Oct. 2 Bronxville, NY - Sarah Lawrence Coallege/The Pub
Oct. 3 NYC, NY - Knitting Factory
Oct. 4 Parmus, NJ - Paramus Picture Show
Oct. 7 Charlottesville, VA - Star Hill Music Hall
Oct. 8 Asheville, NC - The Orange Peel
Oct. 10 Columbia, SC - New Brookland Tavern
Oct. 11 Atlanta, GA - Echo Lounge
Oct. 12 Live Oak, FL - Great Southern Music Harvest
Oct. 14 Charlotte, NC - Visulite Theatre
Oct. 16 Raleigh, NC - Lincoln Theater
Oct. 17 Baltimore, MD - American Visionary Museum
Oct. 18 Brooklyn, NY - Southpaw
Oct. 23 New York, NY - CMJ - Tonic
Oct. 29 Cleveland, OH - Agora Ballroom
Oct. 30 Ferndale, MI - Magic Bag Theatre Cafe
Oct. ! 31 Chicago, IL - Old Town School of Folk
Nov. 1 Madison, WI - Luther Blues
Nov. 3 Ames, IA - Maintenance Shop
Nov 7 San Francisco, CA -Warfield w/ Guster
Nov 8 Los Angeles, CA - Wiltern w/Guster
Nov 9 Tempe, AZ -tba w/ Guster
Nov 13 Eugene. OR - McDonald w/Guster
Nov 14 Vancouver or Spokane w/ Guster
Nov 15 Portland,OR -Roseland w/Guster
Nov 16 Seattle, WA -Moore w/Guster
Nov 18 Boise, ID -TBA
Nov 19 Salt lake City, UT - w/ Guster
Nov 21 Denver, CO -Fillmore w/Guster
Dec. 13 Pittsfield, MA - Berkshire Museum
Fri 31 Oct 2003 Old Town School of Folk Music Chicago IL
photo's & mp3's available using above link
saw the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Friday, with their two openers, Saint Reverend Jen and Kimya Dawson. It went like this (mp3s as linked and a few photos in the cut):
Reverend Jen's set:
Reverend Jen's Theme Song / selections from the musical Rats: We Don't Have Thumbs ~ Put the Glue Traps Away / selections from the puppet musical Les Mizrahi: scene 1 ~ scene 2 ~ interlude: excerpts from Don't Call Me Rat-dog, the autobiography of Reverend Jen Jr ~ scene 3
Kimya Dawson:
(I don't know the names of any of these songs so I'm just listing them by the opening lyric)
"my mother says that rain is angels" / "we switched to Jay Leno" / "my heart is on my sleeve" / "[something about] the persistence of time" / "a white man in white pants"
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players:
Trachtenburgs Theme Song / Mountain Trip to Old Japan, 1959 / Look at Me / Don't You Know What I Mean / Christian Terror (? not sure of the title) / Middle America / The OPNAD Contribution Study Committee Report, June 1977 / Closing Theme
This was a fun show, and I just have to repeat again that the Old Town School of Folk Music is the greatest concert venue/music school ever.
Okay, so I didn't know anything about Reverend Jen and I'd read a lot of Kimya Dawson hate in the alt.music.tmbg newsgroup, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I saw that these would be the two openers. I checked out Reverend Jen's website and just from that it seemed like she might turn out to be pretty annoying, but in fact she was really, really funny. Jason Trachtenburg introduced "Saint Reverend Jen and Reverend Jen Junior"; Rev. Jen Jr turned out to be a chihuahua wearing a lizard costume (it was Halloween, after all). The dog stayed in a shoulder bag during the whole performance and was perfectly behaved, much better than the children in the audience--I heard several of them crying, but that might have been because Rev. Jen was definitely not appropriate for children: she said "fucking" within thirty seconds of getting onstage, used the words "dildo" and "carpet-munchers" in her puppet show, and told us a story about selling herself into prostitution in order to pay Rev. Jen Jr's hospital bills (I don't think it was a true story). I'm not a big fan of dogs that fit into purses, but Reverend Jen had me from this:
Rev. Jen: So, do you like musicals?
audience: [scattered applause and cheers]
Rev. Jen: I hate them.
So she busted on Cats for a second or two and then performed selections from her own musical Rats. She warned us before she started, "I can't sing nor can I dance," so caveat emptor if you choose to listen to this mp3. (She's actually not a particularly bad singer, but the song isn't particularly melodic either.)
When her set was done she introduced Kimya Dawson. Rev. Jen made reference to Kimya's "costume," which as far as I could tell was simply a big hooded cape. Kimya had long, white-blond dreadlocks; because Rev. Jen had talked about a costume, I assumed they were a wig, but thinking back I'm totally not sure whether they were a wig or her real hair. Anyway, she played some songs and I thought she wasn't bad at all. She seemed sort of nervous--is she known for having chronic stage fright? At one point she said, "It's intimidating playing at a music school. [whispering] I'm self-taught." I actually really like her voice--maybe it's because I myself am an unskilled musician, but I like the unschooled, very natural quality of it.
