Feeding Me Grapes

I have long held this little dream that HUCK SLIM plays a street fair. In fact, I was just writing my best friend from childhood (who's out in Portland) about how I want the band to set up a booth and play all day for the folks mingling past -dreamcatchers, guatemalan jewelry or figurines in tow, stuffing some corn on the cob or sweet sausage sandwich in their mouths, washing 'em back with some lemonade and such. And all the while, we're kicking the jams, getting them moving and perhaps selling a CD or two. Sort of like Union Square, only in a street fair, carnival setting. I've even written a song called LEMONADE STAND because I love them so much. Maybe because I never had a lemonade stand myself. But I did have the Johnnyknobs.

Now, the other half of this now legendary band was none other than this fabled best friend of mine in Portland (to whom I was relaying this secret wish) And we, or the Johnnyknobs rather, made "concept albums." Our first album was called NEW THREADS -and the songs were as follows; 1) New Threads 2) Old Duds, 3) our space opus FUTURISTIC OUTFITTING -which was tailored on purpose to be like Spinal Tap's JAZZ ODYSSEY. If you haven't the discovered the method to our madness yet, we just described how old some form of clothes were in a title, and the titles created the songs. Primitive perhaps, ridiculous surely. But in some cases (OLD DUDS in particular) we struck paydirt in the Klondike of what was our seventh grade classes...

Old Duds, we like our old duds,
They are cool, they are hip,
They aren't for dudes who are named skip.

Such was the chorus of this gem. And it was our big hit.

I say "hit" because that's what everybody wanted to hear us sing after they bought the tape. That's right, we never got the dixie cups and set up a card table on the sidewalk back in the day, but we did make copies of NEW THREADS and peddled them around Frost Intermediate School for a dollar. And damned if folks didn't buy them. Whenever I hear Biggie Smalls rap about "went from selling mix tapes to bitches feeding him grapes" I think of the Johnnyknobs. We even made a $20 profit. I squirreled my share away in a shoebox with the words "Car Dough" written on the top of it, which meant that I was in theory, saving for a car. However, if memory serves, I withdrew the JOHNNYKNOB funds to buy a ticket for HALLOWEEN 5 and the box remained empty until years later, when it became the stash where I hid my smoking paraphenalia from the folks.

So yes, I've been in the record business before, but I had never sat on the sidewalk and peddled cool quirst squenchers. Until last Sunday, that is.

See, I work at the Rodeo Bar. Every time there's a street fair, we know it's going to kill business. And every time there's a street fair, the owner asks me to go outside and try and sell something on the street. Up until yesterday, I have been too shy. Perhaps it's because of our park jams, perhaps it's because I watched the whole last season of the APPRENTICE when I was home in Virginia. But I decided to give it a shot. So, I hauled my host outside and set up shop. We sold t-shirts, gave away peanuts in a cup with our to go menus and a bumper sticker inside. We called this marketing. We even peddled the odd can of soda. And such was my first time doing a lemonade stand. Our prices were etched on the sidewalk in chalk. I did my best imitation of those guys who sell baseball cards on television in the wee hours of the night-what I call the owl hours.

My brother loves those guys, man. We used to watch them for sheer entertainment. "Ken, I got the rookie Griffey, and the Jordan, and for the next ten minutes, I'm gonna throw in Pete Rose. Folks ..." (Everything is puncuated by folks) "Folks, this is for your kids, they're gonna be so glad you bought these for 'em here today. And for the next ten minutes, I'm giving you deal. Ken, I can't believe I'm going to do this ..." We get into it, man. My brother -whom I think is the funniest man on the planet and the best storyteller in the world- loves to take their patter and exaggerate it beyond recognition.

