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The whole point of being in Bangkok is “Sanook.” The word loosely translates to “fun” or “pleasing.” Do you like sleep? Let me make your sleeping more Sanook. Do you like beer? Sanook. Everything moves very slowly here and in a strange non-linear way. This impression is perhaps aided by the fact that I arrived at midnight and then just stayed up all night and the next day – having fun, looking around.

My good friend, and virtuoso pianist, Bob King, picked me up at the airport with a young violinist named God who was on break from a gig. Almost immediately I started to have an intense and alarming nose bleed – due to 24 hours in airplane air. I was wearing a white jacket and remarkably did not get it ruined. Bob said that in the land of the unexpected, I was already fitting in just fine. My first few hours of Thailand were obscured by a larg mass of toilet tissue in my face.

A few hours later we were sitting at a roadside bar on the outskirts of the touristic part of the city. The cops had just changed the laws that bars had to close at 1am but they could still operate on the street. It’s all working off a pleasant but greased-palm, look-the-other-way, kind of authority. It works for me. Cold Beer. Sanook.

Back to Bob’s small room a little bit further out of tourist area. Only real Thai people here. We just hung out and caught up and chilled until the sun came up and then went out into the day. The goal was to go on to the busy corner and people watch (girl watch – let’s be honest) while the population went to their day jobs. The girls are very fashionable with high heel shoes and painted toe-nails, sitting side saddle behind drivers on motorcycle cabs – holding their hair down casually while they scoot in and out of traffic. As much as there is commercial (wink, wink) based, obviously unrestricted and loose “sanook” vibe, there is an equal conservative, law-abiding, proper, elegant, calm element that is as beautiful and on display in the mornings.

Bob suggested we take a bus and get an even better view down by the big bank. The bus was fun, open, no doors. But we missed our stop by about 40 blocks (I don’t know either) and wound up just turning around and coming back to Bob’s neighborhood.

Next stop – Bob bought me a massage! This was the most thorough, most intense, most awesome massage I’ve ever had. Thai massage is no joke. I’m still humming from it. Many places here are of the “happy ending” variety where the talent is untrained in the real art. This place however was strictly no-joke at all. It was run by very talented and well trained and experienced couple. Oddly, he was blind and she was strongly non-beautiful to look at. Regardless, she worked on my while the blind man worked on Bob and for TWO HOURS we were like putty. Ask me for a repertoire of all the crazy contortions that my body was in for this massage. It hurt really really good. Wow. Two hours of a great massage cost each of us $7.50 (250 Baht). Again, this was not the touristic innuendo kind of joint that will charge over 2000 Baht.

One more thing of note – We went downtown and I went into at least four different tailors to wind up purchasing two custom tailored linen suits and a wonderful price. My fitting is tomorrow. I actually dreamed of the suit last night – the suit in the dream was entirely hound’s tooth the same color as on our cd. The shirt too, and the tie! It was like a hound’s tooth camouflage outfit.

Yes, that is @MCHammer.

My head is all a twitter with the events of last night. Where to start? Imagine us sitting on stage left at Galapagos Art Space. Behind us is a huge screen. On the screen is a steadily updating feed of tweets from all over the world. People are text messaging twitter with the word #shorty in their text and is getting posted to the screen. It’s almost the main attraction. Some of the comments are about the band, that is to say, comments about us. Some texts are quite favorable, some others not-so-much! Gradually a real-time debate develops on the screen behind us about the merits of what we were doing. It was totally surreal. The brainstorm hits to begin incorporating the text from the screen behind us into the lyrics. It has an immediate impact on the screen behind us. “Did he just sing that woman’s comment?” One woman said that she was so bored she was going to slit her wrists! Clifton tells the band that he wants the next break. We give it to him. He whispers into the mike, “Please don’t slit your wrists.” In seconds, she posts again: “Sorry.” This happened over and over again creating a very different form of dialogue. There was a flurry of comments about us behind us that I would read back and put some spin on.

When I wasn’t singing or playing trumpet, I was encouraged to tweet from my iPhone from the stage! I posted things like, “The band needs beer.” and “Clifton is going to start preaching. Listen now.” It appeared on the stage behind us. The world was watching and responding.

When I saw the first negative comment I had the obvious sinking emotional reaction. This was a pretty basic comment that was really the first piece of harsh criticism we had received – and in writing – and in front of an audience of the three hundred people – and in front of all the tens of thousands of people watching on line. Oh yeah, receiving written criticism about your performance while in the middle of that very same performance is a first and weird too. So, when I saw the line “This band Sux!” it kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit.

About thirty seconds later though I was excited and amused when I had a flash of insight. We had suddenly been thrust to the level where people with no personal connection to us were moved to appreciate, judge, talk about, defend, protect, haze, fall in love with, and diss . . . It felt suddenly like an enormous step in the right direction. I started to beam. And people were rallying to say great things about us too. No matter what it just started to make me happy. For the record: the positive responses to the band far far outweighed the disses. The negative stuff was good feedback to and often very funny. The positive stuff was very encouraging and we have many many more fans than we did before the event.

