52nd City

Eric Hall and Fred Friction channel Neil Young

I'd heard about the post-Christmas night Neil Young tribute at Off Broadway, but only just that. Didn't go. Didn't see and hear. At least, not until tonight, when Eric Hall sent along a YouTube video of his performance with Fred Friction.

It's... interesting. And, now, I can kinda, sorta understand why the soundman killed the power. Kinda. Sorta.

Here are Eric's liner notes and a link:

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here is the video of "sample and hold" fred friction and i did for the neil young tribute show at off broadway the day after christmas. everyone else at the show played very faithful guitar-based versions of his better known tunes, so i picked something from "trans", which might be his most hated album. in that environment, i think we stole the show, fred in particular. im playing a qchord (electronic autoharp) through distortion pedals and doing some processing on freds vocal with a little digital delay (sampling, holding) and a vocoder. he had never heard the song, so we duct taped the lyrics inside the classifieds from the paper. that way hes looking through the classifieds for something to sample and hold, which ties perfectly with the subject of the song. then he used a toy cell phone for the customer service section of the lyrics. off broadway is a non-smoking venue and james weber jr put a cigarette in the fake hand in freds jacket pocket. after that jason hutto lit it, causing the audience to cheer and the bartenders to yell and throw coasters at us, to which fred responded by turning towards the bar and spraying yellow foam out the fly of his pants. that was right about the time the soundman turned us off. nonetheless, the booker loved it and asked me to put together a longer set for the bowie tribute next month. im thinking the labyrinth soundtrack... enjoy, or just scratch your head. eric.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT6xz6V0ibE