the da-jango code - not just for music anymore

Myspace is the New Blog

2006-01-31T20:20:00.000-08:00

At least for me...

If you haven't noticed, I haven't posted here for quite some time. It's not because I threw away my computer and became a buddhist monk in the mountains of China. It's because I've been spending my online time over on myspace. And I've got two blogs over there (one at myspace.com/theoldceremony and one at myspace.com/djangohaskins), so forgive me for slacking off, but come join me over there for god's sake! Love, Django

When life gives you Oranges, make Lemonade

2005-02-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have heard that International Orange is no more. I just wanted to clear up the rumour here with the facts. The fact is, it's true - Int'l Orange decided to call it quits. It's also true that we're all on excellent terms and felt that this was the best thing for us to do at this point. It's entirely possible that we will collaborate in the future in different combinations on other projects - it's been an amazing experience travelling and working with these guys, and I know we all have a huge amount of respect for each other. So there you have it. We'll all be busy working on our various other musical adventures, and we'll try to keep the IO.com site updated a bit as to where to find us. Thank you for all your support - it's been a great ride.

From the Cradle to the Grave/Winebar

2005-02-15T13:55:00.000-08:00

Thanks to everyone who came to the cradle show. I love how these two bands, who seem to play incompatible styles of music (country, and whatever the hell it is we play) fit so well as a bill. I wish more clubs would try that kind of booking, where the common thread is quality songs, not a particular category of music. And I have to give a particular shoutout to Rich, Thad's new guitar/steel player (also of Frank Black & the Catholics), who was one bad mother, especially when he stood up from the pedal steel and played guitar. I couldn't stop grinning the whole time he was playing.

The Old Ceremony is returning this week to our old stomping grounds, the West End Wine Bar, for two Thursday shows. I can't wait, cause it means that we get to play a ton of new stuff and create the kind of 20's Berlin speakeasy atmosphere that we like to create. The usual suspects will be appearing - horns, strings, female vocalist, etc. and we can pretty much assure you a great time. The shows start at 10pm, and if the last three times were any indication, it will get pretty packed. Or at least, let's hope so.

back to the old sounding board

2005-01-31T09:19:00.000-08:00

hi folks, the usually relatively quiet month of january has been a flurry of activity over here - int'l orange has been touring (played the cradle twice, and a trip down to florida and back), and the old ceremony has been recording what will most likely become our first full-length release. so far, we've done eight songs:

shadows on my trail
blood and oil
american romeo
ole
pennsylvania
you belong to me
carry the one
the late shift

and the sound so far is pretty amazing - the horn parts (courtesy vamsi and will on sax and trumpet) really added a lot of punch, and the accordion (jil) and violins (daniel hart and gabriele) make the dark stuff that much darker. i'm really proud of what everyone has done so far, and i think when the album is finished, you'll see what i mean. in the meantime, i put up an updated version of "shadows" at the OC site (www.theoldceremony.com), with the strings added, and a rough mix of "ole" with a near-perfect violin solo from daniel hart (check him out at www.gomachinemusic.com).

we've got some great shows coming up too; we're playing the cat's cradle for the first time on sat feb 12th at 9pm SHARP. when i say sharp, i say it because we absolutely will be finished before 10pm, so latecomers will miss the show. we're opening for my buddy thad cockrell (www.thadcockrell.com), who is a fantastic singer and songwriter currently living in nashville. he reminds me at times of a mix between willie nelson and roy orbison, which is a pretty damn good combination.

The Old Ceremony Moves On

2004-11-21T17:27:00.000-08:00

first of all, thanks to everyone who came down to the wine bar shows. we envisioned a certain kind of vibe that we were trying to create with them, and it was seriously exciting to see it actually come to fruition even better than we had imagined. as you know, it was pretty dang crowded in there and hard for some people in the middle and the front (by the entrance) to see/hear the band, so we're scouting for new locations for the next shows. it looks like we may do a short residency in raleigh next - details to come. stay tuned.

the other thing we're up to is planning some more recording. there are two sets worth of material that we've been playing, and i for one am dying to make a decent record of it. and with the newer additions to the sound (trumpet, sax, female vocals, accordion, violin) it's going to be one helluva sound.

we're looking into getting a message board for theoldceremony.com, but in the meantime, feel free to use this space here to discuss all things TOC, music, politics or whatever. mi blog es tu blog.