Well, it passed the time last Sunday, which as Didi says in WAITING FOR GODOT, "Would have passed in any case." In any event, I had a monkey full of barrels. We sold $76 bucks worth of merchandise, which went into a glass nestled underneath the host stand, and which will probably not be saved for an automobile of any kind either. I still don't have "bitches feeding me grapes." But I do have Huck Slim, and I still want us to play a street fair, at least for the time being. And when we do, I suppose we'll have to cajole somebody into sitting there and peddling our CDs and T-Shirts in much the same way as I did last Sunday. I haven't seen those baseball card guys on tv in awhile. I wonder what they're up to these days.

Vince is Dead

I received some terrible news recently. I am deceased. During an afternoon of boredom I filled out and returned one of the endless line of pre-approved credit applications than clutter my mailbox. So after about 2 weeks I got the response. "We regret to reform you that we can not approve your application at this time because our records indicate that you are deceased." Holy shit, I died and no one told me. I'm in some ethereal middle plane of existence where I sill intersect with all the living but I'm really dead. Thanks a lot guys. Someone could have at least tipped me in. I guess maybe that is against the rules. "At this time" ? What? So maybe sometime in the future when I'm a little less dead they might approve me? The kicker here to me is that I still get the applications from these cats twice a week.

So this is just the beginning of what I have come to find out is going to be a total nightmare. I decided I'd better clear this situation up. I can understand where the mixup came. My father, Vincent B Terlep Jr., passed away 6 years ago. I can see how they would mix that up with Vincent B Terlep III. But, the way they do these things is by Social Security Number, not name. So somewhere in cyberspace they put my SSN with my dad's name. This is kind of a good thing, I suppose. My credit is outstanding. Unfortunately I can't use it because I am dead.

Clearing this situation up is not as easy as you would think. Or that I thought it would be. The kind people at Capitol 1 told me that I would have to get in touch with Equifax in order to fix the situation. So I go to there website looking for a number to contact them at. Not to be found. The only number they have anywhere on the site is an automated line that you call to purchase your credit report (for $9). It seems the only way to actually talk to someone is to have the credit report in your hand. The number to talk to a representative is printed on the report itself. So no big deal, just get the credit report, right. There is even a new law that requires these companies to give you one credit report a year for free. Sweet. I go to the website for this new law so I can get the report and get the number so I can talk to someone and clear this up. I start to fill out the application and then there comes this page in the application that I need to verify that I am actually me. Right on, good safety measure. So they ask me a couple of questions that only I should know the answer to. "With which company did you have your last mortgage" And "How much were the payments" or something like that. Shit, again. Wasn't expecting this. So the only way to get the report to get the number to talk to someone to prove that I am not my dead father is to answer these questions in order to prove that I am my dead father. Nightmare.

So I get on the horn to the FTC. (Cell minutes flying out of me, hundred by now) They confirm for me that there is no way that I can talk to these people without the credit report. They won't give me any of the numbers, or really help at all. Sorry guy. Tough luck, no credit for you. I'm figuring at this point that I'm going to have to hop a greyhound down to Georgia and walk in to the Equifax corporate office and punch someone in the face to prove to them Im not dead.

I guess that's where it stands at this point. I'll let you know when I get resurrected. There will be a feast and a holiday. I guess I should have been tipped off to this whole thing when I was working on Ever Be True and played that end part backwards. I could have sworn I heard "Vince is dead...Vince is dead."

Thoughts on Jackson Island

I played basketball in high school for the freshman squad. I wound up quitting after two teachers of mine sandbagged me after class. They tried to Miss Watson me out of my Huckleberry ways. Church me up, so to speak. I'd better behave more, they told me, "or they would talk to Coach Jefferson." I didn't cotton to being coerced like that, and I suspected Coach Jefferson didn't like me very much anyways. So I quit. He was the son of an ex-Redskin who had opened a barbecue joint in Arlington. He sat and ate pulled pork mostly, and had benched me after missing a practice. Years later, my suspicions were confirmed when my brother took a ball in the face at the try outs. He got a bloody nose and had to see to it, to which Coach Jefferson said, "Just like your brother." So he quit playing hoops for the school too.

