Audience Participation.

Live music shows are always an adventure.

Today, we had 3 - count' em - 3 people walk up and start talking to us. Mid-song.

It's a new record for us.

It started during our first song when this guy wandered up and started talking to Steve. Mid-song - did I mention that? He said that he was a musician, too. And played the guitar. And he had a song that Steve should learn. It was a song for kids. Kids love it. Could he play it. Now?

Steve, as always, was polite and professional and explained that we had just started our show and maybe the guy could come back later as there were a bunch of people sitting there, watching us play. Then the guy told Steve that his name was Steve, too. And he told him his website address and his facebook site, again mentioning that he was a children's musician. He then suggested, in a clear, ringing voice, that one of the audience members was "probably retarded".

How could this guy NOT have a Grammy for his children's music act, yet?

Hi. We're kind of right in the middle of a show here, buddy.

Steve eventually convinced Steve 2.0 to take a seat so we could continue. We plowed forward and, if I do say so myself, we sounded pretty good.

Later in the show a guy came up to the gazebo where we were playing, slung his arms over the railing and spent an entire song staring at me as if he was trying to take over my mind. Which he might have - I'm still not sure. He was covered in festive neck-tattoos that had a distinctively home-made feel to them. As the song wound down, he started hooting, "Do a drum solo! Do a solo on the drums!"

Steve, naturally, is disinclined to let me perform long, complicated drums solos on the flimsy pretense that I am so awful at the drums that I would drive the audience, screaming from the show.  I politely declined the fellow's offer and he yelled "A Metallical drum solo!" before wandering off toward the corn-dog stand.

Freed from his hypnotic gaze, I performed with my usual ineptitude through a few more songs. As Steve was announcing one song, a kid, maybe 13 years old wandered up to the front where Steve stood and handed him a frisbee.

"Wanna frisbee?" he asked, interrupting Steve.

"I love frisbee," Steve answered, ever the gentleman and consummate performer. "Thank you so much."

The kid lumbered back to his posse of friends, who staggered around for a moment, convulsed with laughter at their brilliantly witty idea of giving a frisbee to Steve mid-show.

Before anyone else could rush the stage, the show ended. Joe and I began packing up instuments as quickly as we could, fearing that if we didn't, people would rush the stage and begin playing them.

Sure enough, Steve 2.0 sauntered up and said that he was going to play his song now.

"Noooooooooo," Joe hissed. "Steve - Just say NOOOOOOO."

I cringed and awaited the inevitable moment when Evil Steve would start pointing out more audience members who  he thought might be "probably retarded".

"Hey, Steve," Joe said, in a brilliant attempt to stave off the horrible end that loomed over us, "They cut off the power, already. Sorry."

Evil Steve commandeers the guitar and sings his song. Our Steve high-fives a young fan.

Evil Steve looked at my drum set. "Drums don't need power," he said.

I quickly yanked the snare off its stand. "Sorry," I mumbled, "Set's already torn down."

"I can play without power," Evil Steve said, heading for Steve's guitar.

"Noooo," Joe hissed again.

Steve, however, has his own set of guidelines for interacting with deranged lunatics - to wit - he is amazing with them. He smiled and handed the guy his guitar and stood back as Evil Steve sang his song about a class clown.

The lyrics that I caught, in my race to break down my drum set before the Metallica drum solo guy came back, went like this:

"Class clown. He's a class clown.
Class clown. He's a class clown.
Class clown. He's a class clown.
Class clown. He's a class clown.
Class clown. He's a class clown.
Class clown. He's a class clown.
Class clown. He's a class clown."

Repeat until entire audience rises as one and leaves.

Steve - our Steve, the good, kind, patient Steve, stood there with a genuine-looking smile spread across his face, clapping along.

Joe and I marveled at Steve's cool, calm equanimity.

Eventually, Evil Steve wandered off, probably headed to play songs at some kid's 5th birthday party - a party he hadn't been invited to.

