Interview by Shaun Dale
A bit of a disclaimer is called for here. Most of the interviews I do for Cosmik Debris are done from a position of relative objectivity. I have rarely spoken to the subject before the interview, and have never had anything that resembles a personal relationship with the interviewee. That's not exactly true in this case.

I've known David Gans for several years, primarily through the medium of the Well, the venerable online conferencing system that hosts, among other things, a hotbed of Deadhead activity. We've traded tales and opinions about music, politics, writing and life in general. David was the host of the Well's Grateful Dead conference for years, and was or is the host of a number of other spaces there. When he decided to expand his professional horizons beyond his nationally syndicated radio show, The Grateful Dead Hour, and take his own music on the road, I found out on the Well, and followed his progress through a series of road journals he posted, along with schedules, set lists and other updates.

I've also read a stack of his books, which include Playing In The Band, Conversations With The Dead, and Not Fade Away: The Online World Remembers Jerry Garcia. I've even read his first book, which didn't have anything to do with the Grateful Dead at all. It was a biography of another band, Talking Heads. Before any of the book projects, he was a well established music journalist in his own right, whose byline appeared in Record, BAM, Rolling Stone and elsewhere.

Needless to say, I've taken an active interest in his career as a singer/songwriter, accumulating a modest stash of recorded shows, checking his progress reports and looking forward to his appearances in the Pacific Northwest. I've been trying to schedule this interview for nearly a year, which he graciously granted during his latest appearance in Seattle.

There's one more thing I've got to admit. David Gans is something of a personal hero to me. Like a lot of guys of a certain age, I've got a guitar, a stash of self-penned songs, a long abandoned dream or two and a total lack of the courage and drive it takes to get out there, get up there and try to make a living playing music for people. David didn't have to do it, really. He had a couple of successful careers already, and probably could have picked any number of easier (and perhaps saner) paths to follow. But he decided to do it, and he's doing it damn well. It's not a burden he has chosen to bear, really, but in a way he's doing it for a lot of us out there. Here's what he has to say about what he's been up to, and what it's been like....



Cosmik: This is a hard interview to do in a way, because we've been goofing around together online for a long time. Usually I don't know any more about the people I interview than my readers do, I look them up on the net the night before and listen to the albums, but...

David Gans: Yeah, we'll have to remember to say all the stuff we already know. Plus I'm an accomplished journalist myself, which means I know all the tricks.

Cosmik: Right, which is where I thought we could start, how you came to be a singer/songwriter, if you started out there and then moved to journalism....

David: I did. I was a musician long before I did anything else professionally. I played music all the time when I was a kid. My parents got me a clarinet when I was in grade school, and when I was 15 I started playing guitar and writing songs. That's all I really cared about in life for several years. In the early seventies I dropped out of college to play guitar and sing my songs, and I also wrote, for fun, you know. I wrote for an underground newspaper in San Jose, California, in the early seventies, and then in 1976 a friend of mine knew a guy who was starting a music magazine down in the Bay Area and they asked me to do some writing for it. Then they asked me to take over as the editor for it. The whole thing lasted about three issues, and when it was over I took my unpublished pieces to BAM (Bay Area Music) Magazine and started contributing to BAM, so the next thing I knew I was a music journalist. From '76 until '80 I worked in the computer ticket business, and travelled around doing that, but I'd write reviews...

Cosmik: Computer tickets, boo hiss.

David: Yeah, right. But in those days it was just beginning to become the ugly industry it became. It was a company called BASS tickets, which was an independent computerized ticket agency. But I traveled around, helping them set up systems in other cities and stuff for about four years and did writing as a sideline, just for fun. Then in 1980 that job ended and I had a choice of trying to become a computer geek full time or making a living writing. Needless to say, I chose the latter. All this time I played music, I played with friends and played gigs, but I didn't have the confidence to get serious about it at that point. So, from 1980 to '86 I wrote for music magazines. I got a gig at Record Magazine, which was started by Rolling Stone in 1980 as a music magazine. I stayed on their masthead from the first issue to the last. I went from being a musical instrument columnist, doing a little short feature every month on something to do with instruments or recording, and the editor there, David McGee, saw talent in me and he nurtured me and mentored me and he brought me along and I ended up being the Senior Editor on the west coast, doing a lot of cover stories, which was really fun and was really my college education. I got to interview Leo Fender and Rod Stewart and Tom Petty and Neil Young, it was great fun.