I was telling this story last Easter, (after me and my brother had shot some hoops at our house) and my Ma's beau said to me, "You're lucky it didn't make a quitter out of you." I didn't really say boo to that because I've felt like quitting alot in my life -and lots of times I have-classes I couldn't hack, relationships, character building jobs, acting and theater, you name it. I don't quit on really important things, I like to tell myself, (I didn't drop out of college, I came back to New York) but sometimes that just ain't so. I feel alot like that coach's son in THE BAD NEWS BEARS who just holds the ball and lets 'em run around the bases. 'Cause if the desire to win is so strong that your pops backhands you one on the mound, then winning just ain't worth it. For better or worse, that's the attitude I've adopted. So when it comes to villanelles, give me Elizabeth Bishop's THE ART OF LOSING over Dylan Thomas's DO NOT GO GENTLE- I don't care what odds them Vegas boys give miss Bishop, I think that pound for pound, she takes the welshman any day of the week and even on Sundays.

So I went gentle I guess. I quit hoops and started guitar, grew my hair out, did plays, wrote poems, discovered girls and learned most of the songs that we played by request last night at Union Square. We got a coupla shout outs for the Grateful Dead -mostly Jerry songs. We played DEEP ELEM BLUES and discovered that Flynn plays some mean clarinet solos over it, and that felt good. It felt good to turn him onto that song too. We obliged some folks with I KNOW YOU RIDER and they even sang harmony. But they dug the originals too. And the vision of those two folks swaying with each other over by Heartland Brewey during SALVATION ARMY BAND did my heart a world of good, or did my world a heart of good -which don't seem that different to me. Another bunch of folks gave us half of a birthday cake. They couldn't finish it, and wanted us to have it, which I thought was very sweet of them. (pun sort of intended) Some guy wsa broadcasting our TIME TO MOVE ON to his buddy via cell phone early on. If I had a nickel for everybody that we make smile, and vice versa -I'd count myself a rich man. Come to think of it, we do. Come to think of it, I am.

And I guess I owe some of those riches to Coach Jefferson and those two Miss Watsons for trying to civilize me. And I owe another chunk of 'em to the Grateful Dead for being the Jackson Island, where I ran away to play pirates. "Okay, the pirates are just for me," to quote Shelktone in HALLOWEEN, 1987. But that's what I did after resigning my position at point guard. I guess it was around that time that I read HUCK FINN again, and I learned alot of songs in that stretch too. Most of which we play at some point or another. I guess in alot of ways -I'm still on Jackson Island. Though now it looks alot like that North West Corner of Union Square across from the Coffee Shop Bar -the famer's market folks packing up their tents, rats chasing each other behind us (mating or sparring, we can't tell which) and good folks coming and going. They give us postcards, picks, change, five spots, chocolate cakes that read "Hap Birth" and smiles (ours and theirs) Meanwhile, we get better and better at what we do -it may not be ball handling, give and goes, and your basic triangle offense, but it's something. I'll never be able to play for the 76ers, but I can and do play for HUCKLEBERRY SLIM. Well, I actually play wth Huck Slim. I play for the kinds folks who like what we do, (which I hope is ya'll) and of course, chocolate cake.

Better Luck Next Year

I always read the Washington Post every morning. Love the Times, but there's nothing like your hometown paper. I always go right to the sports page, after a quick perusal of today's headlines.

Today, there was an interesting article about getting cut from your high school team. This one focused on a soccer team but it doesn't matter. The feeling is the same. Whether it be soccer, or football, or the school play.

Brent(my twin brother) and I tried out for baseball freshman year at West Springfield High School. WSHS is known for being a baseball powerhouse. We have obnoxious bumper stickers that say, "We don't rebuild, we reload". We have a sprinkler system for the varsity field. So we knew it was going to be difficult.

Baseball was always my favorite sport. When we played soccer, we always lost. One year, our parents gave us trophies simply to give us trophies. (So we didn't feel like losers?) But it had the opposite effect. The Purple Panthers all felt pretty low that day.

