Category: Music

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Music

Your Suggestions for My Accordion Repertoire, Please

Joey plays accordion for Wendy at Kickass Karaoke.
Me and Wendy at Kickass Karaoke at the Rivoli

It’s time for me to freshen up my accordion repertoire! It’s been far too long since I’ve added songs to it, so I’m looking around for ideas of songs to cover from my MP3 collection, internet and regular radio, the song selection at Kickass Karaoke and you! If you’ve got suggestions as to what I should cover, let me know in the comments.

Some points to give you a general idea of what I’m looking for:

  • Cheese is okay. I’m not going to turn up my nose at a song because it’s bubble-gum pop aimed squarely at the “hanging out at H&M in the mall for hours” demographic or because it’s a staple of those “EZ Rock” stations. Sometimes — as with Britney Spears’ Baby One More Time they translate very well into accordion numbers.
  • Forget that I play accordion. It’s amazing how many people say “I didn’t know that that song could be played on accordion. As long as the song was written using the notes of the conventional even-tempered scale (which should account for 99% of the music you hear on mainstream North American radio), it can be played on any melodic instrument you can find at most music stores, including the accordion. I get a lot of mileage out of AC/DC numbers, and they wouldn’t be considered an accordion band (except by me).
  • I’m looking for a mix of current and old. Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy is a likely candidate, as is Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’.

I’m planning to record my perfomances of these songs as videos and post them on this blog, so choose wisely!

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In the News Music

Happy Worm-a-Versary!

Today, July 26th, is an anniversary for two men who are infamous for unleashing their worms upon an unsuspecting world. Thanks to Dave “Dave’s Picks” Polaschek and his blog for the reminder!

Robert Tappan Morris Jr.

Robert Tappan Morris, Jr.

First, it’s the anniversary of the indictment of Robert Tappan Morris. Those of us who make a living off the internet will instantly recognize the name: he’s the author of the Morrris Worm, one of the first computer worms to porpagate via the Internet and probably the first to gain attention in the mainstream media.

Computer worms are self-contained self-replicating programs; unlike computer viruses, they do not need a “host” program to attach to. Although the worm functions by taking advantage of some design flaws in the Unix operatin systems of the era — late 1988 — Morris claimes that he wrote it for a benign purpose: to gauge the size of the internet at the time. However, do to a flaw in the design of the worm’s self-replication mechanism, it made too many copies of itself and slowed a significant number of machines on the internet to a crawl.

Morris was indicted under the Computer Abuse and Fraud Act of 1986 on this day in 1989 and convicted in 1990. He was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and fined US$10,000. Morris did well for himself later on, helping to create an application that Yahoo! would buy and turn into Yahoo! Store, get his Ph.D. from Harvard, become a professor at MIT and found the techie venture capital firm Y Combinator.

Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens (nee Rubenfeld)

Pee-Wee Herman's mug shot.

It’s also the anniversary of the arrest of Paul “Pee-Wee Herman” Reubens, who exposed a worm of a different sort. On July 26, 1991, he was arrested in Sarasota, Florida for masturbating in public in a porn theatre (the movie is supposed to have been Nurse Nancy). He negotiated his punishment down to a fine and some public service announcements.

Song of the Day

In honour of this momentous anniversary, I present you with the Divinyls’ song I Touch Myself [3.3MB MP3], as performed by the Scala Girls Choir. Where the hell were these girls when I was in Catholic high school?

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It Happened to Me Music

Ramoniacs Poster

Poster for the Ramoniacs.

Just for kicks, here’s the poster for the Ramoniacs’ gig last Saturday at the Middle East nightclub in Cambridge, Massachusetts (click it to see a larger version on Flickr). For more on this gig, see my entry, Bouncing with the Ramoniacs.

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It Happened to Me Music

Bouncing with the Ramoniacs

Bill Griffith's comic character, Zippy the Pinhead.