IO Guestbook

2004-11-02T08:33:00.000-08:00

So the IO guestbook is sick and the company (guestbook.com) that manages it has been unresponsive to requests to fix it, so feel free to post here anytime about IO and we can actually have back and forth dialogue rather than just one-way posts.

home sweet residency

2004-10-20T17:29:00.000-07:00

the old ceremony starts its short residency at the west end wine bar on franklin street in chapel hill tomorrow night. we've been looking forward to this one for a while - got some great guests coming in on accordion and violin and we'll be trying out plenty of new stuff. check out www.theoldceremony.com for updates. if anyone here sees the shows, we're always up for feedback here too.

ahoy!

Indy Music Awards

2004-10-05T20:25:00.000-07:00

Int'l Orange won the "Best New Rock Band" award in the Indy Music Awards this weekend. That was great and flattering, plus we got this cool statue of a pig in a minuteman outfit. (see below)

The biggest thrill of the night for me was probably playing the Cat's Cradle. I've seen a bunch of shows there, but hadn't played it in the past two years that I've been living in Chapel Hill, until now. Of course, Robert (and probably Snuzz) has played it a million times before, but there definitely was a special energy on stage on Saturday. Naturally there's no way to really have a "best band" - it's ridiculously subjective - but it was nice that enough people thought well of us to put us on the ballot and to vote for us. So, if you're out there, thanks and the check is in the mail.

IO's Most Wanted

2004-09-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a weekend of shows in DC and NYC. A lot of driving but definitely worth it. The show at Sara Lawrence College was especially fun - it's always great to have people right up in front of you when you're playing - the interaction is so much more immediate that way. Plus it was one of the best singing crowds we've seen for a while.

While we were staying in NYC, Robert had a fun run-in with the Boys in Blue. Someone broke into the studio in Brooklyn where Robert and Snuzz were sleeping and stole Robert's bag. He also broke into the next door place and was eventually apprehended by the Brooklyn P.D. on the street outside. Robert went down to the precinct and got to know everyone in the holding pen there while they filed the paperwork. Robert eventually got all his stuff back. The amazing thing was that our host in Brooklyn, Joe Fattorini (aka Joey Fatts) had a video camera set up in the studio there and reviewed the tape revealing the burglar in all his glory.

So all's well that ends well. And a big raise of the glass to the Brooklyn P.D. Well done, boys.

New IO Tunes

2004-09-15T17:10:00.000-07:00

We're working on a few new songs with Int'l Orange these days. A couple of them have already made their live debut at our last two shows: "She Can't Stand To Be Alone" and "Long Shot" were my contributions, and Robert brought in "Nude Photography," which we played at the last 506 show. Also, we're working on a couple of Snuzz tunes, including "Shut Up Singin Bout the End of the World" and "Checking the Damage." It'll be great to rotate in more new material in our upcoming shows. We're heading back to NYC next weekend, and I'm sure we'll play some of them there.

Garrison Keillor's Big Stand

2004-09-14T13:33:00.000-07:00

Garrison Keillor, the host of Prarie Home Companion, is usually the kind of guy who makes you think of Norman Rockwell and comforting, conservative America of the 1950's, so it was shocking (and kind of exhilarating) to read this article he wrote recently about the state of U.S. politics. If nothing else, it'll stir up some discussion:

---------------
We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
By Garrison Keillor

Something has gone seriously haywire wth the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned, and there was a degree of plain decency in the country.

Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor. In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach.