Our Steve wandered over to us with a blissful smile on his face. "That was fun, wasn't it?" he asked, slipping his guitar into its case.

"Are you mental?" I asked. "He said that that kid was retarded! Out loud. On stage!"

Steve smiled again. "Awwww, he was a fun guy, wasn't he?"

"Steve?" Joe asked. "Did you practice patience with a monastery of Shaolin monks?"

He claims not to have, but I'm not sure. All I know is, he does a hard job well, and makes it look really, really easy.

Now, if I can just convince him to let me do a Metallica-style drum solo during the act...

New Opportunities to Make Money

The first thing I need to warn you about is that if you read this blog post, you will doubtlessly become extremely jealous of me. I mean, after all, it isn't everyone who gets his face on official currency.

See?
You're jealous already, aren't you?
I had no idea that this tremendous honor had been bestowed upon me until I walked into Grinnell Elementary School in Derry last Friday to perform a rockin', reading musical extravaganza with my buddy Steve Blunt.

We had been at the school last year to do a show and before we had left, they had already booked us again for this year.

I must admit that I was a little leery of the return engagement. Not because of the school, at all. Our show at the school last year was wonderful. The kids were great. The teachers were great. It was all great. Until I went out to my car at the end of the day. Somehow, I had killed the battery. I managed to get it jump-started and, as soon as the engine was running, the brake pedal dropped to the floor and a large, slick puddle of brake fluid spread from beneath my car. The ride home was a thrilling, soul-shattering, hair-raising adventure that I have almost recovered from.

The lingering horror of that ride home swirled through my mind as I retraced my route back to Grinnell School last Friday. I was just clearing the memory away when I walked into the school and was greeted by Alicia Henderson. Alicia is the delightful lady who arranged to bring Steve and me to the school. She also arranged to have my face plastered on official school currency.

I have had the honor of visiting a lot of schools over the years. I have been flattered over and over again by the amazing projects that teachers have created based on my books. But this is the first time that I have shown up on dollar bills.  Marty Dollars were awarded to students who could correctly answer the Marty Kelley Trivia Question of the Day. The questions were mostly quotes from my books that the students had to identify.

It was extremely flattering; though I wish that Alicia had contacted me for some really serious questions. Then she could have asked students some hard ones.

Q. What are the names of my duck and two chickens?
A. Duck, Chicken, The Other Chicken

Q. What is my truck's name?
A. Uncle Louie

Q. Does everything I own have a name?
A. No.

I think that if Alicia had talked to me first, she could have saved herself a lot of time. She wouldn't have had to give out a single dollar.

As it is, I may have made things difficult for her on Friday. I heard the Marty Kelley Trivia Question of the Day over the morning announcements and I'm proud to say that I knew the answer.

I happily provided the correct answer to 350+ kids during our performance. I suspect that Alicia spent the rest of the day printing up piles and piles of Marty Dollars to distribute.

By introducing that level of liquid assets into the system, I fear that I may have precipitated an economic crash to rival the recent global one.

Or, actually, probably not.

Because I discovered that, despite the fact that my picture is on it, there are few places outside of Grinnell Elementary School willing to exchange good and services for Marty Dollars.

I already warned you about the fact that you would be jealous of me. The second–and possibly more important–warning I have is about attempting to print out and spend this money anywhere.

A crucial part of any (and every) show that I do with Steve, is food. Frequently, when discussing an upcoming show, Steve will say, "We can go do the show in [obscure town I have never heard of] and then, right down the street, there's this great little place that has the best [random food item] in the world." It's an amazing gift and he is always 100% correct.

So Friday, after our show, which was a lot of fun, we set off toward Sal's Pizza for some sustenance. My car started, the brakes didn't spray fluid like a geyser and all was well with the world.

Until I slapped my Marty Dollar down on the counter and ordered. For some reason, the fine folks at Sal's were reluctant to accept Marty Dollars as legal tender and became rather insistent on the fact that I should pay with "real money".

