop" and it's written entirely in CB-speak! It can be downloaded here (just scroll down toward the bottom). This is actually the second compilation of truck drivin' music that I've been a part of; back in 2004 The Slow Poisoners recorded "Chicken Truck" for a CD put out by Cool Beans! zine. (Feb. 1, 2009)