The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics...The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform of tragedy- the single greatest failure of national defense in our history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed, hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what happens to ours. The omens are not good. Our beloved land has been fogged with fear- fear, the greatest political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution, eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we keep coming back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a turning point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of national security at the time.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and there is more to life than winning.

Politics as Unusual

2004-09-14T11:34:00.001-07:00

The Old Ceremony is playing two political benefits in the next month or so, one for Democratic Senate candidate (and former Clinton advisor) Erskine Bowles, and one for a general "get out the vote" campaign. This year has been the first time I've felt so strongly about a campaign in my life. I was watching the last one closely (and agonizingly) but this one I actually have been getting off my ass to do something. It just seems to me (and a lot of people I talk to) that this election is absolutely crucial in the future of our country (and the world). I've read so much political history and analysis about Nixon, Bush I, Reagan, and Clinton lately, and none of them did anything to approach the destructive and selfishly arrogant policies of this administration. I actually had to stop reading the NY Times every day because I'd get so upset before breakfast that I didn't know what to do with myself. After seeing Farenheit 9-11, I went out and got a stack of voter registration forms and came back to later screenings to register people to vote. I may be imagining it, but it seems like a lot of young people are getting more involved these days. Am I just getting old, or is that true? hmm....

IO at UNC

2004-09-12T11:31:00.000-07:00

Int'l Orange played a show on the UNC campus the other day for the first time. The strange thing about Chapel Hill is that, though there are thousands of college kids who one might think would be into local rock music, there has been virtually NO connection between the music scene and the campus. Well, one local dude named Stuart Cullinan is setting out (with a lot of help) to change that by organizing concerts on campus by good local groups. We were headlining the first of these, held in the Great Hall, which actually is more reminiscent of a Great Big Basketball Court. Pep rally flashbacks aside, we had an amazing time playing, and the crowd was very responsive. Judging from that experience, if these things keep going we might see a renewed interest in local arts among UNC students, which would be amazing. Now all we have to do is just get this weasel voted out of the White House and we'll be all set...

Old Ceremony recording session

2004-09-12T11:24:00.000-07:00

So the Old Ceremony (www.theoldceremony.com is finally up now) holed itself up in Chateau Brandau out in the countryside outside of Chapel Hill and produced its first recordings - three very different songs: American Romeo, Blood & Oil, and Shadows on My Trail. We were crammed into one little room as the five of us laid it down into the wee hours, then Mark doubled up (in addition to the live organ parts) on vibes, and I added my vocals. The whole process took less than two days, and we are very happy with the results. For American Romeo I was trying for an early 50's Sinatra vibe, with some 60's French film music thrown in for good measure. Shadows has a similarly 40's/50's vibe, but is much darker, sounding more like the soundtrack to a Hitchcock thriller..Blood & Oil, though it is set in the 40's - it's the story of the wife of a WWII G.I. who has an affair while he's away and then runs off when she hears he's coming home - has more of a rockabilly/Bad Seeds morality-tale-gone-awry vibe. The overall vibe is fairly dark but musically accessible - kinda 'Songs for Paranoid Lovers.'

Patti Rothberg

2004-08-31T13:45:00.000-07:00

Had a great time playing the shows with Patti Rothberg. She and her guitarist, Freddie Katz, and I played Columbia, Atlanta, Charlotte, and Chapel Hill, travelling together in their mini-van, complete with a menagerie of stuffed animals on the dashboard and an enormous cd booklet containing almost exclusively records by NYC bands in the late 70's and early 80's. It was great to get a little education on the early NYC punk stuff - I thought I knew about it, but I hadn't even scratched the surface. Freddie introduced me to some great John Cale stuff that I'll be checking out more. Be sure to look Patti up (www.pattirothberg.com) - she's a terrific singer and songwriter and an all-around cool cat.

Here's a picture of us all at the Local 506 show.

