I make no secret of the fact that my storytelling is inspired by the movies. Where other performers talk about how they grew up in houses filled with musicians or yarnspinners, I grew up at the foot of a black and white TV with a bad vertical hold that brought me all the UHF goodness of the Monster Movies of the 30s and 40s. Plus, there was the Spring Valley Cinema, home of the fifty-cent double feature and all the great low-budget movies of the seventies and eighties.
Recently I read the Fool of the World and the Flying Ship in Andrew Lang's Yellow Fairy book. I decided I wanted to tell the story, but it needed to be punch up a bit. I remembered my eighties movies and that the opening story in Terry Gilliam's Adventure of Baron Munchausen was not actually a Munchausen story, but was indeed the Fool of the World.
Then it hit me - I looked back a few years in my idea book - there was a note from January 2009 entitled: Indana Munchausen. The idea was to tell first-person adventure stories that are a mix of Indiana Jones and Baron Munchausen.
I started toying around with the idea again in the vein of the Fool of the World instead of Indiana Jones. I like flying ships, and they look good on advertising. So I dug into my vast collection of Ed Emberley books.
I grew up drawing from Ed Emberley books. I was never patient enough to develop my drawing skills, but I can follow directions, so Ed Emberley gives me all I need.
There it was, in the Big Purple Drawing Book, the most difficult Ed Emberly drawing ever, the Sea Hawk. I had never drawn the Sea Hawk, it took me three attempts in pencil before I could get it to fit on a single page. And then, when I finished, to make it into a flying ship I still had to attach two more sheets of paper, and then I had to scan it in three passes.
But now that it's complete it's a beauty to behold and will become the centerpiece image for my summer program: Les Voyages Fantastique, classic adventures told in the Munchausen style.
Halloween season is upon us. It's time to take out all of those great scary stories and songs that don't get near enough exercise all year long.
I love all those fun kooky-spooky stories that don't scare the kids too much, and they get a great work out this tme of year, but it's not often I get to bring out the really scary stories, the blood curdling stuff that earns me a reputation for being too scary.
These are the stories I spend a great deal of time crafting, working up language and imagery, making complex stories with moral ambiguity and adult themes. Unfortunately these stories only get used once every year or two, which is dissappointing when you consider how great they are.
This year I've got a couple of hours-long, adults-only gigs, perfect opportunities to bring out the best of the best. One of my favorite Halloween stories is Pie, the Piper of Out Est Fromage.
Being a musician, I like to tell stories that have a musical component, and a couple of years ago I was looking through a book of musical stories to find some to add to be repetory, and for the first time ever I read The Pied Piper of Hamelin.
I knew the story from cartoons and such, but I had never read it. I liked the story, it had a great musical component so I started to research it - I had absolutely no idea that the story was true!
It blew me away, I devoured eveything I could find on the subject.
My favorite character in the story is the Little Lame Boy. The Little Lame Boy (sometimes the Little Blind Boy) was added by the Grimms. When all the children are taken away by the Piper he can't keep up and is distressed that he doesn't get to go with them.
When the adults ask where they went, the Little Lame Boy is crying, distraught, "Didn't you hear the music, he was taking them away to a magical land of enternal playtime, candy and soda pop!"
In my opinion they were going to Pleasure Island and the Little Lame Boy was lucky to stay behind, but I can imagine this character, growing up in a medieval mill town, unable to work, he becomes a beggar, a raging alcoholic, forever plagued by what he missed. He begs for money, which he uses to buy cheese. The cheese he spreads throughout the town hoping to attract rats so that the Piper will return and take him away.
I decided to learn the story but I needed the right music. I have a recorder, and I figured I needed two songs, one in a major key, for the rats, and one in a minor key, for the kids. I don't really play the recorder very well, and I couldn't come up with two songs that worked the way I wanted, but I do play harmonica, and I had two perfect jazz songs, one in a major key: When the Saints Go Marching In, and one in minor key: Saint James Infirmary Blues.
But they're jazz songs, on a harmonica, they didn't fit the story. So, somehow I decided it would be easier to re-write the entire story around the music then to find music to fit the story. And in the process I turned a Grimm "Fairy Tale" into one of my favorite Halloween stories.
