The Washington Social Club were in town tonight for the first night of their three-night residency on Brookline Ave. in Cambridge. Tonight and December 15 they’re at TT’s, and December 8 they’ll be at The Middle East next door.

I’ve got to thank Mediamark for the twenty bucks that got me in and bought me two beers – I spent a half an hour tonight calculating just how many times in how many days I’d read what percentage of the pages of which magazines. The New Yorker won, and Bassmaster lost. I’ve now moved on to part two of the survey (another new twenty!), which is a hundred-page survey of every possible consumer habit I could have, from skin lotion to bed sheets to movies to mp3 players. We’ll see if I get through that one inside the deadline. Anyway…Marty and the band were in fine form, minus their keyboardist from the last time they played TT’s, sounding tighter and more relaxed than ever.



Rocking out. “WTF, Boston, WTF?!”

Paradise Guy was there – maybe I should just call him Milton; it sounds right – taking notes in the front row. And it actually was a row, because there were at least 25 people in the main stage, not bad for a Monday night. He’s been to, I’d say, 75-80% of all shows I’ve been to in Boston over the last three and a half years. Admittedly, the range is not great, spanning the spectrum from Badly Drawn Boy to Neil Finn, which is really not much of a spectrum, but he’s been there. He’s got his spot at the Paradise, and apparently the front row is his spot at TT’s. Hell, we’ve been to so many of the same shows, maybe I’m his “Paradise Guy.” Somehow, though, I doubt it. I asked him once, feeling particularly daring after seeing John Wesley Harding at TT’s one night, why he was taking all those notes; was he a reporter? I’d seen him at so many shows, and I was just curious… After he answered with, “No, it’s just for me,” and looked as though he was ready to launch into something a little deeper than I was ready for, I bolted, only more politely than that sounds.



Funny to think that Friday morning I was deflating the Coleman inflatable mattress next to Marty’s tangled up 4-track recorder in his and George’s newly re-painted bedroom after gorging on the delicious Thanksgiving meal at their family’s house and watching the laughably incomprehensible Timeline. And here he his, a rock star making scarily convincing eye contact with his microphone and bringing the house down. Brilliant.