The Sound Of One Man Yawping

My career as a performer started inauspiciously with a speaking part in a first grade play. Well, not really speaking, whispering actually. I played Mr. Bear and I got to whisper the secret to the girl who had the only real speaking part. I was a good bear, though. After that triumph, I moved into my latency period, not appearing on stage until the age of 21 when I performed some warped stand-up as an opening act for the infamous J. Alan Throbbing Zero Hour performance art shows 1984-85. The next year I reprised the humorous shtick opening up for the great Meat Puppets at an exclusive club gig in Chicago (or was it my fraternity's living room?). In the meantime I had started really performing--five gigs daily, hawking literature and grammar to adolescents. With such a fearless grounding in the theater of the absurd, I gave my greatest performance ever in a crowded bar in Cleveland's Warehouse District. On a hot August night, I won the bar's treasured lip synch contest by lip synching to an instrumental. That's correct, I stood pretty motionless for a good couple minutes as the theme song from "Mission Impossible" played and the crowd went nuts. My confidence buoyed by that stroke of thespian genius, I was soon performing poetry all over, or basically wherever there was a howling espresso machine to drown out my more poignant lines. I did make it all the way to the National Poetry Slam Finals in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1994, where our team shoulda won, but they changed the rules on us, kind of, and we wound up fourth, I believe.

But now, well, the fans have spoken, TMZ is camped out in front of my house, and Phil Spector's trying to bust out of jail to produce me. Here, then, for the asking, is a freebie: "Big Cat Blues" one of the songs my songwriting partner Ben and I wrote and recorded under the name The Whim. Yes, that is your not-so-humble blogger belting out the vocals (though I think I would feel prouder if I were the one playing that great guitar; I'm not, Rob Muzick is). Enjoy, if you will.

The Whim-Big Cat Blues

Lalo Schifrin-Mission Impossible Theme