# noDNC.txt
# 20 aug 2004


i don't remember how i found out about the bl(A)ck tea society, but i did. i
saw they were putting on a really REALLY democratic bazaar, where people who
were different from the democrats had an opportunity to show their stuff in a
positive exchange [as a counterpart to the more negative protests]. they wanted
music there, i volunteered, and they accepted.

it gave me the opportunity to do some political music. given that we would be
performing on boston common, where many political protests had occurred over
the years, i felt the set should have obvert political content. i had
originally wanted to do it with a band that i play with occationally [sgt.
monkey], but the scheduling didn't work. so, the bassist [eskew] and i went it
alone. since there were only two of us, we had to approach the music
differently than we would have with a four piece band.

we showed up to play and things were somewhat in dissarray [with anarchists in
charge, what did i expect?]. we were put on the second stage which had only one
microphone and no auxillary electricity. we needed to run guitar, bass,
theremin, 505 through the sound system instead of using the amplifiers we had
brought [by hand] to the stage. this made hearing what we played more difficult
than it had been during rehearsal.

the eclectic set went pretty well. a few people stayed and listened to the
whole thing. we were on at lunch time, so a lot of people walked by.  eskew's
friend gordon made a video of the event and the audio tracks were taken
from that.


PRESIDENT OF MY SOUL
a little bluegrass ditty written by a friend [kevin devine]. i dropped the
third verse, nerves prolly.

THEREMIN 505
this was the electronica part of the program. the least explicitly political
number of the set, but musically, probably the most radical.

AMERICA UN BEAUTIFUL
a spoken word performance, a confluence of influences. the text was kinda like
ferlinghetti's 'loud prayer', ray charles is the background that everything is
built on top of, george w. bush talks about intelligence failures, and white
noise, bombs and automatic weapons complete the mix.

MASTERS OF WAR
on stage, eskew had posters that he flipped through in the manner of the
'subterrainian homesick blues' video. singing a dylan protest song on the
boston common was just too great of an opportunity to pass up.

STRANGE
this is from the english punk/political band wire. we had rehearsed it with
distortion on the guitar, but since we couldn't use our amplifiers, it was not
available to me. i also programmed the drum track.


checksums
---------
MD5 (americaUnBeautiful.mp3) = b0b8bba7e364b72c4b7efef59f492de8
MD5 (mastersOfWar.mp3) = efc155a511b46744eb16312d677c7a34
MD5 (presidentOfMySoul.mp3) = 2c7064ea7b1d3d1a10bea9dc1ebc885b
MD5 (strange.mp3) = b5f9b602c111a52d3e4873ada71e3be1
MD5 (theremin505Improv.mp3) = 39e4273f7a32da9937afabbd8fe6ea85