I haven't told the story in two years, but I practiced it up today and it's as good as ever, I can't wait for Halloween time!
Last night was the annual Hobo Campfire at Old Poway Park. I do campfires all summer long, at various venues, but the Hobo Campfire is the biggest and usually marks the end of the campfire season.
Through out the season I'm usually a solo, telling stories, leading sing-along songs and teaching a little astronomy, but at the Hobo Campfire I have a band of some of the best musicians you could ask for and it's a huge campfire extravaganza.
This year the show was the best it's ever been, so many people come back year after year. This year I had gotten a great deal of MC experience at other events, plus I learned to make the fire with a flint and steel which has been met with great applause at fires all summer long, and although we didn't get a chance to do a formal practice, I was able to provide the guys with recordings and music to practice up on (I'm not as good as they are, so the songs I play are usually pretty easy for them). The show was so good people were clambering for an encore, and of course we obliged.
When I shower the morning after a campfire, the scent of the smoke comes out of my hair and it brings back all the great memories of the night before, and all the fantastic times I've had at campfires all over the county, and to top off the season with a night like last night, where we absolutely nailed it with the biggest campfire show ever, it's just makes that smokey smell all the more sweet.
Once upon a time there were two cave men: Fred and Barney.
While Fred and Barney were out hunting one day, they found themselves treed by a sabre-tooth tiger.
When they returned home, one of the tribe members asked Fred where they had been. Fred said, "Uh, we got treed by a sabre-tooth tiger."
Another of the tribe asked Barney, and he told the story of how the sabre-tooth had chased them across the plains, towards the tree. Making wild gestures he showed how Fred's arms flailed as they ran.
Whenever he told the adventure the cavemen laughed hysterically. This was something new, something uniquely human. Laughter itself wasn't a new thing: hominids laughed, chimpanzees laugh, I've even seen a dog laugh, but until that day laughter had always been in response to an imediate event - you see someone slip in the mud and you laugh. But, now the cavemen were laughing at Barney's relating of an event - to the pictures imagined in their minds through his storytelling.
That night, they gathered around their latest discovery - fire, the element that separates man from beast. Without fire the nights are wasted, there is nothing to do but huddle together and fear predation, just like every other animal. But fire brings warmth and light, it makes the night a functional time for small projects, like tool making and art. With fire we get community, camaraderie and an easier to digest diet. But, most importantly, fire gives us the very thing that allows us to grow in ways bound only by our imaginations - it gives us leisure time.
And, around that fire, hundreds of thousands of years ago someone said, "Hey Barney, tell us about the time that you and Fred got treed by that sabre-tooth."
From that day forward people forgave Barney's poor hunting skills because he provided something their growing minds and culture desperately needed - entertainment.
On August 13th I'm gong to be performing at the Lake Poway Campout. August 13th happens to be the peak of the Perseid Meteor Shower.
The story of Perseus is near and dear to me. When I was a very young boy we had a book fair at the school. My teacher saved a copy of D'Aulaire's Greek Myths especially for me, she said I would enjoy it. I bought it and I was hooked! I read and re-read that book a hundred times (I just re-read it again a couple of months ago), I made family trees of the greeks, and I wrote myths about the gods who weren't represented.
Then, in 1981 Clash of the Titans came to our tiny, local movie theater. The theater was only 50 cents for double-feature and when a new movie was out, we would go in the morning and stay all day. I remember it like it was yesterday, it played with Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, a Charles Schneer/ Ray Harihausen extravaganza. I could have died at 12 years old and my life would've been complete - I had seen all that was right with the world.
When I visited Florence twenty years later, I required a picture with Cellini's Persesus.
Now, I like to inject some learnin' into my campfires, and I've learned to find the constellation of Persesus so I can point out the nexus of the meteor storm, and I've learned the source of the storm. It's a terribly gloomy story:
Each year, in August, we pass through the orbit of comet Swift-Tuttle. Swift-Tuttle orbits the sun once every 130 years, leaving behind a trail of debris, that from our perspective, appears to originate in the direction of the constellation Perseus. The comet was first discovered, in the second half of the 19th century, by two different atronomers: Swift and Tuttle. Much like Edmund Halley, they calculated the course of the comet and predicted when it would appear in 1992.