Parallel to that, I worked for Mix Magazine, a recording industry magazine, and became their music editor. So I had two part time editorial writing gigs for magazines, and through my Rolling Stone connection got an assignment to do a story on the Dead for Rolling Stone that never came out. That got me a junket to Jamaica, Thanksgiving '82, I was doing the Dead and they got me on the junket to go see the World Music Festival. On that trip, I met Peter Simon, the photographer, who was doing a book on the Dead, and I met his editor there at the same time. Within a few months the guy who was doing the text for Peter's book fell out of the project for some reason and they invited me to take it over. So in spring of '85 Playing In The Band came out. I had seven or eight years of interview with Grateful Dead guys in my file cabinet, and stuff I'd done for the Rolling Stone piece that had been aborted, so I had the basis for a really nice book about the Dead. So right around the time that was coming out, I appeared on a radio show, on KFOG, in the Bay Area, called The Deadhead Hour, to promote my book. I put a little piece together, called The Greatest Pump Song Ever Wrote, which was the story about this one song. "The Greatest Story Ever Told" began with a recording of a pump on Mickey Hart's ranch and he had Bobby Weir write a song to go with it, and that's where we get "The Pump Song" on Mickey's record and it evolved and became "The Greatest Story Ever Told." So I had all these interviews about the song and Mickey had broken out the master and played me just the pump and then the log drum and all these things. So I do this little piece about the evolution of this song, for this radio show.

Cosmik: With the audio of all the source material.

David: Yeah. So I produced a really nice little piece about the song for my first radio show, and I had so much fun doing that that I invited myself back to be a guest on the show again, and that was fine with the guy who was hosting it because he wasn't really that much of a Deadhead. A few months later, I wound up taking sole responsibility for the show, 'cause I was really into it and the guy who was hosting it was really overworked already. There were some other Deadheads contributing material, but I just really wanted to do it and they gave me responsibility for it. So, quite by accident, I wound up doing radio [the Grateful Dead Hour], and while I was doing that in the Bay Area, a station in Hartford, Connecticut called up and said "Can we put your show on our station, too?" So I went to the Dead and said "Can I syndicate this? What do you think?" And they said sure. So quite casually I went from writing magazine articles for music magazines to writing a book about the Dead to hosting a radio show about the Dead. And I would much rather be playing with tape, producing radio shows, than doing all the laborious research and writing, and I'm a really slow, undisciplined writer. Being a freelance writer was way more work than I wanted to do. So, just through this series of fortunate happenstance I became a full time radio producer, syndicating the show. And that became my career for the last sixteen years.

All along, I was playing music. Not as seriously as I should have, but it all turned out OK in the long run, because I don't think I was really ready to do any of the stuff that I'm doing now. I was too young, and I didn't have enough to talk about in my songs. I wrote songs a little at a time. I've always been a really slow writer, but I have a decent catalog because I've been doing it for thirty years.

Cosmik: I remember asking you about co-writing credits on some of your songs, and it turned out to be someone you wrote songs with in high school.

David: Yeah, Stephen Donnelly. Stephen Donnelly is the guy I went to high school with who took me to my first Grateful Dead show. We wrote songs together on the Elton John and Bernie Taupin model in the early 70s. Some of those songs still survive, I still do several of them in my show. And pieces of those songs we wrote together have been redeployed. So I was always playing music but I didn't really get serious about it until a few years ago. I had bands, I've got recordings going back to the 70s, but in the mid-90s, after Jerry Garcia died, I realized that I probably wasn't going to be doing a Grateful Dead radio show for the rest of my life, and I probably shouldn't do a Grateful Dead radio show for the rest of my life. A series of things happened that made me realize that I'd probably be much better off doing something that's primary creativity rather than packaging somebody else's creativity for a living. I also realized that I had set out, really, in 1970, 71, 72, I had really wanted to be a musician, I just didn't have the balls to do it back then. So in the mid-90s I realized that if I didn't get off my ass and do it, I was going to be too old to do it and I was going to really regret that. So starting in 1997 I went out touring. I did my first real tour as a solo guy in June of '98 with the help of a fellow named John Metzger in Chicago who publishes an online and print magazine called The Music Box. He took an interest in what I was doing, because he would see on my mailing list that I was doing gigs on the east coast and on the west coast and he said "How come you never play in the middle?" And I said "Because I don't know anybody in the middle!" So he said "Let me see what I can do," and he booked me a little tour. It was fun. We went out together, I sold Grateful Dead Hour t-shirts and my CDs, made a little money, did another one in September and I've been doing that ever since, building up my reputation, building up my confidence and my repertoire ever since. So it's just been onward and upward since June of 1998.

