NOCTAMBLOG: Getting to Do This…
Noctambule playing John Whelan's lovely tune "Trip to Skye" in one of our favorite nocturnal haunts.
After multiple weeks of peripatetic noctambulations about this great nation of ours, it will be good to play in the warmth and comfort of our own back yard at Stevie’s Coyle’s Mighty Fine Guitars in Lafayette, California. We’ll be there on the evening of Saturday, November 1.
This touring business constitutes something of a departure from my life as a workaday psychiatrist where the stride from my chair to opening the door for my next patient pretty much constitutes the extent of traversing through space. Marla seems more adept at this, really, because she teaches in far-flung places with no Starbucks that require a sequence of puddle jumpers, followed by treks with string instrument-toting pack mules. The raw arduousness of these journeys quell any nascent, if quasi-envious, desires to teach guitar; although, as at least two of the editors of this august cyber-publication are aware, no one is bloody likely to ask me to teach, unless a Reform School for Wayward Alt-Tuned Guitarists is established… But the foregoing is kind of a crock because it is all overshadowed, if not blotted out entirely by our feeling of being entirely privileged that we get to do this.
And we are very proud to be a Peghead Partner because it seems to us – albeit in a somewhat simplistic way – that all of the wonderful information that is disseminated, and pedagogic opportunities offered, are in the service of helping as many people as possible get to do this.
But here is The Thing I Really Want to Say: first that it is both an honor and a homecoming to play at Stevie’s. He is our great friend, and someone that we have both performed with at various points, and in a derivative kind of way the guy who fixed us up musically and, now, maritally. He “got” what we were trying to do in our somewhat odd and unscheduled fusion of two very different musicians and “got us going” with our first recording. But all this is, in turn, simply manifests what I would consider a greater underlying truth: that if, as Pete Seeger contends, we are all musicians, then the world needs folks that implement that teaching — and I can’t think of anyone who is a better implementer of this truth than Stevie. In that spirit, you will see Stevie listed as a Peghead String School instructor.
Which brings us back to the gig on November 1: it will be a warm and wonderful thing to play at MFG and have Stevie join us on a couple of numbers. But apart from doing some hopefully novel and mellifluous things with strings and voices, we are simply grateful that we get to do this, and hope that you and your inner Seegerian musician will join us!
Bruce & Marla
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