Crying, Waiting, Hoping

THIS IS AN HISTORIC POST FROM 2020. DIG IT. A YEAR HAS PASSED, AND WE ARE STILL LOCKED DOWN. We are NOT planning a show at Moondog's but we WERE planning a show last year....

We in the The Little Wretches are optimistic that some of the uncertainty created by the pandemic and quarantine-efforts will have settled down by the month of May. We're planning a show at Pittsburgh's legendary blues club, MOONDOG'S, on the night of Saturday, May 23.

Steve Sciulli and Dennis Childers, our old friends from Carsickness and Ploughman's Lunch, are planning to join us with one of their current projects, STANDING WAVE. Also joining us will be NATE GATES and his rocking little outfit. Nate's albums, GHOST ON THE RIVER and THE BIG PARADE, are really good. He's described somewhere as "Central Pennsylvania blues and roots music with punk attitude." I hate when people compare The Little Wretches to The Beatles and The Velvet Underground because whatever draws fans to those bands is unlikely to be immediately recognizable to people to come to our shows, so I hate to curse Nate with a comparison, but if Steve Earle was from Central Pennsylvania, people would compare him to Nate Gates. How's that?

Unlike our last appearance at MOONDOGS (which by all accounts rocked in spite of our acoustic/unplugged approach), we're bringing our amps to this one. Live-recordings indicate that the band sounded very strong from the point of view of the audience, but up on stage, it was very hard to play with confidence because we couldn't really hear each other or ourselves. All those years of nightly playing paid off, I guess. Without a single rehearsal (though we have played some private gatherings here and there in recent years), we jumped on those tunes. Ellen, Dave, Mike Madden and I caught the groove as soon as Losi started pounding the intro to NO ONE EVER TOLD YOU THAT and held it all night. What did we close with, BAG O'ROCKS? I BELONG? Whatever, it was a great set that left us wanting to do it again.

Everybody keeps telling me (this is Roberto at the keyboard, by the way) that Pittsburgh has undergone a cultural renaissance, that if The Little Wretches were on the scene in the region, the setting would be ripe for us to build our audience. As great as the show at Moondog's was, I could probably have named 90% of the people in the audience. A lot of our old faithful turned out, like Pat and Katie, Mary Kay, Pinto, Tony Norman, Dan Serafini, Ron and June, Mark and Lisa, David Flynn, and others. We saw Sean MacDonald of Red Medicine Recording, Sue S (Carsickness' old sound-person), Mike Psyche, Tom Weber. Billie was still managing the club. Leroy, who ran sound for us a few times back at the Electric Banana or The Decade in the old days, was on the soundboard.

Sounds nostalgic, right?

F#@# nostalgia. We're not about nostalgia. We love our old friends and listeners. We want NEW EARS. You can assist us in this endeavor by sharing our music through social-media posts, recommending us to festivals, hooking us up with like-minded artists, and turning people on to our music.

Hope to see you in May. It'll be Memorial Day Weekend. I think everybody will be in the mood to celebrate.

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