Cosmik: It's funny, because you say you didn't start earlier because you were too young, and you've got to do it now before you're too old, when the industry model these days is to make your first album by the time you're 22, retire and then come back in ten years to do a VH-1 Where Are They Now special. A guy in his forties starting to break out is way out of line by the industry model.

David: I don't think there would have been a place for me in the industry then. Maybe there would have been. I grew up in the John Prine/Jackson Browne model of being a singer/ songwriter with clever songs about personal topics. I had to do a lot of stuff in my life before I could feel like I belonged onstage telling my own story. It was psychological, personal stuff. I didn't feel like I was a fully formed human being.

Cosmik: Of course, Jackson Browne was doing that when he was about twelve.

David: Well, yeah. Maybe I could have, but I think I would have burned out really early, and I don't think I really had the tools then. I needed to do it exactly the way I did it. And I don't really have any business in the music business. That whole, what I'm doing is not in any category that you can name. I mean, it's sort of Americana but I jam too much to be an Americana guy. I definitely would be happy to be opening for Greg Brown somewhere, or Peter Rowan or Guy Clarke, anyone of those singer/songwriter types I could do a set, opening for, and make it appropriate, but what I do is beyond that, also. I like to jam. I'm stuck in the mold of the Grateful Dead, which is really, really good, interesting American song styles and improvisational music.

Cosmik: Your first CD is called Solo Acoustic, but it's really not acoustic anymore. It's you and your magical electronic partner.

David: Well, the Solo Acoustic record doesn't really have that much of that in there. I wasn't using any of it yet.

Cosmik: Right, but your music has evolved so that you can jam without a band.

David: Right, and I need to put out a new record. Actually, I have a DVD that's waiting for some licensing issues, but it has a lot of loops on it. I started doing loops around the end of 2000, I got a Line Six digital delay modeler that had a very short loop in it, and then I upgraded to a Roland Boss RC-20 that has five minutes recording time and from that point on I really started evolving my trip, and that's what I do now.

Cosmik: So you can lay down five minutes of rhythm and play over it....

David: Well, yeah, but I don't do it for five minutes. It varies. A lot of times I'll do sixteen bars of a pattern and then start adding things on top of it, not necessarily the same thing for sixteen bars, but four bars of this, then rest and another four bars of that, and then something else in the second and fourth segments. So I can have alternating sounds and then add something on top of that, so I can stack three or four sounds. Like, I do "Terrapin Station" now, and the "Lady With A Fan" jam has a thing where I'll stack three guitars underneath, and then solo over it, and that's really a fun thing to do.

Cosmik: And not many years ago you would have needed a full studio to do that, or an enormous amount of money, and now you can go to Guitar Center and buy the tool on sale.

David: That's exactly right. The sampling technology that existed in the seventies, my friend Ned Lagin who did the Seastones stuff with the Grateful Dead, he used computers, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of computers in order to be able to sample a few seconds worth of sound and make it play back over and over again. That very same technology now exists in a box that costs me 250 bucks. I like to do that stuff, but it's not the main thing that I do. I'm fundamentally a songwriter who uses that stuff in service to the song and because I also like to jam, but I can still get up alone, just me and my guitar, and deliver a set of satisfying music just by picking and singing.

Cosmik: That's one of the things that separates you from the jam band scene, and that separates the Dead from the scene that they spawned. I mean, one of my favorite albums of the last couple years is Might As Well, the album you produced for the Persuasions, and one of my favorite things to do is to play it for people who say they're not really into the Grateful Dead....

David: (laugher) Good!

Cosmik: Because there's nothing there but the quality of the songs. I mean, the performances are great, but those are great songs. And quality songwriting isn't really highly valued in the jam band scene, the jam is everything.

David: The groove is everything.

Cosmik: Yeah, or the groove is everything. But with the Dead there were great songs behind all that, and with you, whatever you do with loops, it's all based on playing a great song.

