A Little Sooner Every Year

Celebrate New Year's Eve Eve EVE with Flutterbox, why don't you? We have two hours to fill to bursting at Barbes, starting 7pm tomorrow night, Monday December 28th. We'd love to see you again before the year's out.

Time is of the Essence!

Please sign the petition at http://tcktcktck.org today.

Sir Paul McCartney, Neill Cardinal Furio in Copenhagen!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Two of the world's most inventive electric bassists will be in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference: Sir Paul McCartney and Neill Cardinal Furio. Sir Paul will be giving a speech in favor of "Meat-Free Mondays" making the point that individuals are every bit as responsible as their governments for making efforts to alleviate global warming.

Mr. Furio's no doubt charmingly insurrectionist plans were unavailable at press time – making it impossible to say whether he might cross paths with Sir Paul. Don't think you have to stay tuned to GDAE to find out!

While you're waiting, sign the Hopenhagen petition!

Second gig this week!

Sometimes things just work out. We'll be back at Jalopy this Monday night, Sept 28th, opening for Tony Scherr again, as Nature intends. Long may we run.

9pm! $5! F train to Carroll St!

Flutter in the Arcade

You never know what a search of the word "flutterbox" is going to turn up. At the forum over at arcadecontrol.com, we read the following sentence: "I've got a swp crystal maze machine, there is two types of this machine. I've got the better one with the flutter box."

We know how hunty3000 feels.

Flutter in the Equinox

We begin again, newly balanced. Events have conspired to keep the Flutterboxers on either side of the pond this summer, but summer is drawing down (if only now feeling like summer) and the Return of Flutterbox is nigh. We'll be at Barbes for two shining hours on Monday September 21 from 7-9pm. New songs! Old favorites! My calendar says Sept 21 is also the International Day of Peace. We'll have something to sing about that too.

Come out! Come out!

Flutter in the Zeitgeist II

This just over the trainsom, remarks upon the "flutterbox" (pictured) built by an unknown musician as part of the entertainment at a performance event we're sorry to have missed involving music and textile artists.

"I got very interested in the ’flutterbox’ instrument one of the musicians had made.... The flutterbox was an insane-looking construction, made out of a drum, bike wheel, gurney castor-wheels, wingnuts. The sounds it made I’d never heard before and because it wasn’t a known instrument like a guitar I had no received idea of how it should be played so that alone was fascinating. And the musician was bent over it like it was a loom or something.

It may be that all flutterboxes, at one time or another, bring their players to their knees. This one looks a little like a hamster pram.

Ready ... Steady ... ZOOM ...

Proud possessors of a new H4n ZOOM 4-track (simultaneously!) recorder, Flutterbox will be making some quality living room recordings in the weeks and months ahead, songs which will then be made available, in a delightful running brook of hit singles, on iTunes. More on this master plan as things develop. Meanwhile, watch this space!

One thing we know for sure right now. We'll be at Barbes on Monday, September 21 for two hours, from 7-9pm. Says here on the calendar that Sept 21 is the International Day of Peace. We have more than one song to sing about that.

Flutter in the Ether: Podcast!

Click to hear Flutterbox open and close the May 6th edition of THE KGB RADIO HOUR with your hosts, and Janine's, now also Neill's, friends, Mark Jacobson and Larry "Ratso" Sloman.

This entertaining pair beam smart, smarm free podcasts out of the KBG Bar on E. 4th Street roughly, literally, every month. Mark came to fame in Janine's life as the coach of her son's basketball team, a job he performed with 110% rumpled style and authority, but his calling is as a writer (currently, at New York magazine) interviewing icons, gangsters and saints of all stripes. He's been at this for years and remembers details.

Ratso was maybe the first editor of High Times, the dream job of countless millions. Larry's working with Tyson on the fighter's autobiography now. You should read his book on Houdini. The magician was a spy, you know.

