my favorite Aunt - and the perfect first date

so this past saturday saw the demise of Aunt Pat.

i've never understood where the motivation for that name came from, but aunt pat was (hell, still is) my favorite Philly band. they were on life support for a long time to begin with, but the death knell came on saturday, when they played their last show with the family lineup, before scattering to the four winds. brian is moving with his wife melissa (who is absolutely wonderful) to northern california, and michael hasn't actually been in the band for three years now, but played this last gig with them.

a little history, before there are too many vague references...

aunt pat came up through the philly ranks at the same time i did, and the first time i saw them, i thought they were amazing. the entire band was related by either blood or marriage..the mcshanes - kerry, mollie, brian and michael - were joined by mollies' husband blake and various drummers (a la spinal tap) passed through at various times, but the core of the band was always blake, mollie and kerry and the amazing vocal blend they had. kerry was a compelling stage presence - when she sang, you had no choice but to look at her. not because she was a classic beauty in the typical sense (certainly not unattractive, either), but because she had charisma. blake, however, was the songwriter of the band. they presented an interesting dilemma, where image was concerned - they had these two female vocalists who were obviously focal points, but blake was quietly churning out these amazing songs while everyone else was mesmerized by other members of the band...

i loved them from the first time i heard them. i was hooked.

and boy, did i wish i were a mcshane.

i did, actually, secretly lust to be part of this band for years...we did shows together often, at steel city coffeehouse in phoenixville, at the fire in philadelphia, and at the youthfest show at the camden waterfront complex...it got to be a common thing for me to do their songs or sit in with them when we'd split shows. the last show we did together, though, was without michael on guitar - and i started to ask what the deal was (as he was tending bar in the front that night), but i decided it was none of my business and didn't say anything...

and that was the last i heard of them for a year and a half.

until i got this phone call from blake...

turns out that michael has left the band, had left the band when i played with them all that time ago...but now there was another dilemma.

kerry was pregnant.

pregnant, and preparing to leave the band - and he was wondering if i knew anyone..or if i myself might be interested in joining the band.

i told him i'd been waiting for this call for years...

so we played one show, and one show only, with kerry, and then she was gone - i remember feeling like i'd just joined fleetwood mac as stevie nicks and lindsey buckingham were leaving - but blake and i were developing a mutual sympathy to each others' sensibilities, and while i don't think we were doggedly determined to keep aunt pat alive, we were starting to formulate our own agenda.

so while everyone else has been busy with their lives and doing other things, blake and i have quietly constructed a masterpiece of a blake allen album. great blake songs, with big, sloppy helpings of instrumental support from yours truly. and i love the record. or, at least, i'm pretty sure i'm gonna love the record once it's a record.

but without blake playing the mick fleetwood-slash-rodney king "can't we all just get along?" role, the band went even further into auto-pilot than it already was, and i think saturdays' "goodbye brian and melissa" party proved to be the disappearance of the blip from the radar screen, as the analogy goes.

bummer i missed it.

yeah, you read that right...i missed it.

i got a call from blake about it last week, asking if i'd be interested in playing bass, since brian wanted to drum, and i said, "sure", even though i'd never played bass on any of these songs, and my knowledge of them on guitar was kinda sketchy at best, anyway - and i waited until 8am on saturday morning to learn the songs. think of of it as a combination of slackerness and total schedule saturation. but, by 11am, i had them all down pat, and my son dylan and i went to my guitar techs' shop and then came home to leave for this party....where, upon arriving, i'm told that AP will be going on between 6:30 and 7:00 or so...thus negating my ability to participate since i had to be back in reading for a 7:30 load in.

so i missed it.

but - in hindsight - i'm glad i was where i was.

i had been looking forward to the debut of the 4 piece lineup, and playing without our old guitar player, if for no other reason but to prove to myself that we could do it without him - i never thought that it'd be an issue, but the set we did without him at the carnival earlier in the summer left some doubt, because of the whole outdoor sound issue, but the first set went great...better than i ever expected. i did slant the setlist toward stronger songs that we could pull off without him, but i could tell that things were going in the direction that it was supposed to be...the band sounded so much cleaner, so much tighter with one less person...it was uncanny.

but then the clouds parted...

quin had called me to tell me that he had remembered someone that might be good for the job, and he called me to tell me about the guy - he sounded pretty promising, but i was pretty skeptical after a few bombs that had gone off during the whole audition process, and i wasn't gonna get hopeful until someone came in and laid it down and showed me something.

and when the second set started, the clouds parted, man.

donnie ortner walked in, plugged in and was in the band two hours later. what a player. and when he came in and started playing, it felt like everyone else's playing elevated a step..or two steps...we played songs we'd never played before and kicked the shit out of them. and the songs we all knew went somewhere else that they'd never gone, too. the people that were there seemed to sense it, too - there weren't a lot of them there, but they were absolutely tuned in to what was going on. i know that some of them were picking up on the fact that there was something happening that didn't happen every night.

and that was definitely happening. we were smiling, for christs' sake.

the end of the night came waaaaay sooner than i expected it to - i could have played another two hours if we would have been allowed to, and it would have still seemed like the night was over too soon.

i didn't get to talk to don as much as i'd have liked to, but from what i gathered from the snippets of conversations we did manage to have, we've been going through the same things - trying to find other musicians to play with who are sympathetic to what's best for the song, who are interested in being good, as opposed to good enough. i don't have time in my life for good enough, and i don't think he does, either. his girlfriend said the same thing that wendy said, after watching the show...

"it sure is good to see him having a good time for a change..."

so first official rehearsal with this guy is tomorrow night.

the sky's the limit, man...

i said to the crowd on saturday night something to the effect of, "y'know, sometimes being in a band is like dating...you go out with women who just don't measure up in some way or another for a while, but once in a blue moon, you go out with someone who seems to be tied to you in some way, and everything is perfect - you have a lot in common, you talk about the right things, everything surrounding you is exactly the way it's supposed to be, and you feel like you might have soulmate potential...then you go home and you can't sleep because you're still wound up from what's just happened to you..."

saturday night was one hell of a first date.