“Crab Napkin“- the Chandler Travis Philharmonic, recorded at Harry’s Roadhouse, Hyannis, MA., Aug. 17, 2004, by Chris Blood, mixed by C.T.
Thinking of putting out an album of this stuff, as it was a great night at a place we always had a good time at, the original Harry’s in Hyannis, and my old partner Chris Blood did a terrific job recording it (really the only time we got halfway serious about recording the band live.) I always thought it would make a great album, but after making a couple of tentative passes at it 15 years or so ago, I got side-tracked with other things and never got around to it, partly because live albums have never really been my cup of tea, and we’d put out quite a bit of live stuff when the CTP started out on the RadioBall series, but most of that was in lo-fi (our patented Horrend-O-Phonic system, which was basically an old beat-up seventies Sony cassette recorder from before they turned into boom boxes- fabulous in a way, but definitely lo-fi), so it’s nice to be finally getting around to this, as the CTP from that era was really a pretty amazing and entirely reckless live band, which on this occasion was made up of:
Rikki Bates- drums
The Valet aka Fred Boak- bg vox
Dinty Child- mandocello, mandolin, accordion, and bg vox
Keith Spring- keys
John Styklunas- string bass
me- guitar and vox
and our horn section, the June Trailer Dancers:
Mark Chenevert- clarinet and tenor sax
Dan Brantigan- trumpet
Keiichi Hashimoto- trumpet
Bob Pilkington- trombone
Just one track for now, the immortal Steve Wood – Jay Cournoyer burner, “Crab Napkin” (and did I ever tell the story of Jay entirely improvising the third verse more or less as you hear it now, when our band Lester recorded the original version, also available on the only album Lester ever recorded, cunningly entitled, “Lester”? Anyway, there’s definitely a whole bunch more on the way…