The Love Letters' official debut

Playing right now: Three Dog Night - Suitable for Framing
(I don't care what anyone says, those guys could sing like mother^%&*ers. I put this on because a close friend really loves them and she's really sick now, so this is providing some solace.)

The Love Letters, my new band, had their official debut last Thursday. (I say "official" because we played a show in September, but that wasn't exactly open to the public, and this gig was at a club, the Thunderbird Cafe.) The instrumentation is the same as the Mofones: guitar, bass, keyboards, drums. We even do a couple of Mofones songs. But it's pretty different, sonically. Aimee from the Mofones is playing keyboards now and writing more songs. And Erin, our drummer, sings harmonies a lot. Anytime the two of them sang together, things really kicked into overdrive. When I joined the vocal section things..... eh, I could say I sullied the waters, but that wouldn't necessarily be true. I think I did okay, harmony-wise. Still trying to regain my bass chops, though.

And then there's Buck. Oh, Buckley Knauer, you guitar master from a family of guitar masters. Buck's great. And he spun out some great solos throughout the evening. Things went pretty smoothly, overall. A few too many lulls between songs, but we'll work on that.

Trash Magnet opened the evening with some old fashioned fuzzed out punk rock, including a cover of Thin Lizzy's "Jailbreak," of all things. And the Inseams played after us. They also took things back to early punk rock, with raw riffs and catchy choruses. Turns out, I met their drummer about 20 years ago through his brother-in-law, who was a college friend of mine. Hadn't seen him in almost that long. It's cool to make connections like that.

The only damper on the evening came at the very end of the night. I found out that Mike Grimes, the drummer of Liverball (Buck's other band, which also includes Ray from Trash Magnet) died the day before from a brain aneurysm. He was about my age. It's a goddam tragedy. He was a good egg.