David: That's certainly my intention. I mean, it's all a matter of what you like. Groove oriented, jazzy, funky jam band music is popular. A lot of people like it. It's not what I do, and it's why I don't fit into that thing. I play a lot of jam band type clubs, but I sort of don't belong there and I sort of don't belong at the Americana clubs, because I'm doing both. I'm trying to jump the track, or create a track of my own, that is open to the improvisation but fundamentally song oriented. Right now I'm in a real place and time to establish my identity. I've got new booking agents who are out there talking me up and it's "Oh, I know who he is. He plays? He writes books and does radio, what's he going to do at a club?" And they'll say, "Well, he's a singer/ songwriter, listen to this." I'm starting to get feedback, emails and postings from places where people are starting to talk about me, I'm starting to get recognition for the quality of the songs. I haven't made a big deal about announcing that they're my songs, but people are starting to figure out that a bunch of the stuff that I do is my own. I've done a few songs that are getting a lot of attention. "Down To Eugene" and "Who Killed Uncle John" are both really reach out and grab you by the throat songs that have a certain appeal to Deadheads, so I'm getting some attention for those. Even though Jim Page wrote "Down To Eugene," I own that version.

Cosmik: That little Mississippi John Hurt kind of feel.

David: Yeah. That's like Jorma doing Jim Page, that's my feel. And "Who Killed Uncle John" is very controversial. There's a certain faction of Deadheads that take offense to it, 'cause they see it as finger pointing, and they don't realize that I'm pointing that finger at myself. I see myself at least four or five times in that. The thing about that song is that it's a room full of shoes, and you just try on as many as you like. A lot of those shoes fit me.

Cosmik: Well, the last time I saw you, when you did it the people who seemed to enjoy it most were the tapers in the back of the room, and some of those shoes were made just for them.

David: Yeah, see. They get it. There's a collection of Deadheads who are very protective of the Grateful Dead and they see anything like that that challenges or questions the scene as somehow an attack.

Cosmik: They're more protective of the Grateful Dead than the Grateful Dead ever were.

David: There was a guy, a journalist in Worcester, Massachusetts, who pulled a brilliant trick. He did a preview piece on my show there by saying "When Sycophants Go Bad." Somehow, I was lame because I was a suckup to the Grateful Dead, until I wrote this song and turned on them. So this guy was putting me down for being a sycophant, and then he put me down for biting the hand that feeds me. I thought that was just such a great trick. Except that he promoted the show and gave all the details, he did the thing, it was a perfect example of I don't care what you say about me as long as you spell my name right, it was like laughable. I looked at it and thought, boy, this guy just had it in for me or something. It's just a great little isolated incident.

Cosmik: It's the bane of music journalism. Half the guys out there want to be Lester Bangs when they grow up and they think the way to do it is to trash whatever they saw last.

David: I never had much interest in that. I wrote a few nasty pieces when I was a magazine journalist, but it always seemed more interesting to write about what I thought was cool. Occasional I'd get an assignment and I'd run into somebody who was a total, you know.

Cosmik: I've got stacks of stuff from the different magazines I write for. I've got fifty things I haven't heard yet I'll probably like, why would I write about something I hated.

David: The funnest thing when I was a journalist was finding something that I didn't think I'd care for. I had a major epiphany at a Twisted Sister concert. I was right in the middle of writing the Dark Star chapter of Playing In The Band when I got the call. You've got to go to the Civic to see Twisted Sister. I thought, man, fuck it. Heavy metal band, this guy in clown makeup, this is not going to be any fun. I went and I loved it. I understood, I figured out what heavy metal was all about. There were all these fifteen year old girls in leopard skin leotards, and all these guys with their hormones coursing through their veins and the girls were walking by saying "Look at these, you can't touch this." And here comes Dee Snider, exploding with teenage angst, and he's singing "We're not gonna take it..." and it's all about "My parents made me do the dishes, goddammit." It's just all about this totally blind teenage rage, and I got it and I just totally loved it. Then I went backstage to interview the guy and he's this total regular old wanker from Long Island and he's all jazzed because he's just met his hero, Alice Cooper.

It was just a glorious night, and I went on home to write my Dark Star chapter and wrote a glorious little piece about Twisted Sister for Record Magazine and went on my way. I went in expecting it to be a bore and wound up learning something really cool about what music does for kids.

Cosmik: Well, it's what it's for. You may not like the music that comes out of the commercial music factories these days, but for the kids who buy it, it's perfect music, and the people who make it make it perfectly.

