Ah, remember the Usual Suspects! And family next week

Got a nice e-mail earlier in the week from Matty Knuckles, one of the guys in the Usual Suspects. He was letting me know how things have been going since I left the band upon moving to Florida.

Coincidentally, Matt wrote to me on Jan. 25, three months to the day since my last show with the band. That last show was at the University of Maryland, inside the alumni center just before their Homecoming game. It was raining cats and dogs for that last gig, but we were indoors. That Homecoming game was outdoors. It was a whole lot nicer indoors!

The last dude in the band I saw was the other Matt -- Matty Fingers -- when he dropped me off at a train station after the gig. He wrote me today to let me know of an e-mail address change and then to tell me about this video he'd just posted online:


It's a compilation of clips from my first gig with them, which was on Feb. 16, 2008, at the Fish Head Cantina in Arbutus, Md. Most of this stuff has been online before, but I was surprised to see and hear what starts at 3:06. We get a good half-minute of our reggae version of the song "Hotel California." And of course that song is now more important to me this month as I've just finished playing the entire Eagles album of that name onstage note-for-note three times.

But it was always a great number to play live with the Usual Suspects, and I didn't know any other band to make a reggae version of the song. That changed on Nov. 23, 2008, when Dessie and I were relaxing on Islamorada with a Red Stripe on lounge chairs by the water's edge, and the reggae band playing nearby launched into a similar version of that tune around 4:30 p.m. Upon hearing this, I busted out my BlackBerry and sent off a quick message to my former bandmates, although it didn't send until after midnight, when my handheld's Internet connection was restored.

This weekend, I'm doing some cool stuff.

• On Saturday, I'll be assisting with an interview of Mark Stein, original lead singer and keyboardist for the Vanilla Fudge. (I saw a reformed version of that band at the 9:30 club in D.C. back on Jan. 18, 2005, pretty much headlining over Canned Heat and Mountain, with Pat Travers joining some Fudge members for a closing set.)
• And Sunday being Super Bowl Sunday, I'll be catching an early-morning flight up north, ultimately to see my family for the first time since October, watch the big game, catch up with some friends, spend the better part of a week up there, and once again visit Aunt Rose, who's been sick for a long time.

Then on Friday, I'll be picked up by a buddy in the D.C. area and spend most of the weekend with him. I probably won't even be inside the District while I'm around, and I probably won't see many of the people, places and things I mentioned in my long litany of goodbyes in October. But I'll be back to see my buddy Brian, and that's cool enough for now.