Blues Bakery

I've not given a shout out to the Blues Bakery, yet, so here it is.

At the moment Bernd Holnbucher is more than halfway through his bid to get in to the Guinness Book of Records by playing the piano for 53 hours. I saw him earlier today and he was still hanging in there. One of my friends, Peter, was helping out by singing some Sting songs along with him.

Yesterday I did a few songs too. I did something in a boogie-woogie style early-on, possibly, Vanilla Pudding Blues^*, and a little later I got up and did a fairly straight-on version of House of the Rising Sun. I was surprised that in the lyrics a line was written "been the ruin of many poor girls". I know that that's the right version as the song is about a prostitute. It's just that because of the Animals some people think of it as a man's song and it seems ambiguous about what the mans downfall is. As soon as that one word is changed back all ambiguity disappears. I think that's odd.

A few beers later, in order to get some obnoxious suits away from the microphone -- my first choice was to drag them somewhere quiet and give them a good kicking, but there you go --, I did a shuffly, boogie woogie medley of a few songs including Rub Me Raw and One Woman Man (so I got a tribute to Warren Zevon in, though no-one noticed).

Bernd then started playing something jazzy that I didn't know -- Sunny I think. I had to hang around to keep the suits off the mic and eventually persuaded Peter to do some Sting stuff over the top. Bernd changed tunes slightly and it worked, so Peter carried on for a while until he ran out of lyrics.

I was prepared by now, though, and managed to pull off a jazzy version of the Sensational Alex Harvey Band's Gangbang. Really. It was weird, but, for the two or three people who got it, it was fun, also it managed to be the best bit of singing I did all day. Really.

By now the suits had gone. So I stepped away from the mic and left the stage to Bernd. It was, after all, his night.

^* An apparently "obvious" song about Vanilla Pudding written by me and Peter. Sample verse:

"Well I like to nibble it slow
And roll it round my tongue
And when I've finished eating
I've got to get me another one"

Subtle, eh?