David: Yeah. I'm sort of not conscious of how the music business works these days. I read a really cool book called Working Musicians, by Bruce Pollack. It's all these interviews, these short, first person diatribes by people of all different ages, and there's one in there, I don't remember the woman's name, but she talked about when she sat down with the record company, and one A&R guy thought she sounded like Jewel and another one thought she sounded like so and so, and that's all they want to do, is to see how they can contort you to fit into an existing mold. I'm too old for that, too idiosyncratic for that, there's no mold they can put me in that's going to make any sense, but the channels for getting out there into the world and promoting your own music are wide open in a way, and I am both utterly without prospects and utterly without encumbrances as a musician. I can do whatever I want, whatever makes sense to me.

I can build my audience one person at a time, which is what I'm out here doing now, and I'm asking everybody who digs what I'm doing to turn around and tell some friends. I'll send them email and tell them "I'm coming back to your town. I don't expect you to come to my show every time, but I'm hoping you'll tell a few friends." Because, people are buying a CD and burning copies for their friends, you can't even rely on making money off of your CD or selling songs. When I started all this, one of the things you did was get other people to record your songs. The Doobie Brothers first record had a Randy Newman cover on it because Lenny (Waronker) said record my buddy's tune here, it's a great song. Carole King was writing songs that other people were doing, John Prine, everybody. Even guys who were buddies and peers, like Jimmy Buffett, John Prine and Steve Goodman all played on each other's records and recorded each other's songs. That's the paradigm I came up in, and that's vanished.

Cosmik: Someplace along the line, someone decided that if you weren't doing all original material you were doing something wrong, but the Great American Songbook was built by eight or ten guys who wrote for everybody. You do a lot of covers. Maybe that's part of the Grateful Dead legacy, too, because they did a lot of covers.

David: I don't think my songwriting is the be all and end all of the world. I'm happy to do songs that further my own narrative, and that's the thing that I learned from the Grateful Dead, that a show, a set of music, can be a narrative. There's a story being told even if you're not conscious of it and even if it's not being told in an overt way. I'm not talking about a song cycle or an opera or a suite of songs. I'm talking about a subliminal narrative that I'm dimly aware of. I'm more aware of it sometimes than other times, and I find myself, I realize that I've chosen songs that tell my story. For instance, "Return Of The Grievous Angel," by Gram Parsons. There are phrases in that song that directly relate to my life, not necessarily literally, but close enough metaphorically to further my tale. I didn't even know that when I first acquired the song. I loved that song forever and I never learned it. I had a drummer that kept wanting me to learn that song and do it and I never did and I finally did and I thought, god, this song is so me. And some nights one particular line jumps out and it fits the narrative. There are a couple of different stories I'm trying to tell, maybe they're a couple of different complaints I'm trying to register with the world or something. I'll have a song for years. You know "Rocket Man" by Elton John? Just a silly little pop song, but you know what? From a certain angle it's a perfect song about being on tour. Whether they meant it that way when they wrote it I don't know, but for me it tells the story of being out here, thousands of miles away from home, away from my wife, and, it furthers my narrative to do that song.

Cosmik: And it's fun to hear.

David: Yeah, it's a great song to play, but on a certain level it's not cool. You know who I have a lot in common with? Shel Silverstein. We were talking about him because he wrote "The Unicorn," which is the hokiest song you ever heard in your life, and Shel Silverstein wrote totally nasty, filthy stuff with Dr. Hook, and he wrote incredibly sentimental books that are totally suited to children.

Cosmik: Absolutely intended for children.

David: Right. And the song "Sylvia's Mother," the first big hit for Dr. Hook, you don't know if that's earnest or not. It depends on the delivery. Then you find out it's Dr. Hook doing it, and you know what else they're capable of and you go, OK, they can't be doing that purely on the primary level, there must be some irony in their delivery. I'm way too sentimental to be cool. I have edgy songs, I have a lot of angry songs, but I also have songs that are just as hokey as can be. I believe them. I'm a sucker for real, hokey, American tunes.

Cosmik: Well, you reach a point where we've all got a backlog of guilty pleasure tunes.

David: Anybody who sees "Rocket Man" on a setlist is going to think, well, what is this guy, some 70s throwback stuff. And then I have my newest song, "Surely You Jest," which is just this really nasty, cranky little song. I have no problem reconciling those, and I'm starting to get feedback from people who recognize that I'm presenting a range of emotion and that's what attracts them. They can co-exist in my head. A really sweet, sentimental song can co-exist with a really nasty, satirical, angry song.