The News Roundup

2004-08-21T08:43:00.000-07:00

The Old Ceremony show went great - hopefully we'll have some pics here for you very soon, and maybe even some mp3s of the show. Thank you to everyone who came out. We'll be doing a residency at a soon-to-be-named venue in Chapel Hill and possibly Raleigh in the next coupla months, so there will be more chances to catch the band.

In other news, I'm getting ready to do four shows with Patti Rothberg in Atlanta, Columbia, Charlotte and Chapel Hill. She's apparently a great performer of the ole rock musics, so I'd recommend checking it out. Also, my friend Danielle Howle will be joining us for the Chapel Hill show.

My tendonitis has been better lately, probably cause I've been laying off the computer a bit. It's a terrifying thing as a musician to get tendonitis cause it threatens your entire way of life. The week I started feeling it, Robert Sledge also was coming into rehearsals with wristbands (he'd injured them while moving heavy stuff). We're a fragile breed, we are.

meet the kid

2004-08-16T18:45:00.000-07:00

we just signed on a new piano player to complete the core lineup of the old ceremony. his name is james wallace, though i prefer to refer to him as "the kid" due to his youthful air. originally, i was planning to not have him join us for the first show on wednesday, but after playing with him the other day, i think he's gonna be just fine to do the first show. he has a great ear and a real musical sense, plus he's a funny guy. i'm happy to add the final piece in the old ceremony puzzle: meet the kid.

Les Sans Culottes & The Old Ceremony

2004-08-11T19:29:00.000-07:00

les sans culottes

Just found out that the first show of The Old Ceremony, my new pop-noir band, will be a month or so sooner than we originally expected. We'll be playing at Local 506 in Chapel Hill next wednesday opening for Les Sans Culottes, which from what I gather, is a fake-french pop band from NYC.

We (the O.C.) are excited about our first show. It's bound to be a learning experience either way. The idea of the band is that we take on extra members at certain shows - violin, cello, saw, theremin, sax, trumpet, trombone, etc. This show will be just the core group - guitar, drums, upright bass, vibes, and organ. We'll be adding a piano player to the core soon most likely as well.

It's great to have an outlet for the non-rock stuff I've been writing for years. Growing up with jazz standards (singing round the piano with the folks) made me really love jazz when it's played as pop music and years and years of listening to Tom Waits and Nick Cave and Kurt Weill have created permanent pathways in my brain for rundown cosmopolitan, dark, pseudo-east-european, or just downright threatening but beautiful pop music.

Second Thoughts on Ole Canadia

2004-08-07T15:07:00.000-07:00

The show turned out to be a great time. Met some great folks including a coupla families from Nashville, NC, a place I'd only heard of for the first time this week because I'm playing a show with Thad Cockrell there on Tuesday. When we first arrived at the venue, we got a kick out of our "passes" which consisted of a list of places we weren't allowed: No pavillion, No backstage, No main venue. We were, however, allowed to buy ourselves six-dollar cups of Miller Light and six-dollar pretzels filled with some sort of tomato/cheese concoction at the booth over near our side stage. Good thing I've built up a high tolerance for greasy road food from all our travelling. All in all, a fun experience was had at ye olde alltell pavillion.

Oh Canada

2004-08-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

So we're playing with Alanis Morrisette and the Barenaked Ladies today at the Alltell Pavillion in Raleigh. Actually, we're playing somewhere near the concessions stand on the back of a flatbed truck. And we have to change the lyrics of "Lemonade" to be about Molson Golden.

The beginning

2004-08-05T19:16:00.000-07:00

In the beginning there was pain. Tendon pain. Black gold. Typist's T. been having a renewed bout of tendonitis lately and therefore my first official blog entry will be short and a bit sour. It's probably due to the fact that I've been rehearsing three different bands (Int'l Orange, my new group The Old Ceremony, and as guitarist/harmony singer for country phenom Thad Cockrell) as well as doing my old web work. So I'm gonna sign off now and save my wrists for more...important activities. Like brushing my teeth.

welcome to my blog

2004-08-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

yes, welcome.