Friends of Bob-servin' superfine LIVE music-March '05 Newsletter
FoB Organizational Meeting: Thurs., March 24, 7:30 @ LBC upstairs-everyone welcome! Get involved!
Robyn Hitchcock + Kelly Hogan & Scott Ligon: Duncan Hall; Sun., April 3, 7:30
Wayne "The Train" Hancock & his Band: Lafayette Brewing Co. Sat., April 30 8:30
There is great excitement that FoB has been able to snag a Robyn Hitchcock concert date. Look at his tour schedule:
New York, Chicago, Denver, Austin, Los Angeles, and nestled among them Lafayette, Indiana. It will be a wonderful show. As the All Music Guide proclaims, "Robyn Hitchcock is one of England's most enduring contemporary singer/songwriters and live performers." His performances-on top of being musically wonderful-are charming, witty, and utterly entertaining. This will be an acoustic show: Robyn will move between acoustic guitar and grand piano
(though there will be some electric songs for encores).
The New Yorker recently referred to him as "the poet laureate of dark whimsy" and whimsy is Robyn's trump card. His eccentric pop/folk songs are charming and inscrutable. Emerging in Britain at a time when punk was the mode in fashion, his winsome pop seemed out of place and it was in the U.S.-where REM and The Replacements claimed him as an important influence-that he built his critical reputation. His most recent album Spooked was recorded with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Running into Rawlings in the bar after a London Welch/Rawlings show,
David explained that Robyn had autographed his guitar for him after a performance in 1989. A friendship was kindled and after some time in New York where Robyn was filming a bit part in last year's remake of The Manchurian
Candidate (director Jonathan Demme-a big fan-made a performance movie Storefront Hitchcock in 1998), Robyn spent a week in Nashville with Gillian and David clustered low-key and acoustic around a microphone singing and playing new songs and shared favorites.
Opening the show will be FoB favorite Kelly Hogan . We emailed Kelly to ask if she had a suggestion for a
Chicago-area performer who might make an apt opener. She offered a couple of good suggestions but basically groveled "Me! Me! Me! Pleeeeeeease!" She and Robyn have played shows together in the past and have remained friends since, so she was thrilled at this possibility. And being huge fans of Miss Hogan and her incredible voice, we're thrilled too. For her previous FoB appearances, Kelly was accompanied by stellar guitarist Andy Hopkins. For some time, though, Kelly has had a new musical partner: Scott Ligon . Not only is Scott a fine guitarist, he's also a superb singer so the vocal experience will be even more stunning.
Even if you aren't familiar with Robyn Hitchcock
And other good news! Our pals from the
, take a chance. This will be a remarkable evening.
Lafayette Brewing Company will be providing refreshments and snacks at the concert. We thank Java Roaster, who has provided this service for several years; unfortunately, staffing difficulties no longer make it possible for them to do so.
Our international concerts-and therefore this Robyn Hitchcock concert-is presented with support from the Indiana Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Gannett Foundation, Eli
Lilly & Co., the City of West Lafayette, and Learning Systems Inc.
You can help us publicize this show by downloading a handsome poster from our website: www.friends-of-bob.org
Do the Dues!!! Membership dues are by the calendar year-2005 dues are due!
Dues pay for this newsletter and provide a safety net for when admission charges don't cover expense-which actually happens pretty often. Our venues are small and our prices are as low as we can make them. Please help us keep the music coming. Become a Friend of Bob! Since our last newsletter, the following people have sent in their 2005 dues:
Chris Agnew
Dan Annarino
Deborah Axness
Gail & Alan Beck
Clyde Bodkin
Dawn Boston
Peter Bunder
Vickie Burch
Kenn Clark
Gail Dodge
Stephanie Frischie
Greg Fuchs
Kirk Hallman
Nancy Hewison
James & Linda Hicks
Peter Hirst
Holly Jaycox
Bob Joly

John S. Jones
Michael Jones
Michael Keilty
Joshua Kelly
Dave Kurtz
Linda Lemar
Tanya Lodics
Teresa Luttrell
Nancy Marshall
James & Maureen McClure
Scott Mills
Jonathan Moody
Sandy & Zippy Ostroy
John & Kin Reisman
Joe Rund
Greg Seiters
Don Staley
Frank & Suzanne Stewart
Beth Strickland
Kim Strother
David Umberger
Brian Wagner
Todd Wetzel
Lou Wilkinson
Tim & Tena Woenker
We've tried our best: if there are errors or omissions, please let us know.
(567 2478 / fob@insightbb.com)
Wanna join? Go to How Can I Help? at www.friends-of-bob.org
Other live music to make you get out and about:
The Prannies / Moonshine Mason & the Rotgut Gang / "The Prom" This year's theme: Thrillin' Cotillion 4/23 Merou
Grotto
TIPPECANOE CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY Schubert's Trout Quintet; Duncan Hall; Sunday, March 20, 3-5 www.TippecanoeChamberMusic.org
LAFAYETTE BREWING CO. 3/26 Truffle Bluff/Woodstove Flapjacks; 4/1 Groovatron; 4/2 Clayton Miller Band; 4/9
Ekoostik Hookah; 4/16 Cornmeal; 4/22 Strawberry Larry; 4/23 Moonshine Mason www.lafayettebrewingco.com
KNICKERBOCKER SALOON 3/24-25 Lane Reiss; 3/26 Tone Def Systems www.knickerbockersaloon.com
Our thanks to University Bookstore and to Learning Systems (Inc.) for their generous support of our Ladysmith
Black Mambazo concert. Wow, what an evening!
