Shut Up 'n' Play Yer Guitar

There's a fellow I know named Matt Rae, a regular guy living in an ordinary house on one of those quiet Connecticut streets, but he's a guy's who's worth introducing to anyone who hasn't already met him. In addition to being a pleasant fellow who likes B movies and who is kind to dogs and children, Matt is a guy who can, at any moment he pleases, wring some lightning and thunder out of a guitar neck and knock the listener out of his chair and into the street. He is, in a way, the most genuine kind of musician there is: one whose aspirations coincide with the immediacy of second-to-second communication, who plays without the cop-out of irony, and whose only goal is to bust out some notes and tear the universe a new one right when it least expects it. C'mon, let's go now, down to his basement; let him pick one of the guitars off the wall and lay down some funky shit that Homer and Cervantes would have been down with, lookout jangles for holy prophets and colliding suns. Hell, I've heard him tear the blues out of a $3.95 Toys 'R' Us kiddie ukulele, and he makes it sound good. Incredibly rare it is to find musicians who possess this kind of astounding technical ability and that elusive quality the old-timers call "soul," and Matt Rae has both, in spades.

For those of you who aren't able to catch him on one of his club dates, you could probably do a lot worse than to visit his website, mattrae.com, and preview some of the tracks from his latest CD, "Twang!" Check out the savage hillbilly assault of "Road Rage" and the down-home cockeyed grin of "Tele Savalas", get back to the oceanic with "Floatin'" or "Sonic Blue", or just wrap your mind around the million-dollar solos that pepper the whole crazy porridge, and you've got a rocket in your brain like Buzz Aldrin only dreamed of. Get on board, cosmonauts, 'cause the crummy planet we're on is old news and the cool kids are outta here.

The true joy, however, is seeing him play live, as this is an experience all to itself. With ultra sangfroid bassman Mark Bridgman and escaped mental patient and drum abuser Stuart Stahr, the Matt Rae trio has been raising insurance rates across the state by tearing the roof off of joint after joint and exposing unwary barflies to stars and rain. When the crowd is ready and jumping, when Matt sinks his teeth into a groove and his left hand goes all crazy and boneless across the frets, your soul is amazed awake and ringing, you feel the shock unto your mind and the throne upon your lungs; 100 bullets are flying every which way, and Matt has fired them all, buzzing and tickling into beer glasses and wall joists until rhythm and time are ping-ponging brainwise like a last revelation or first arrest. Then all the lonely barmaids say "hey, this cat can really swing, gimme some more of that head-over-heels, guitar man!"

Yeah, baby. Matt is only happy to oblige.

Scene From a Marriage

L: Look! It's Wilford Brimley!
J: What?
L: It's Wilford Brimley! You love Wilford Brimley!
J: What are you talking about?
L: You love Wilford Brimley.
J: I love Wilford Brimley?
L: You love Wilford Brimley.
J: Since when do I love Wilford Brimley?
L: You just do.

A Disturbing Trend

The situation with Mr. Eggorian is now becoming intolerable. Faxes are arriving on a daily basis, and the changes to the script that he is requesting have gone beyond the aggravating and into the bizarre. For example, why cut the birthday party scene? It's not terribly long, it contains some fairly good character development (I thought), and without it the viewer would have to wonder why Cadge and Mandy go down to the harbor at all. In addition, why the request to "tone down" the lobster's rooftop monologue? Just how mellow do you want the villain to be? Okay, maybe the cape is a little over the top, but the whole bit about the "claws of fate" is pure gold and I'm not touching a goddamn word of it.

Even more worrisome than the deletions are the new scenes the lunatic wants added. Suddenly there's supposed to be some subplot involving Mandy and an estranged mother? Why? What the hell for? Who would possibly care about that? She's a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, that's all you need to know, end of story. As if that weren't enough, he wants a big blow-up between Mrs. Rample and Dr. Fong. I don't even know what to say about that one. The two characters barely know each other. What kind of emotional baggage are they supposed to have?

I'm now starting to wonder if the man is simply insane. I'm half-tempted to sneak into a rehearsal of the Ridgebury High School production of Lend Me a Tenor to see if he foams at the mouth.

Crime & Punishment

For those who are interested, I'll give a quick update on the latest ups and downs of my first and greatest film project, the horror-musical Night of the Lobster, written by me and produced by Flaming Guerrilla Studios.

Pre-production moved slowly but steadily throughout December and into January, and we all had good reason to be optimistic; casting was near completion, several letters were sent to the Connecticut Foundation for the Arts, and our production assistant and location scout Tim "Piker" Gabble found an abandoned wire mill which we could use as a makeshift studio. Regarding the last, let me just clarify that we did make an attempt to discover who owned the derelict building, but upon repeatedly dialing the phone number penciled onto the faded sign on the gate producer Darren Truett said that the only response was an answering machine recording on which could only be heard the barking of bipolar lap dogs.

The first setback was the jailing of the young man slated to play the lead role, a college student named Corky Lamour. Apparently in between his drama classes he had offered to sell pep pills to an undercover police officer, an incident which was complicated by the fact that she had been dressed as a schoolgirl at the time. Rather than contact his disciplinarian parents for the bail money, Corky preferred to remain in the pokey, spending his time making new friends and learning to play the harmonica. Darren briefly considered using part of the film's budget for the liberty of the male lead, but Herschel, the roofer who will be writing and performing the score, desperately needed a new wah-wah pedal, and so the shooting schedule was simply delayed until the rehabilitation of our star. One good thing did come of the incident, however, which is that Darren signed on the arresting officer to play one of the supporting roles. It was a nice little coup, really; she is in sufficiently good athletic condition to perform the stunts which the script demands, her duties as an undercover police person have required her to learn something of the dramatic arts—in some cases better than our college students—and on top of all that she has a certain physical charm which was a little unsettling framed in a Catholic school uniform but which will be right at home in a film about violence and totalitarian shellfish. The only complication will be, of course, that we have to make sure that our illegal occupation of the wire factory is not a topic of conversation within earshot of our winsome representative of the law.

One other difficulty presented itself when I was introduced to the director, Brian Eggorian, who is the pompous ass that runs the Ridgebury Community Theater and the Ridgebury High School Drama Club. He immediately started referring to me as "the scribbler," and by the time I had made it home from the meeting he had already faxed me several pages of notes on the script, the suggested changes accentuated by both underlines and exclamation points. For starters, he was campaigning for the eradication of all the political subtext, in particular the reference to Karl Marx. Additionally, he demanded that the dialogue of the female lead be given more "pepper," a term which I found somewhat vague. When I later pressed him for a more articulate accounting of his concept of "pepper," he hemmed and hawed for a while, muttered something incoherent (it sounded like he said "flammo," perhaps another obscure theater term) and then hung up the phone.

I have recently tried to meet Mr. Eggorian halfway and make the script a little less political and a little more peppery without destroying the feel or the underlying message. Unfortunately my attempts at "pepper" seem to come off as either abusiveness or Tourette's Syndrome; I may have to watch a few Katherine Hepburn movies to get the tone just right.