My brother-in-law Andy Ramoniac, the bassist for the Boston-based Ramones tribute band, the Ramoniacs, invited me to be the Pinhead for the song of the same name during last Saturday’s show downstairs at the Middle East club. They were opening for Bebe Buell (Liv Tyler’s mom and the person whom “Penny Lane”, Kate Hudson’s character in the movie Almost Famous, was modelled).

Pinhead, for those of you not familiar with it, is the song from which the Ramones’ catch-phrase “Gabba Gabba Hey” originates. In turn, the Ramones borrowed it from the 1932 movie Freaks, where the freaks in the movie chant “We accept you, one of us! Gobble Gobble!”.

The Pinhead dance involves a “pinhead” (someone with microcephaly, like Schlitzie the Pinhead from Freaks — usually a roadie in with a pinhead mask — who bounces about the stage during the song waving a sign with the words “Gabba Gabba Hey”. If you’re interested, you can rent the Roger Corman teen movie classic, Rock and Roll High School (a cult favourite that got a mark of 81% on Rotten Tomatoes) or see this video on YouTube.

Here’s the video [4.2MB QuickTime] that Wendy shot of Pinhead, featuring Yours Truly as the pinhead. In the audience, but not shown, were Wendy’s parents and aunt and uncle, all of whom are used to this sort of goofiness from me.

Still from the video of the Ramoniacs' version of 'Pinhead', featuring Joey deVilla as the Pinhead.

Click the image to see the video.

I had a blast. My thanks to Andy and the Ramoniacs for inviting me to be the pinhead!

As for the show itself — it was excellent. These guys play and sound just like the Ramones, from the non-stop energy to Andy’s perfect imitation of Dee Dee’s “One Two Three Four!” count-offs. Remember how I posted that “One does not simply ROCK into Mordor?” Well, the Ramoniacs could.

I’ll post more videos from the show later.

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Music

Johnny Cash’s "American V"

I’ve been listening to Johnny Cash’s American V: A Hundred Highways, and all I can say is “wow”.

From now on, if I ever meet up with anyone from an emo rock band, I’m making him or her listen to any of its tracks — perhaps the cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s If You Could Read My Mind — and say “Hear that, poseur? That is what heartbreak really sounds like.”

Here’s a CNN piece on the making of the album.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods It Happened to Me Music

Last Night’s "Give Me Liberty" Street Party

The neighbourhood in which Tucows is located — Liberty Village — is undergoing some interesting changes as it transforms from a neglected industrial area of old factory buildings into a hub of techies and creatives. One of the nice side-effects of this change is the annual “Give Me Liberty” street party, an open-air after-work party where the denizens of Liberty Village get together for good food, beer, music and general carousing.

Ever since I started working at Tucows — three years ago this July — I’ve been invited to play accordion onstage at the start of the party. This year, although I wasn’t contacted, they automatically added me to the playlist. I was a little tied up at work at the time, but they gladly slotted me in between DJ sets at 7:00 p.m.

I loved that there was some kind of assumption that I’d be playing — I rather like being considered an important element of a party for the neighbourhood in which I spend most of my waking hours. The crowd was great — many people told me that they were looking forward to my performance. You guys are the best!

(I promise I’ll make time for sound check next year!)

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It Happened to Me Music Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Accordion City Musical Tidbits

Just a couple of quick tidbits:

  • Last night, I was part of a small group of bloggers who were invited to take a tour of the Four Seasons Centre, the new opera house at Queen and University. I’ll post a writeup before the grand opening on Sunday. I think the architects and designers did a great job in making the building unique and yet fitting it well with it surroundings — the very open design makes it feel as though it’s part of the surrounding city, which is important for a place devoted to an art form that is often perceived as cut off from the modern life.

  • It must’ve been some sort of musical milestone: on Monday at Carson’s karaoke night at The Social, I met another guy who plays rock and pop on an unconventional instrument — the bassoon! After he performed Madness’ big hit, Our House (a.k.a. the Maxwell House coffee song) with an excellent bassoon solo, I joined him for what was probably the first bassoon/accordion/karaoke treatment of Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. I imagine Robert Plant got chills down his spine at that exact moment and had no idea why.