Friends of Bob Sells Out!!!
It is a fact that our last 2 shows-Greg Brown and Ladysmith Black Mambazo-have sold out well in advance of the actual concerts. Tickets had been on sale for several weeks. In both cases, a lot of people who planned to go to the show were out of luck. These situations tend to compound the work that our ticket outlets do
(and for which they take no percentage of the ticket price!), and, we're told, it has prompted a number of out-of-luck, would-be ticket purchasers to become rude and verbally abusive to employees at the outlets. Now cut that out! Be nice!
In fact, buy your tickets early! Furthermore, please support these businesses that support Friends of Bob: Von's, JL,
McGuire, and Klaverenga.
Sunday, April 3, 2005 7:30 from England
Yep Roc recording artist
plus Bloodshot recording artists
Kelly Hogan & Scott Ligon
$12 advance; $15 day of show
From Von's Records, JL CDs, Klaverenga, and McGuire.
[Advance by mail $13; checks to FoB, Box 59, Battle Ground, IN 47920; please give name, address, phone, and email.]
All-ages show
"Robyn Hitchcock is one of England's most enduring contemporary singer/songwriters and live performers."
All Music Guide

"There are many who would argue Hitchcock's sprawling body of work remains one of the great undiscovered gems of modern pop." Daily Telegraph (London)
"Hitchcock's endlessly imaginative mind has been confounding and intriguing listeners for years, beginning with his band Soft Boys n the late '70s, whose masterpiece, Underwater Moonlight, combined the Sex Pistols' angst with an Abbey Road-period melodic sensibility. Often compared to
John Lennon, Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, and poet Edward Lear, Hitchcock is best known for his evocation of an organic underworld teeming with bizarre fauna and absurdist physical interaction, an ethos visually manifested in his stunningly surreal cover paintings. Supporting his colorful verbal landscapes is his equally articulate right-hand pickstyle, which on his two predominantly acoustic releases, I Often Dream Of Trains and 1990's Eye, creates a kind of finicky folk that's not sentimental enough for the coffeehouse, and too acerbic and sharply poetic for most rock audiences." Guitar Player
"Robyn Hitchcock, the poet laureate of dark whimsy for more than twenty years, has a new album, Spooked , that finds him paired with the Nashville team of David Rawlings and Gillian Welch." The New Yorker
"Robyn Hitchcock has the heart of a singer/songwriter but the warped sensibility of a man one step ahead of or behind his time." Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll
"Always a critic's favorite, at least in the U.S. (and rarely any kind of commercial success), Hitchcock has bouncved from label to label. Throughout, his body of work (with one notable exception) has been first-rate.
In live performances, his sets are festooned with a stream-of-unconsciousness patter that is almost as fascinating as the songs are beautiful ." Music Hound: Rock, the Essential Album Guide
"Hitchcock's endlessly imaginative mind has been confounding and intriguing listeners for years, beginning with his band Soft Boys n the late '70s, whose masterpiece, Underwater Moonlight, combined the Sex Pistols' angst with an Abbey Road-period melodic sensibility. Often compared to John Lennon, Pink Floyd founder Syd
Barrett, and poet Edward Lear, Hitchcock is best known for his evocation of an organic underworld teeming with bizarre fauna and absurdist physical interaction, an ethos visually manifested in his stunningly surreal cover paintings. Supporting his colorful verbal landscapes is his equally articulate right-hand pickstyle, which on his two predominantly acoustic releases, I Often Dream Of Trains and 1990's Eye, creates a kind of finicky folk that's not sentimental enough for the coffeehouse, and too acerbic and sharply poetic for most rock audiences." Guitar Player
Storefront Hitchcock (1998) Master of the rockumentary Jonathan Demme (STOP MAKING SENSE) takes on the project of filming idiosyncratic English singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. Filmed over the course of two days on location in a New York City storefront window, the film smartly captures the musician's quirky sensibilities. Demme films Hitchcock along with violinist Deni Bonnet and bass player Tim Keegan with their backs to the window, allowing passersby to fill in the background. As in STOP MAKING SENSE, the audience for the performance can be heard but not seen. Hitchcock peppers his performance with strange little stories and observations that segue into bursts of seemingly unrelated songs. Most of them are taken from Hitchcock's MOSS ELIXER album. This stripped-down, unplugged version of his work should appeal to longtime fans. Surprisingly, considering the limits of the visual landscape, the film does an effective job of recreating the experience of seeing him live. The performance includes four songs written specifically for the film.