There was a costume parade and intermission after Kimya's set, so I went out and asked her to sign my Bed Bed Bed book. She seemed genuinely excited when she saw I had it (which was rather cute). And she told me she'd done some shows with TMBG in New York recently, so I asked her if she'd also be performing with Them here in Chicago in December, but she said no. And I was going to buy a button from her but this guy came up and started talking to her in this really pretentious manner and I had to run away to prevent myself from slapping him.
Okay, so the Trachtenburgs made their appearance. Tina came up onstage for the opening theme before going to the back to work the slide projector; Rachel was in costume as Wednesday (from The Addams Family), which suited her very well. There were of course a lot of Jason's characteristic scattered monologues; Rachel took advantage of this lengthy downtime to work intently on de-tangling her row of chimes, which seemed to be giving her a lot of trouble: I could see that even when she had to drum and sing she kept frowning at the chimes, as if she really couldn't wait for the song to be over so she could work on them some more.
There was an excellent moment toward the middle of the set when Jason asked if the guy with the "dog guitar" was in the audience. I had noticed that there was this guy who came in with a guitar gig bag and thought that was odd; so it turned it out he had brought this guitar that was carved into the shape of a dog. Jason took it to play for one song. He seemed very amused by it. (I did get a picture of Jason playing the dog guitar, but it didn't turn out that great--it was quite dark in the auditorium, my zoom isn't very powerful, and it didn't help visibility that Jason was standing behind his keyboard at the time. But there it is.)
Toward the end of the show Rachel had to keep prompting her dad to hurry, because there was going to be a second show. They had a discussion about the setlist--Rachel was in charge that night and the promise was made that the second show would be completely different from the first show, at which point Jason laughed and said he didn't really know how that was going to happen, since he didn't think they knew enough songs, but Rachel said, "I know how it's going to happen." (I never found out how, though, because I didn't go to the second show.) And then they did the OPNAD song to great acclaim, and Tina came back onstage and the whole family sang the closing theme and the show was over.
I feel I got my $14 worth.
I have a recording of the whole show and am open for trades as usual. (Check out my sort-of-new trade page for other stuff, too.) It sounds pretty good overall though there are some rustling moments when I'm moving my bag around because people are coming and going (but not during songs). Also, I accidentally hit the compression button before the Trachtenburg set, which resulted in a surprising amount of hiss on the recording. I got rid of most of it using CD Spin Doctor, but I'm still peeved at myself for being careless. So email me if you're interested.
Sun, Oct 19 2003 MicroCineFest 2003 Awards
July 30, 2003 Cafe DuNord San Francisco, CA, USA
review & photos
Fri May 2 2003 GEL Conference
Good Experience Live IX
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players: Look at Us
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players is a three-piece musical group that creates music based on photographic slides acquired at yard sales and estate sales. Here is a rough transcript of remarks made during their performance at Good Experience Live:
We are the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. My name is Jason, and I play the keyboard. My name is Tina, and I run the slide projector. My name is Rachel, and I play the drums. We are a conceptual art rock band. We read the newspapers to track down strangers' yard sales. We look for obituaries to see who died. We go to their estate sales, and we buy their slide collections. Assuming they have a slide collection. We turn these slide collections into pop rock performance exposes. We're going to do the best 15 minutes of our songs this afternoon. This song is called Look at Me and is about two retired military nurses named Jean and Cathy. How do we know their names? Sometimes they write them on the bottoms of the slides.
Everyone's slide collections says, "Look at us!" And by us I mean them. For this next song, we were fortunate enough to acquire slides taken from a traffic education class in the '70s. We like to call this one "Middle America." This is a slide that's been in our act for about a year now. But you see that Hershey bar guy? I just noticed him and every time I look at him he is so disturbing. This is the content of the Opnad Contribution Study Committee Report from June 1977. This song will justify our existence. These were taken from an internal McDonald's corporate marketing meeting. These slides were meant to be buried for absolutely forever. We unearthed them in Seattle. We turned these into a six-song rock opera. Part one, "Theme from Opnad." Part two, "What Will the Corporation Do?" We took Ed Schmitt's quote here word for word and turned it into a rock opera number. Words by Ed Schmitt. Music by the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players. This is a controversial piece. This song was banned in 17 states, along with our first two CD's. This song is called "Wendy's, Sambo's, and Long John Silver's." "New competitors are using network television to take advantage of efficiency." I just got the hurry up from the drummer here. That's OK. This is part four of six, and it's called "Let's Not Have the Same Weight in 1978." Joe Casper raises several troubling questions, actually. We're at part five of six. They're at the crucial part where they need to ask the eternal important question of, "Why did we decide to take this decision to you?" Who should we take this question to, Ed Schmitt? Ed Schmitt? Then you hear some rumblings in the back: Joe Casper. Look at Joe. Everyone wanted to be a white-collar executive. Joe was a vinyl-collar executive. They don't make executives like Joe Casper any more. Joe Casper was not a man of many words. He was a many of high fashion." Thank you so much! This is part six of six. It's the final song of our part of the afternoon. "Together, As a System, We Are Unbeatable." It's how they wrapped up their business meeting rock opera. That's all!
taken from http://www.mediadiet.net/2003/05/good-experience-live-ix.html
