John Wesley Harding - 7th St Entry 04/09/09

Lonzo went with buddy Skip to the 7th St Entry to see John Wesley Harding one of Skip's
favorite British folk singers. Wes is touring his "Cabinet of Wonders" which includes recruiting musicians from each particular city he is in to come up on stage and perform a song or two acoustically with him or solo or read poetry or anything else entertaining. It was a mini brush with fame for Lonzo. "I got to meet or chat with Wes, Grant Hart from Husker Du fame, Laurie Lundeen ex ZuZu's Petals and Marc Perlman from the Jayhawks, pretty cool."

If you' ve ever been to 7th St Entry you know it only seats about 60 people. Here's Wes' blog about the night:

The Empire Builder

We're on The Empire Builder train to Chicago. I sent out a tweet at 7.30 this morning along the lines of "First Class Lounge, Amtrak, St. Paul, 7.30 am. America, you have no idea how a class system works." It's true that the lounge itself was nothing to write home about, but once we were on the train everything changed. In a remarkable coup, Eugene had (yesterday) simultaneously been able to upgrade our car to a sleeper car, and get a $10 discount off the original price. This is exactly how upgrades work - you get something better and some money back. On arrival, in our car, we were also offered the adjoining large sleeper car, so we have two roomy sleeper cars next to each other separated by a door. (When the door is open, it's evry like you're looking in a mirror - a mirror you're not reflected in.) It's very Hitchcock. We were always going to enjoy this train ride and now it's even better than we could have hoped.

The Empire Builder is just gliding into Milwaukee en route to Chicago. I haven't been watching the magnificent Midwest go by. I have been fast, fast asleep. It's very pleasant sleeping on a train, as it's very pleasant sleeping on a larger ocean liner (a mode of transport I can recommend for no other reason.) Anyway, it was good to rest because tonight we have a lengthy evening starting in about an hour: getting to the venue (late - The Empire is being Built slightly behind schedule today), doing a show, having a meal, then doing another show at midnight. Oh, the good times. When will they end? My guess is about 3am and then we have to get to Madison for our saturday evening experience. Here's hoping we can sleep late. > > > The show in Minneapolis turned out to be the "sleeper hit of the tour". It was a fantastic night, with a willing and able cast, put together with quite a lot of luck and much assistance from Laurie Lindeen: she's the ex-lead singer of Zuzu's Petals and wrote a sensational memoir called Petal Pusher. (There is also another fact about he, always mentioned in her parenthesized CV, that I shan't mention here.) She recommended Dennis Cass, who gave a short lecture on the brain and its various qualities - his book is called Headcase. She also, in tandem with Heidi (whom it was also a pleasure to meet) gave me Grant Hart's phone number; Grant was an old acquaintance/friend of mine from many years ago and it was great to see him and to hear him sounding so good. (I also got to play harmonica on Now That You Know Me - a Grant Hart classic and one of the great recreations of the Blonde on Blonde sound ever committed to tape.) Sherman Alexie - who we have given the honorary title of "Cabinet Poet Handler" - recommended Todd Boss, whose book looks up at me now from my case. And to round it out, we had Jayhawk and Golden Smogger Marc Perlman, who read from his liner notes for Zuzu's Petals and also duetted Fred Neil's Dolphins (a lovely song, in case you don't know it...) and Big Star's Thirteen - the latter I've done a few times on this tour: it's on my mental desktop. The show was perfectly Minneapolitan, featuring the smokiest dressing room of recent years and possibly all time. When I retrieved my sweater, it was as though it had been smoked with aromatic spices. Also, thoroughly enjoyed working with Sonia at the club, whom I had met by chance on a flight to SXSW.

And it was just a lovely, lovely show in the Seventh Street Entry (the small room at First Avenue in Minneapolis) somehow transformed into a pleasant cabaret room, with white tablecloths on the tables. Neither I, nor anyone else (since everyone mentioned it) had ever seen the old place looking so fine. The show itself unfolded most naturally (I always think a good show is when I kinda don't notice that it's passing by; it's when you start to fret about things, to work out how to make things go better/faster that the show is probably not at its best) and ended with a fine example of our typical climax.

And then we ended up, for very complicated reasons, in Marc Perlman's brothers club, which had a) food b) the advantage of being next door and c) women with no clothes on. We were there as a party with Laurie and her friend Dawn, and so we mostly got on with the astonishing amount of food that we ordered. But there were undeniably boobs, and some of them weren't real (though on the other hand, they mostly seemed to come in sets of real/unreal: there weren't any unmatching pairs.) Incredibly, the bill came to only $64, which it couldn't have done, so I say: thank you. I heard a rich conversation in the gentleman's toilet that I can't bring myself to recreate. It involved "full body" (not on display in this relatively classy establishment), "juice bars", the time of night, and much fretting by a businessman over the lack of possibility of combining all the above. David Mamet would have liked it.

OK. Well, we're rolling on. The train is making a noise familiar to all parents whose children watch Thomas The Tank Engine (though the noise is of course made by Spencer) and all is well. I say adieu Minneapolis, but not goodbye. The Cabinet will open again soon.

By the way, we're very excited about our next run of dates:
May 21: World Cafe Live, Philadelphia, PA
May 22: New Hazlett Theatre, Pittsburgh, PA
May 23: The Iota, Arlington, VA (matinee!)
And we're putting together the cast lists as we speak.