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Another one of our roles besides simply being entertaining was to play about 26 little intros and walk-ons for the winners. Besides simple fanfares and atmospherics, we had to learn a few special songs. The person who one in the comedian’s category wanted us to Rick Roll him. So sure enough, we started playing that infamous “Never Gonna Give You Up.” We also were required to play the theme from Mad Men. And yes, we did play “You can’t touch this” to introduce MC Hammer.

The whole thing was very surreal. We are connected to another world now in a way that we weren’t before. That world has Fail Whales, Tweets, Shaq via satellite, 140 character updates, and MC Hammer.

We did our first live national radio broadcast this week. In New York it was on 770AM – WOR but apparently it gets syndicated all over the united states. It was the Joey Reynolds Show. Before meeting him we did not really know anything about him or the show but he was an engaging and fascinating guy with an enormous history in show biz. His booking person saw us performing in the subways and she got us on the show. (Hi Myra!)

That’s how we found ourselves down at the WOR studios at 1:30am, sitting in the lobby, warming up our instruments and shooting the breeze. George, the producer, took us down a long hallway to show us around a bit. On the walls were enormous, very well printed photos of WOR history. In each pic, an enormous WOR radio mic was prominantly featured: FDR addressing the nation, announcers calling a game at Yankee Stadium – was that Mickey Mantle on the field? etc… The live feed from Joey’s show is filling up the hallway with sound and the first words we hear are “Hitler” and “The Nazis.” Clifton and I just started to giggle and smirk. Ok, this is the world we’re in right now. Late night AM talk radio. Before we could follow the thread the conversation had moved on to the KKK. Eventually we saw a very small, amiable rabbi walking out of the booth: Joey’s guest right before we were to come on.

We were invited into the booth and met Joey. He seemed like a very nice person but you could also see his mind working very fast behind his sun-glasses as he tried to size us up to see how he was going to make for interesting conversational air time. Joey is such a pro. He’s been in the business for over 50 years. This bio is from wikipedia.

He rose to fame as a Top 40 radio personality during the 1960s and 1970s, amassing huge audiences in places such as Hartford, Connecticut, Cleveland, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, and his hometown of Buffalo, New York. Reynolds is often regarded as the originator of “shock talk radio”, whose sometimes outlandish on and off-air stunts garnered widespread publicity. (The Four Seasons even produced a special radio jingle for the introduction of his daily radio show). He was the focus of a two-part series on The Oprah Winfrey Show concerning talk radio personalities, on which more than a dozen of Reynolds’ media peers paid tribute to him. Moreover, he has been invited to speak about entertainment media at several radio industry conferences.

We come out of the gate with some music. We had Elizabeth! with us in the studio to as she was playing trombone with us when the booking person saw us. She slayed it! The recording quality came out great and we will definitely be releasing this as a special treat to our fans. If you are not on our mailing list, Sign up now!

The talking part of the show went ok too I guess but I never got too comfortable. Joey’s thing is to keep you off base a bit and try to suck you into saying something controversial. So he digs a bit. For example, Elizabeth! is listed on his notes as having no last name. He asks her her age, she wont tell. He says, “Come on – somewhere between 20’s and 30’s right.” She’s like, “Yeah, something like that.” He presses further, “So, you don’t have a last name – what are you embarassed to be associated with these guys?” But it’s all in good fun and you really want to please him because he is very charismatic – so sometimes you get sucked in.

Clifton did great though! He’s got a real bad-ass attitude and says some outrageous things. Very entertaining and it made for great radio. During the first commercial break Joey had us all sized up and knew who he could count on for what kind of response. Jesse – the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Clifton – an engaging asshole (he even said during the break, “So, you’re the asshole.”) , Elizabeth! – sweet and lovely tones, Stephan – like Harpo Marx, wacky but only answers with his horn, Rob – sincere and honest and would sincerely, honestly rather be playing bass than talking! Anyway, it was our first time all together doing that so it was a learning experience and there is a lot to learn there.

I don’t think it will be our last experience though. Joey asked us to be on the show again at some future time and even asked to write a theme song for the show!! He went out of his way to tell us how much he enjoyed the band and asked us to write a jingle for him! He really was smiling the entire time were playing music.

I just got finished meeting with the “top brass” of Twitter and we are all excited about rockin’ the 1st Annual Shorty Awards tomorrow night.

I’m excited (but not as much as Stefan) that we get to back up the one-and-only MC HAMMER…I’m currently transcribing and arranging “You Can’t Touch This” so we can bring him on in style.

Shaq, CNN, NASA, The Hit Men, and many others will all be there and the Mighty Tin Pan will be playing throughout. It’s always been a dream of mine to cut off an overlong acceptance speech with music and my time has finally come!

NYCer’s can come down to Galapagos tomorrow at 7:30PM and join in the fun or you can watch the streaming video from:

The Shorty Awards

Now I must prepare the important muscles of the body for our late night (2AM) radio show on WOR at 2am.

Until then just keep reaching for those things that may bring you inspiration…

-c l i f t o n