Dec. 10 1995 10:15:21 PM

"The Mistakes" will be available within one week of my writing this message. I swear.

Weird gremlins in the computer today. I've answered a lot of mail but Scott is unable to make it go to people. The paratroopers are lined up by the door but an ugly beast is blocking their exit. I'd also planned to do a lot of writing (since Beller has been showing me up lately in that dept.) but it doesn't look as if there's time to do that either (I need to drive to LA tonight). Plus there's a Japanese porn video called "Exciting Partner" that Scott says I have to see and I don't even know if there's time for that. You know, life nowadays is just way too unfair.

I'm patching a couple of early holes in the discography with the addition of the first ever Keneally performance on commercially released disc (even if it's a flexi) and a couple of instructional cassettes. These are listed under Burning Bridges and James Morton respectively. Also I'm on a new album by Yukon composer Matthew Lien.

I still get mail from people wondering how to get Keneally CDs. If you're one of these people, click here.

We played at Bourbon Square again two nights ago. Great show, with a much different texture than earlier performances. It taste cooler than pear juicy. We opened with "And Your Bird Can Sing" over the "Tomorrow Never Knows" groove - try it at home. This reflected my recent utter succumbing to Beatlemania in the wake of "Anthology" (taped it off the TV, got the album in all three configurations PLUS the still-sealed CD and cassette longbox versions - I'm not as much of a freak as Chatfield, but I'm a freak) as well as the fact that it was the fifteenth anniversary of John Lennon's murder (although a club in Hollywood called Highland Grounds had the night advertised as a "John Lennon Birthday Celebration". Um, guys?). We also did the "Sgt. Pepper" reprise, marred by me forgetting the lyrics but the crowd still enjoyed it or at least acted as if they did for my benefit. The main signifier to this show's uniqueness was the keyboard, which I haven't been willing to bother with on stage recently. But Viv, Jesse and I just moved to a new place and we found ourselves with room for a piano, and thus one was procured. So I'm keyboriented at the moment. The results on stage were not uniformly stunning (especially a tepid "Blameless" - my voice was meat by that point) but it was nice to bang on it every once in a while, and I had great fun doing guitar/keyboard improvs during "Top of Stove" and "Dilemma". I used to do that a lot during solos in 1988; get a guitar sound with enough gain so that I could play it with just my left hand, and solo on both instruments at once. Mostly what I was playing was bullshit but it's a good sound texture ("Timbre rules" was heard more than once during the FZ tour in reference to this). Whipping it out again the other night, to positive response, makes me want to hone the approach into something a little more skillful. By the way, the song that Bryan was referring to in his last message, the one that's going to propel us to the top of any and all imaginable charts, was "I Will". The "Dust Speck" one, not the White Album one. And boy oh boy, was Bryan ever right...we're all hugely famous now! The best reason to have the keyboard up there was the final song of the night bar the encore, "Christmas Time Is Here" from the Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack. I learned enough of the original solo licks to get the flavor and then tweaked it a touch until it became Monk plays Guaraldi. There was a palpable hush in the room. Very lovely moment.

I'm still jazz-freaked (today I got the Atlantic Coltrane box on vinyl - 12 discs. God it's beautiful) but I'm Beatle-freaked as well. Chatfield Manor is Beatle Boot Central so I'm , as me dad was wont to say, happy as a pig in shit.

I've been in proactive mode lately and it's working. 1996 will bring about a much higher profile for me and my compadres. Stay tuned, won't you? Sorry this is kind of brief but I've got the discography entries to tend to and then it must be the road for me. I love you for reading this. Oh, "it taste cooler than pear juicy" is a line from "Exciting Partner" (I took a break for a few minutes and caught some highlights). Presumably you were wondering about that.

Monster Keneally