The Fidgets!
“She’s into lizards, she’s into snakes,
he’s into trauma - still got the shakes!”
Jitters. Ya know, I don’t get the jitters any more when a show comes up! I got ‘em the first Organical show I played, but that was mostly because I was pulling notes out of my ass. And we didn’t have a drummer, so we had to play to a backing track. And the club’s stage sound sucked. My bass-playing is about as tight as my 7th-grade art teacher and on top of that, I can’t keep time in a box. It was brutal. I was sure I’d be fired from the band if I wasn’t such a fucking awesome person. A lot has changed since then: I am batting around .500 for correct bass notes, I can play without constantly looking at the frets (all the better to see your adoring faces, my delicious fans!), and so far, I have not forgotten to wear pants.
But I gotta say, I’m a little jittery about the upcoming show. Good-jittery, not bad-jittery. The songs are sounding good in rehearsal, it’s been a while since we last played live, I’ve never played at the Drake before and there’s real good mojo in the band, so I’m a more than a little excited (I’m not wearing any thin T-Shirts, if you know what I mean…). I think we really have our groove-on, and even though it’s a short set at Elvis Monday, it’s chock-full o’ tasty hardness. Just like my pants.
And look: I have ended three paragraphs with the word pants. I am great. D’oh! Pants!
ps - that opening quote was from Van Der Graaf Generator’s Peter Hammill. Not many people know that Mark “Luke” Hammill is his step-brother. They were apparently very close - the best of friends - and, sharing an interest in all things anatomical, often played abominable “games” with small rodents they snared in home-made traps made of discarded razor blades and muffin-tins. Parents, teachers and phychologists all agreed it was best to separate the two, and thus they parted at the tender age of nine: Mark stayed in the USA and Peter was shipped off to a “reform school for especially sullen boys” in England. They had made a pact to meet again, to study animal husbandry at Cambridge. Of course, boys are boys, and the only natural course was for one of them to become a catchpenny actor and the other, a brooding troubadour. It’s all true.
