Blue Sky Riders

Now that Georgia and I are safely home from the tour it’s a good time to reflect and appreciate just how much fun we had this summer. Our last show (Just for a while. We’re not going anywhere so stop panicking. It’s embarrassing.) was in Baltimore and Baltimore made sure that we finished up with the proverbial “bang.”  There’s something about a last show that has great energy. You sing a little harder cause you know that you don’t have to sing for a while so if small bits of your larynx comes flying out on the high notes… you have plenty of time to fix it. You run around the stage a little more because you know you have the next day to sit on a plane and rub your knees and say to yourself “What am I? Ninety?” (more…)

One of the most fun parts of all this hullabaloo is being onstage and just riffing with the audience. Mostly we have no idea what we are going to say between songs. I really love that. The problem is that we occasionally say something that really kills the audience and then it’s hard not to want to do that “bit” every night in the same place. I always remember I saw a famous star perform and he screwed up the lyrics in a song and made a joke and everyone laughed and enjoyed the moment. Then a month later I saw the show again and he forgot the same lyric and made the same joke in the same place and the little boy in me that believes in spontaneity died. Then the audience applauded, and just like Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, that little boy came to life again… only to die tragically later that same night in an industrial accident. (more…)

Back in the saddle again. Tonight we played the Strand Theater in York, Pennsylvania and it felt great to be back and doing our full opening show. We have been in NYC for the last few days but we have been semi-retired. Kenny had two nights at the City Winery but they don’t have opening acts at that venue so Georgia took another gig in Austin on Monday and flew away. I haunted the city like a sad lonely ghost and had a day and night of being a wandering tourist. I went to the 9/11 Memorial and looked up the name of a friend who died in the first plane. Later in the day (to go from tragic to ridiculous in one paragraph) I went to a terrific place in Soho that sells a million different favors of rice pudding, and I sampled several hundred thousand of them. (more…)

Last night we played in Atlantic City, the first show of the last leg of the summer tour. That’s a very complicated description. I have never been to the actual Atlantic City… the beach and the boardwalk. I have been to the casinos before. My first publisher, Irwin, was quite the gambler in his day. He would arrange for a helicopter to pick the two of us up at a landing strip on the West Side Highway and we would zoom to AC and I would watch him gamble. As an apprentice electrician and part time songwriter I did not have a great deal of discretionary income to risk on the vagaries of the playing cards. (more…)