But then we played baseball and our luck immediately changed. Our single A team the Athletics went all the way to the playoffs, and won! We won the regular season and the playoffs. And all of our teams did really well. Brent and I were even bumped up to the 'majors' at the end of our triple AAA season for their playoffs.

Unfortunately, on the day of tryouts it rained. And we had to go through the various drills in the basketball gym. It's stressful enough having to throw a ball 90 feet, but try throwing it in a basketball gym where there's so many obstructions! It makes you nervous. And also, try fielding balls off a gym floor. It sounds like it might be easier but just the strangeness of it throws you off.

Needless to say, we got cut. We didn't even make the first cut. And that hurt so much we didn't try out the next year. I bet the next year, we could have made it. Freshman year they just took pitchers and catchers anyway. I bet maybe we could have done well. But we'll never know. We gave up.

I don't think I ever got as crushed about not making plays because there were always so many more chances. At least two big plays a year, and then many small ones. So there was always a chance to be in something. But for baseball it was just the one chance. And we blew it.

So read this article. And how this one kid also blew it. But the best part about it? He's going to try out next year. He didn't make the team freshman year or sophomore year and he's actually going to try out as a junior for the JV team. That's persistence. There's something really quite awesome about that. Dusting yourself off and trying again. It's like Joe Cocker sings, "Who knows what tomorrow brings?"

Who knows?

YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE

I woke up this morning thinking about my grandmother. They were debating on the radio as to what role faith play in healing sicknesses. Before the cancer in his soccer toe billowed into the rest of his body, Bob Marley denied treatment on the grounds that Jah would heal him if it was Jah's will. He gave in, and the chemo made his dreads fall out in the shower, but it still got him. My grandmother, and quite to my ma's dismay, pulled the same move -insert Jesus for Jah-when I was three or so. She went through a mess of faith healers, but in the end, the cancer got her too. Not before she could teach me to sing YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE though (a song that to this day, weeps me up like a willow) Afterwards, Ma always said that my grandmother was my guardian angel. And I believed it. Maybe because I was little and Ma swore that Nana was trying to contact me through the plastic cream colored heart that was making figure eights around the oujia board. Maybe it was 'cause I was her sunshine. I don't know. But I believed it.

Now, by the time she was teaching me YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE, her voice was a husky alto. But the story goes that she once had a beautiful soprano voice, which was the envy of all the choirgirls at Cold Point Baptist Church, where my great great grandfather was a minister. Later she would meet the minister's son, marry him, and give birth to my Ma. But not yet. At this point, she was just a girl with an extraordinary soprano voice who was walking home from school, when she saw her brother Tommy wave and begin to cross the street. The schoolbus didn't brake in time.

By the time she had finished screaming, her brother Tommy's legs and that lovely soprano voice, were gone. So the story goes. Like Huck says about Mark Twain, Ma told some stretchers here and there, but she told the truth mainly. So I believe it.

I only bring it up because I used to work with this sweet girl named Brie. She worked days with autistic kids, and moonlighted nights at my bar. She was borderline psychic too, man. She told me I'd be famous, "Though maybe not in this lifetime." She told me once, through tears, that I should play guitar. And she told that I shouldn't date the girl I was beginning to see at the time. And all in a voice that you could hear a pin drop in. Seriously, she spoke so quietly nobody could hear her. Customers couldn't hear her. The staff couldn't hear her. Nobody. She talked on tippy toes, and she swore that she couldn't raise her voice any further than this strange church mouse volume of hers. And she was pretty self conscious about it too. Later, it came out that she thought she was so quiet because of this incident she had when she was little. She had been playing on her rooftop with her brother in Manhattan. And she had seen him struck by lightning. And I connected her to my grandmother's story somehow.