The sound equipment on hand at the KBG falls somewhere between lo-fi and no-fi, but so what? Neill figured out a way for us to be heard despite the odds and the teeming rain 3 feet from the microphone. At the top, you'll hear the hosts wondering where "that sound" is coming from. Fans will recognize that sound ("In my head?" Ratso wonders) as a loop Neill is building, in this case for "The Robin Sings." At show's end we play "Safety Last"; the crowd, having heard "Robin" was authentically shocked at the tempo. Fun to see the surprise on their faces: That's radio, folks!

Some of Ratso's songwriter friends from Brooklyn are on the show, as are Mike Daly of The Daily News and Tom Robbins of The Village Voice. There are also phone-ins with Cong. Anthony Weiner (who had not yet dropped out of the Mayoral race) and the best Mike Bloomberg impersonator anyone could imagine. Jaw dropping. Are you as sickened by the Bloomberg "campaign" as we are?

Enjoy the show.

Flutter In The Zeitgeist

Imitation is the sincerest form of fluttery!

Janine in The New Yorker

We have a fan at The New Yorker! Nice mention for Janine's solo show coming up. Click on the headline for the link. Scroll down to just beneath Mr. Reed's picture, and there Janine is, mentioned in the same breath as Andy Statman. Janine tried very hard to get Mr. S. to play at St. Ann's years ago, but his religion just didn't allow it. In any case, he is a genius of two instruments and if you can't catch Janine, catch Andy!

Coming Soon to Le Poisson Rouge! Sat April 25

Boho Supremo John Kruth, sweet, string-playing veteran of many a Hal Willner project and prodigious music biographer in his own right (Sun Ra, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Townes Van Zandt) was in truth the man who gave Flutterbox its start, with his invitation to me to sing a John Lennon song at the Bowery Poetry Club on the 25th anniversary of his apotheosis. I asked Neill to join me, he suggested I try on his arrangement of "In My Life," and in the length of time it took to sing and play the song a band was born. Johnny the K been an F-box enthusiast from, literally, day one and he's asked us both to open for and participate in his multi-artist shindig marking 40 years since the release of "Nashville Skyline" (a number that refuses to seem real to me) at Le Poisson Rouge, the swank new club in the old Village Gate on Bleecker Street.

Flutterbox opens at 7 with a 40 minute set. Then Neill will have his way with "Peggy Day," no doubt correcting the cocaine-addled tempo of yore. Me, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" or "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" with Sam Parton of Be Good Tanyas fame. All will be revealed in the fullness of rehearsal time. We haven't played Manhattan since Joe's Pub in November and we hope to see you out there.

More Juliet Rose!

Hats off to beautiful 10-year-old JULIET ROSE SCHLEFER of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who sang "More And Less" with me at Barbes on April Fool's Night. The girl's a one-take natural and she can also snag a dragonfly out of the air with the greatest of ease. She'll be singing Britten's "Requiem" with the New York Philharmonic this spring. Someday we'll say we knew her when.

New Pix & Gigs

Here are some new photos, taken by our man in Pittsfield, Alan P. (for Pittsfield?) Hayes, at Joe's Pub back in November. Thanks Alan! I don't know what I was thinking with that Rebecca of Sunnybjork Farm outfit, nor, for that matter, Neill with that pajama shirt. But we played great, and the sound in the room and onstage was great, and Robin Holcomb was great, as were Tony Scherr and Doug Wieselman, who accompanied her.



Wheezy, as I call him, played such a beautiful clarinet solo on Whoops Wrong Daisy, I do believe I saw tiny tears of joy forming in Neill's eyes.




Anyway, to steal a line from the writer Terry O'Reilly, whom I interviewed the other week for the new Mabou Mines website (for which I am the writer), Flutterbox has gigs "lined up like hurricanes off the Florida coast," including a major Manhattan show, an opening set before John Kruth's multi-artist shindig marking the 40th anniversary of "Nashville Skyline" (to which we'll also contribute) at Le Poisson Rouge, or, as the musicians have taken to calling it, the Poison Fish, on April 25 and a select few songs about Death and Taxes as part of Emily Rubin's roving song and story series, "Dirty Laundry: The City Cycle," at the Ave A Laundromat on April 15th.

It all starts April Fool's Night at Barbes. Always hoping to see you....