I tried arguing the matter, but the grumbles from the line of hungry customers behind me drowned out my debating points.

Alicia has already very kindly invited us back to perform at the school next year. Perhaps she and I can work together to devise some sort of currency that I might be able to use for pizza, too.

You Can't Say @#$% on the Radio

I'm not sure if this has ever happened to you, but you know when you go into a radio station to play some children's music with your buddy and one of the engineers hands you a piece of paper to sign and you read it and the paper has so many swears on it that there is very little white space left on the paper?
You know that?
It happened to me again.
Last Saturday, I was supposed to go to Boston to be on the radio with Steve Blunt and our special guests, The Spaghetti Cats (my daughter Tori and her friend Leea).
The weather, as has happened so often this winter, did not care for our plans and forced us to reschedule to Sunday night.
Super Bowl Sunday.
I, and I realize I am a minority in this, do not care for football. I do not care for sports in any form, except for a very occasional hockey game. I enjoy doing things like hiking and biking, but watching a bunch of guys chase after a ball, or hit a ball, or kick a ball, or bounce a ball holds very little interest for me.
I know, I am in the minority in this mind-set. Many of the people I know are brought to toe-curling shrieks of ecstasy by the thought of sweaty guys throwing balls to each other.
I sincerely hope that the unfortunate coincidence of us being on the radio at the same time as the Super Bowl didn't have too great a negative impact on the Super Bowl's ratings.
Those of you fortunate enough to have listened to our show were richly rewarded by that fact that you did not hear any foul language.
At all.
And there's a good reason for that.
First, the very notion of going on live radio during a children's music show and firing off a few F-bombs seems like a counter-productive move from a career building point of view.
But just in case we thought that swearing for 15 minutes on a kid's music show would be a good idea, one of the helpful engineers in the studio handed us this agreement to sign:

I have taken the liberty of spending a few dozen hours laboriously removing all the foul language from the form.
If you choose to use this altered document as a sort of x-rated Mad-Lib, then I can't stop you, but I also won't be held responsible for the results.
This is not the first time I have seen and signed this particular agreement. The first time I saw it, I laughed so hard that I got a stomache ache and had a hard time playing the harmonica.
The engineer who handed me the agreement last Sunday remembered me this time. He said, "You're the guy who thought the on-air language agreement was so funny, aren't you?"
I would have answered him if I hadn't been laughing so hard as I read it again.
The language in this agreement is awesome in its breadth and scope and stunning in its precision. The very concise nature of it make me think that there is an "incident" behind every word on it. A black radio moment when engineers, hosts, and staff stared at each other in horror and thousands of listeners rolled around on the floor laughing and screaming, "Did that guy just say @#$% on the radio?"
I scanned the agreement again, making a mental note of some of the juicier expressions.
"Do the kids have to sign this?" I joked.
The engineer scratched his head for a minute. "I don't know," he answered, "I'll go check."
He strolled out of the studio, leaving me to wonder what sort of cosmic retribution would await me should my daughter and her friend catch even the slightest glimpse of this encyclopedia of obscenity.
I am happy to report that they were not required to sign the paper and even happier to report that neither of them did any sort of swearing.
When they are ready to start swearing, however, I'll make sure that they have access to this paper so they can be sure to get the spelling and usage correct.

What Would You Do For $112.50?