When astronomers looked for the comet in 1992, it was 17 days late. Scientists adjusted all calculations for the 17 day difference and discovered that the comet will slam into the earth in 2126.
The comet Swift-Tuttle is 27 kilometers in diamters, the comet that killed the dinosaurs (affectionately referred to as "The K-T Impactor") was only 10 km in diameter. Swift-Tuttle travels at 60 km per second and will impact with a force 27 times greater than the K-T Impactor - effectively killing all multi-cellular life on Earth. Ahh, good times.
So, of course scientist launched all their super-computers and studied the notes of ancient Chinese atronomers who had documented the comet and eventually determined that it will miss us, but it's going to be close and will appear in the sky as spectacularly as Hale-Bopp did in 1997 (we married in May of '97 at the edge of Grand Canyon, with Hale-Bopp hanging in the sky above us).
Now, they're saying that Swift-Tuttle will make its closest approach in Spetember of 4479, at which point it may indeed slam in the Earth.
All this gives Swift-Tuttle the title of "The most dangerous object known to humanity"
As a musician, I will often work on "tools" instead of whole pieces of music. I'll practice arpeggios, scales or chords, the building blocks of music so that when I dive into a song it's easier, I just use the tools I have already developed to help me put the song together.
The same is true of storytelling.
Earlier today I was practicing depicting personal martial combat - it's not that easy.
There's an iconic scene in King Kong where Kong wrestles a T. Rex while Ann Darrow watches. The scene is so iconic that Peter Jackson recreated Willis O'brien's original stop-motion scene move-for-move. I wanted to depict the same action, the violence and power of two giant monsters grappling.
Remember Jurassic Park? When the T. Rex was walking the ground shook so hard that water rippled in a puddle, imagine the same Rex locked in combat with an equally massive gorilla and the two beasts fall to the ground.
Describing action like that - the wrestling moves, the grabs and throws, punching and biting with so much speed, violence and size is difficult to convey to the audience clearly and still keep that wild frenetic feeling.
And that's why I practice telling fight scenes.
This week I'm presenting my summer reading program: Land of the Giants, one of the stories I'm going to tell is The Goblin Spider, from Robert Sans Souci's Short and Shivery. The story contains no less than two epic sword battles, the Samurais Raiko and Tsuna battle an army of demons, back to back, in the pouring rain, from dusk to dawn, each one wielding a pair of flashing swords, slashing down demons and goblins with all the style of a Hong-Kong wuxia film, all the while throwing out action movie one-liners: "The sun will be leaving us soon." "Then we shall have to kill this monster in the dark!"
It's good to practice this kind of thing without the context of a story. Just imagine two gladiators thrown into a pit with various weapons, and/or an acid spitting giant cobra. And describe the action, what happens? How does it happen? How do you describe all the detail with a fast enough pace to convey the savagery of combat?
This of course applies to all sorts of tools.
I have trouble portraying love scenes in a manner that doesn't feel corny to me. At heart I'm a ten-year-old boy who likes action and adventure, but a big part of that is rescuing fair maidens, ghostly wives forever watching for their sea-captain husbands, and lantern-jawed lugs confessing their love to starlets with heart of gold.
And so I practice these too.
There're so many tools to work on if you just think about it a little: fight scenes, love scenes, funny voices (what does a talking pig sound like?), describing objects, and settings.
Just like music, if you practice all of your tools separately, as part of a regimen, then when the time comes to play a new concerto, or tell a story about samurais battling a giant spider, you'll already have the tools to play all the parts, or tell every scene, so you can simply concentrate on the making the whole greater than the sum of its parts
I hate turning down work.
I kind of relish the old days when I didn't have as many bookings and I took every job that came my way. The problem with the entertainment biz is that 99% of work occurs on Fridays and Saturdays, so there's bound to be conflicts. But still, when you get a request for a show, especially one that's cooler than what you already have booked there, it's incredibly disappointing.
When that happens it just puts me in a funk. I know I'm s'posed to think, hey that's cool, I'm so in demand that people are lining up to get me, but all I can think of is the missed opportunity.