Cosmik: Well, a song that could be considered nasty on one level would be "An American Family," but it's a song you couldn't write without paying attention to American families and really caring about them. It happens to be my favorite David Gans song.

David: Cool. I started that song, it was an exercise in pure fiction. I realized that the last few songs I had written were personal songs and I wanted to write something that was totally not about me. I started to write a song about a particular guy that I knew, a kind of prissy guy about my age, who lives in a kind of, you know people like him, people who live in a kind of small town America that doesn't exist. The guy I was trying to write about was like that, a guy who lives in a slightly fantasized, cleaned up America. The other characters just showed up. I was trying to make fun of this guy, and it ended up being a serious song about what this guy was going through, and then his wife showed up and started speaking for herself, and then their kid showed up and started screaming for himself. It was like a really interesting experience of having this song telling you where it wants to go.

Cosmik: Well, that's a story of a bunch of people from our generation, people who thought it was supposed to be easy and reach a certain point where there's no there there. I live next door to those people. Sometimes they live in my house. It's a great song. But if you're going to do this, to leave your wife and travel for days on end, there's got to be a business model someplace. There is this alternative music world out there, a circuit of clubs, indie labels and so forth. Does it work?

David: Well, I'm trying to find out. I'd love to find a label that would invest in me. I'm so ready to make a recording, a studio record, that I could scream. I have songs that I can't do in my current profile, alone, that I would like to record, and a lot of the songs that I do in this format would lend themselves to real production. I'm now confident that I really do have a body of songs that is really, really worthwhile. My attitude now is that I will not be denied. I realize that the world is not necessarily going to embrace me just because I believe that, but I'm not going to give up because I believe that what I'm doing is really worthwhile. Finding the channel, finding the way in through the brick wall is really difficult, but the only way to do it is to keep doing it and looking for those connections. I'm looking for people to come to me and say "You're good, let's work together." I've got a new booking agent who is a guy who believes in what I'm doing and he's out of Portland. It just came together because we worked together a bunch of times. He hired me to play gigs up here, and when it came time to make a change I went to him and said "I'd really love to have you find me some gigs and see how it goes." and he said "OK, let's do it."

[Photo by Tim Owen]

I'd like to find a label that wants to do that. Right now that whole business seems hard to manage, because there's a whole culture of people that don't recognize that people should be compensated for their recorded works. People are burning CDs and giving them away to their friends, and not just kids. Not just college kids who don't know any better, but people my age who really should know better. The technology to burn CDs is just so convenient that you don't even think about it, so investing in a record and expecting to make your money back is a real dicey proposition. But there are labels doing it and I'd love to find one and I don't know how to do that. But my business plan is to keep playing and keep getting better. Every gig I play, I could pick out a half dozen shows from the last couple years that I think are really first rate, that I could freely give to anybody and say this is what I do. But most of the shows I play I listen back and I cringe, I say "Boy, I hit a wrong note there, my voice went a little flat there." So I don't feel I'm really at that level, when I think of a great guitar player I think of Tony Rice, who I've seen play a bunch of times and is flawless 99.5% of the time. I've seen him play a wrong note here and there, but he knows where those notes are and he gets them. I'm not there yet. I'm able to deliver a show that hangs together and that reaches people. I can tell that by the experience of being there and connecting with people. And I do. My mission in getting up there is to reach out and connect with people, one by one. I don't understand guys who perform with their eyes closed too much, or who won't look people in the eye, because to me it's a communicative act and that's what you have to do. And I've done it. I've succeeded in doing it enough, and I figure if I just keep doing that, word will spread and my reputation will increase and people will come to me.



A little later, David mounted the stage of Seattle's Tractor Tavern to reach out and connect with people, one by one, and he fulfilled his mission. As he predicted, he didn't sell out the house, but it was a hard night to fill a room. It was the day after St. Patrick's Day, and the day before our country's scheduled military adventure in the Middle East. In other words, it was a weird time, which David made somewhat easier by lifting us out of the madness of the world we live in and into the comfort of the world he creates with his music. He did make note of the trying times, but in doing so he reminded us that just as he's taken charge of his professional life, we can all take charge of our public life. "I want my country back!" he told us, and then he reminded us how that's done. "Register, pay attention, and vote." The weather was kind of lousy that night, but the music was great and the advice was good, and two out of three isn't bad at all.


(C) 2003 - Shaun Dale