We were just sitting down to a delicious dinner (homemade soup with crunchy homemade sourdough bread, should you be curious) when the phone rang.
"Let the machine get it," I mumbled, soup dribbling down my chin and on to my lap.
Conversation ceased at the table as we listened to the answering machine, curious about who would be so bold as to interrupt our tasty dinner.
"Hey Marty. It's Steve. So, I'm wondering... What would you be willing to do for $112.50?"
I excused myself from the table, soup still dribbling from my lips, and raced to the phone.
The question really is, "What would I NOT do for $112.50?"
It was actually the precise amount, including that provocative fifty cents that intrigued me so much.
If Steve had asked "What would you do for a hundred bucks?" I probably would have finished my soup before returning his call.
But $112.50?
An amount like that warrants immediate and undivided attention.
As it turned out, Steve was inviting me to participate in a performance he had booked.
For the following afternoon.
My buddy Steve is very kind and generous about inviting me to some of the many musical extravaganzas he regularly performs. My suspicion is that he enjoys watching me squirm when, mid-performance, he turns to me and whispers, "You haven't heard this next song before because I just wrote it this morning. I haven't got all the words or the structure of the song totally worked out yet, but just play along. It'll be fine."
Steve is a hardened, grizzled veteran musician who can easily and competently operate under such conditions. I, by contrast, am a hack who occasionally plays the drums for my own personal satisfaction or to annoy my neighbors.
The gut-wrenching panic I feel during these moments on stage with Steve is generally its own reward.
But now he was offering $112.50!
With only one song in the entire set that I had never played before, the performance was much easier and less stressful than normal.
But that's because Steve was using the performance as a clever ploy.
He had asked me to arrive at his house a few hours before the performance because he had a new song that he was working on and wanted me to play the drums for him.
At the recording studio.
In two days.
A song I've never heard before? At the studio? In two days?
No problem.
We sat in Steve's living room and he went over the song, stressing the fact that it was going to have a sort of Bo Diddly kind of feel to it. Rock and roll with a chunky sort of back-beat.
No problem.
We practiced it a few times and it seemed to go well, which really should have served as a sort of early warning to me.
I dutifully arrived at the studio at the appointed hour, expecting a fun-filled afternoon of pain, suffering, and humiliation.
Possibly followed by pizza.
As it turns out, there was no pizza, but the pain, suffering, and humiliation I had expected were nothing compared to what I actually experienced.
Steve breezed into the studio and cheerily announced, "So, I've been rethinking this song and I think it may be better if we forget about the Bo Diddly thing and go with a reggae sort of feel. What do you think?"
"Did you bring Jamaican rum?" I asked.
Steve chuckled warmly and ignored my plea, evidently imagining that I was joking.
Steve played his new reggae version of the song and I tried valiantly to think of WWBMD?
What Would Bob Marley Do?
Of course, the answer to that is obvious, but was entirely out of the question.
I've never been particularly proficient at playing island beats on the drum set.
I trudged into the recording room and spent the entire afternoon proving that fact to everyone at the studio including the unprecedented tour group that wandered through the studio at the very apex of my suffering.
Seriously.
A tour group.
"What's that whimpering heap over there in the corner?" asked one of the people.
"Oh, that? That's just a drummer. He'll be fine." came the answer before the tour wandered away.
Six and a half hours after we had arrived, my 3 minutes and 30 seconds of drumming was all recorded.
I woke Steve up from where he was having a restful nap on the studio's luxurious leather couch, and we made our way homeward.
Next time, I'll think very carefully about what I might be willing to do for $112.50.
And then I'll pick up the phone anyway.

(The video is actually from a previous recording session with Steve. I couldn't bear to share the pain of this most recent one.)

A New Video For Your Entertainment, Enlightenment, and Edification

Oh yeah.
It finally happened.
The long awaited (by me) video for Summer Stinks - The Super Cool Punk Rock Version is now available for the world to see.

I spent Tuesday afternoon up at Rockinghorse Studios with my family and Steve Blunt and his daughter, Mary and my good friends Julie and Scott.

We ran around and acted like goons and filmed ourselves. The result, I am happy to report, looks like a bunch of goons running around and filming themselves.

At least, I look like that. My friends all look very cool and suave and sophisticated.

It was a lot of fun and you should watch the video a bazillion times so I become a YouTube sensation and am rocketed to fame like all those other YouTube sensations like... uh... you know... um... uhhhhhh...

Rock on.