There are no coincidences in the wacky world of Robyn Hitchcock. So the story goes, after seeing a Gillian
Welch concert where she performed her new song Look At Miss Ohio, Hitchcock received an e-mailed image from a beauty contest in which the newly crowned Miss Ohio happened to be a woman named Robyn
Hitchcock, prompting our boy to set off for Nashville to record his new album with Welch and her sidekick
David Rawlings. The duo's rootsy, rustic sound allows Hitchcock to revert to folksinger mode for Spooked, a stripped-down strumming session that brings his unhinged lyrics into sharp focus. It's really just a change of window dressing for Hitchcock's haunted house, inhabited here by a typically surreal assortment of ocelots, hobgoblins, millipedes, self-ringing bells and the ghost of Virginia Woolf. Delightful. Tim Perlich NOW
Toronto Spooked , Hitchcock's lastest all-acoustic venture, finds him in cohorts with Gillian Welch and David
Rawlings, the acoustic partnership that has done so much to raise the profile of American indie folk in recent years.
Welch contributes acoustic guitar, bass and drums. Rawlings tackles the Dobro (on the track "Sometimes A Blonde") and, curiously, the Wurlitzer. Adding to the exotic flavour, Hitchcock plays electric sitar on a couple of tracks, giving a
George Harrison feel to the already dreamy "Everybody Needs Love".
Elsewhere, "English Girl" must be the only song to rhyme 'girl' with 'Ronald Searle' (the cartoonist-creator of St
Trinian's school for young minxes). It's suitably English, of course, but Hitchcock, as ever, has his feet on both sides of

the Atlantic. "Creeped Out" draws on Hitchcock's own beginnings as a Syd Barrett fan, as well as the sounds of those he has inspired.
Another man who has pulled like the moon on Robyn's songwriting is Bob Dylan, and on his "Tryin' To Get To Heaven
Before They Close The Door", the only cover on the album, Robyn is an Anglicised Dylan of sorts, stuck in Missouri but still tangled up in Cambridge blues. "Welcome to Earth" is an amusing tour-guide introduction to our planet aimed, presumably, at alien visitors.
Despite its unplugged, bare-boned sound, Spooked is packed with stuff to listen to. The playing is, in places, beautiful and Hitchcock's lyrics glimmer and rattle like diamonds in a tobacco tin. The songs, smart, funny and sad, are peppered with references to things as disparate as ocelots and millipedes, goblins and ghouls; there's even the odd love song or two. Fans of the man won't be disappointed. Newcomers to Hitchcock, familiar perhaps with Welch's albums, will be intrigued to hear one of the great influences on American alt-folk and indie rock of the last two decades. Robert Webb
BBC website
"Robyn Hitchcock is one of pop's great surrealists, an artist whose work has the appearance of familiarity yet none of its reassurance. While he often gets compared to poor old Syd Barrett (an acknowledged influence), this London native has closer relations outside the music world: Rene Magritte (logic-defying juxtapositions),
Marcel Duchamp (dada absurdity), Edward Lear (whimsical, grotesque fabrications), Charles Addams
(gloomy, cartoonish venom). Displaying a keen sense of irony as well as a dry, put-on (and put-upon) wit,
Hitchcock's creations - in song, story, graphics and film - erect puzzling layers of incredibility that stymie presumptions about motivation or meaning. At his worst, when his penchant for self-amusement runs away with him (as it sometimes does), Hitchcock can be far too self-conscious in his pretense of eccentricity, making nonsense seem equally glib and random. At his best, however, he wields bizarre imagery brilliantly to make stealth runs at life's most challenging problems, elevating the mundane to provocative art.
Not truly a rock musician and too arch to be a folkie, Hitchcock has recorded both solo and with a group ever since dissolving the influential and offbeat new wave band, the Soft Boys, in 1980." Ira Robbins/Michael
Pietsch
TrouserPress.com
"Kelly Hogan is one of the most irresistible singers to appear in some time. Recommended without reservation."
Billboard
"Kelly Hogan has a great voice, and she sings with a persuasive passion that gets to the heart of the songs." Washington
Post
"Her singing feels effortless and lovely." New York Times
"On her second solo album, Kelly Hogan continues to mine Americana's rich tapestry, revealing both a discriminating taste in songwriters and an uncanny interpretive skill. Unlike most indie rockers, the whip-smart, wisecracking Hogan has the pipes to pull off her low-fi countrypolitan sound without a hitch." Meredith Ochs rollingstone.com
Saturday, April 30, 2005 8:30
Wayne "The Train" Hancock & his Band-from Austin, TX
Lafayette Brewing Co. 8:30 21-and-over show
Tickets on sale April 4; $8 (advance) $10 (day of show)
Wayne Hancock combines the twang of classic honky tonk with Texas rockabilly, blues, country soul, and western swing to make music he calls Juke Joint Swing. And swing it does. Hancock is the real deal. His incredible voice needs no trickery or effects-just the finely honed chops of his blazing hot road band. This will be a night of fine, fine music.
"Hancock's voice rides high above his rapturous 'swingabilly' music, imparting the hard-won wisdom of a world-weary soul. There is no metaphor for greatness as great as that voice -- let that be recommendation enough for Wayne
Hancock." Rolling Stone www.friends-of-bob.org
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