So, last Sunday, Huckleberry Slim was geared up to play at Union Square -and to try out this cornet player and this drummer. Needless to say, we got rained out. The storm came down in sheets-browning out parts of the East Village, cutting off power in subways, creating "water situations" in Queens-and cancelling Huck Slim's Sunday night Jam in the park. I found out tonight that the same storm passed over Cold Point Baptist Church in Pennsylvania-where my great, great grandfather was a minister, where Nana met my grandfather, and where my mother used to go to church, and where they no longer have a bell tower-because it burned down during the storm last Sunday when Cold Point Baptist Church was struck by lightning.

And that's the truth, mainly or not. So, when I heard that and the radio this morning, I figured that Nana didn't need the plastic heart and Parker Brothers to contact me and that lightning could strike twice, so long as it's in a story. I do hope that Brie was right about the guitar though (for Huck Slim's sake) I know she was right about my ex gal. As for fame, it will prolly have to wait for that other lifetime-the one where Bob's got his dreads, and Tommy's playing hopscotch and dancing, and the loveliest of sopranos sings You Are My Sunshine.

Maiden Post of Jamey Pink

Hello Huckleberry lovers far and wide, this here is Jamey Pink' saying howdy. And we're coming along quite nicely here at Huckleberry Slim, thanks for askin'. Nate's doing some great work on the website. I am eagerly awaiting it with beaver breath. We had an accidental first gig at the C-Note this past week as the "feature band" at the open mic with Dylan Nirvana as the substitute host. Big thanks to him for his encouragement and fine work on the mixing board. For being largley unrehearsed I would say it went rather swimmingly. Our set list was comprised of 1) TIME TO MOVE ON, 2) MISSING MISSISSIPPI MISTER, 3) a SISSY>HOLLYWOOD medley (replete with the rap), and our perennial closer of SAY GOODNIGHT, during which we had a bit of a Spinal Tap situation ala when they play the airforce base and get mixed up with the radio transmissions, when my cell phone sent the guitar signals all akimbo. Oops! We also gave away copies of our demo to anybody who wanted one. My cute brazilian friend with the cheetah tattoo on her shoulder remarked, "Baby, why are you guys giving these away for free?" To which my zen master response was, "Exactly."

Afterwards, we sojourned to our lil' nook in Union Square for a post-gig session with guest cornet player Nathan Erenrode and Rocketrain Mike on drums. We were pretty bushed after the trek from Loisiada to Broadway and pumpkin time came earlier then usual. The Lil' Brown Jug Man did not grace us with his presence, but we expect his imminent return. Who is the Lil' Brown Jug Man, you ask? A fella who comes by when we play the park (with some disturbing regularity) and proceeds to "teach" us the old children's song. He handles the verses and we are to sing the choruses, "Ha Ha Ho, Hee Hee Hee, Little Brown Jug, how I love thee." We all acknowledge the strangeness of it, and perhaps like to think that we're humoring him. But I can't help but think there's some deeper cosmic significance to him. As though he's our guardian angel -or stealing from Salinger (or to continue stealing from Salinger as I did in SHINE YOUR SHOES) he's the fat lady who's listening to the transistor radio all day long, for whom we're supposed to shine our shoes, and do our best with all our heart. Just so long as she's not near an airforce base, I reckon. I can say this, my cell phone has never chirped up or created radar like interference during a rendition of lil' brown jug, and I doubt if it ever will.

Here we go

Posting

New Time

The C-Note gig is now at 8 pm. Prime time! Exciting.

The C-Note

Next gig will be at The C-Note on September 28th at 7 pm. You can also see us frequently performing Union Square. We are always at the west side of the park, near Heartland Brewery.

Welcome!

This is the first post of the Huck Slim blog. Here is where you find out the really inside stuff about the band that is Huck Slim. There's a possible coronet player and drummer in our future! Isn't that exciting? I think it is.

And the demo has been remastered so that will be up soon too. Plus pictures to come! What else? A logo? And a gig hopefully? The Huck Slim cup runneth over!