The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

In my other blog, The Happiest Geek on Earth: If this spam isn’t lying, the CIA is looking for a Director developer.

I was thinking about this when I dropped by to make a quick appearance (I arrived at midnight) at the every-other-Sunday night edition of Kick Ass Karaoke.

A number of popular songs have long instrumental breaks. One example that comes to mind is the stadium rock boom-bastic guitar solo at the end of Pearl Jam’s Alive, which runs a full two and a half minutes. (When I was a DJ at the Queen’s Engineering Pub, I’d take advantage of it to get a bathroom break, freshen my drink at the bar or sometimes both.) These breaks, while generally fine in a recorded or live band situtation, don’t quite translate very well into karaoke, where the poor singer is left with nothing to do but stand there and look confused. I can’t remember which song left a poor singer stranded that way last night, but I know that Barry Manilow’s Copacabana, a popular one with the girls, has a break running almost a hundred measures. That works out to nearly two minutes.

Some Kick Ass Karaoke regulars can get around this. T and Mike, two guys who often perform, often turn single songs into two-song mash-ups; you should hear their version of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, where Mike sings the Closer lyrics while T squeezes Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler into the mix. As you may have guessed, I use the instrumental breaks to break into accordion solos, usually with the help of someone who kindly holds the spare microphone up to my accordion (these days, Meryle “Hoochie Mama Number One” Cox often helps out in that department.)

The part of me with the creative tendencies is glad that there are these long breaks. They’re blank canvases into which you can pour your personal style and make what would otherwise be a very pre-packaged, strictly delineated form of entertainment something very unique. One the other hand, the human factors/ergonomics geek in me wonders if they could be shortened so that the vast majority of karaoke singers out there aren’t left hoilding the mic with nothing to do for long stretches of time. Perhaps the karaoke disc vendors could put both full and abridged versions of songs on their discs.

Jörg Kantel, the blogger behind Der Schockwellenreiter — The Shockwave Rider in English, one of the best-known German blogs out there — turns 50 today. Der Schockwellenreiter is a great blog in the spirit of BoingBoing that covers technology…and everything else! For example, they recently pointed to an article on content management systems and made mention of Willie Nelson’s birthday. Now that’s breadth. I highly recommend it; if you can’t read German, try running it through Babelfish, or do what I do: ask your German foreign exchange student friends to translate for you.

(The best way to get German foreign exchange student friends is to drink lots of Jagermeister and play the accordion.)

Best of all — and I was unaware of this until Scott “PapaScott” Hanson emailed me — Jörg is an accordion fan. He agrees with my assessment of the squeezebox, calling it “das most sexiest instrument“. A Google search for “most sexiest instrument” yields only links related to Jörg (well, at least until this blog entry gets indexed). Jörg, you are a genius with impeccable taste!

Jörg’s been at the accordion a lot longer than I have — here’s a photo of him back in 1987. At the time, I was 19 and had just bought my first synthesizer, an Akai AX-60. With the exception of one evening when I borrowed my friend Rob Weirmeir’s accordion for a couple of hours, I wouldn’t start on the accordion for another 12 years.

Happy birthday, Jörg!

[Thanks to PapaScott for telling me about Jörg’s birthday!]

Just got back from taking Mom out for Dim Sum for Mother’s Day. When we met at the restaurant, I noticed we were all wearing all black clothing (Mom wore mostly black, breaking ranks with a blue blazer).

“It’s Mother’s Day…in The Matrix!” I exclaimed.

This is a list that appears in For the Love of Cheese: A Celebration of All Things Cheesy, a book published by the editors of Might magazine, many of whose writers and editors became Timothy McSweeney’s publishing cabal.

Keep in mind that my life revolves around cheesiness!

• Asking if you have enough money to eat
• Gardening tools
• Gardening gloves
• Seasoned olive oil
• Wishing you luck before finals (Bonus: You’re in Law School!)
• Wishing you luck before you finalize a multimillion-dollar business venture (Mom, before a dog-and-pony show I did for our first investors with Cory, back in the OpenCola days: “Joey, you could be the next Bill Gates!” “I’ll take that as a compliment, Mom.”)
• Brooches
• Foreign exchange students
• Swearing (Not my mom. If I were given a choice between swearing in front of Mom and getting shot, I’d answer “Um, it depends. Where would you shoot me, and are we talking direct hit or just a grazing wound?”)
• Wearing jeans
• Riding bikes (Bonus: Getting Dad to ride tandem)
• Trying to get Dad to take her out on the town. (Joey’s bonus: Opera, where Dad dozes off by the thrid aria!)
• The Mom Cut (here it is, as demonstrated by my friend Liz)
• Talking about herself in a sexual way
• Saying “Oh, lighten up”
• Saying “You used to be so cute”
• Saying “You’ve got something on your seat“, referring to your butt
• Putting on lipstick for church
• Wearing fur
• Clipping articles and sending them to you, F.Y.I. (Joey’s bonus: Doing it via email!)

In addition to all the standard “Mom” things that she did, there’s one particularly inspiring thing that I’m sure influenced me.

Years ago, when I was in my early teens, we were attending some kind of Filipino cultural event that took place at one of Accordion City’s downtown concert halls (I can’t remember of it was Massey Hall or what is now called the Hummingbird Centre). The program was supposed to begin with the playing of both Bayan Magiliw and O Canada, our two countries’ national anthems. The problem was that none of the performers knew how to play them. The stage director took a chance and decided to see if any of the audience members — who were still milling about the lobby — could play those songs on piano.

Mom, upon hearing the problem, said “Oh, those are easy!” While Mom hadn’t seen the notation for either song, she’s the person from whom I inherited and learned playing by ear. Fifteen minutes later, and with only one hasty backstage practice run, she was the opening act of a show she’d only gone to see. And she smiled and played so gracefully, as if she’d been rehearsing for weeks and not just hastily recruited.

Thanks Mom, for teaching me the art of the possible…and being the Queen of Rock!

After all, as my Mom would say (and it’s her day tomorrow): “Those chicks aren’t going to pick themselves up, son.”

Okay, maybe she was referring to dirty socks and not chicks, but you get the idea…