John Wesley Harding
Cafe Fontana
Maple Shade, New Jersey, USA
November 5, 2009

SOURCE: AUD-> Busman BSC1(K1)-> Sound Devices Mixpre-> Edirol R-09HR (24bit@48kHz)->WAV
TRANSFER: Cool Edit Pro v2.1 (+8dB, fade in/out, dither/resample to 16bit@44.1kHz)-> CD Wave Editor (track splits)-> FLAC Frontend (Level 6)-> FLAC

Recorded and transferred by Bill Holtzheimer

SETLIST (101:42):
01. Intro
02. Nothing At All
03. Congratulations (On Your Hallucinations)
04. Banter "Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival"
05. Our Greatest Fears
06. Banter "Requests"
07. Kiss Me, Miss Liberty
08. Here Comes The Groom
09. Negative Love
10. Banter "Hairdresser Puns"
11. People Love To Watch You Die
12. Our Lady Of The Highway*
13. Your Mind's Playing Tricks On You*
14. God Lives Upstairs*
15. Darwin
16. Goth Girl
17. I Can't Get High
18. The Red Rose And The Briar
19. Bob Dylan's Dream¹

***ENCORE***
20. Banter "Vampires"
21. The Secret Angel
22. If You Don't Want My Love²*

¹Bob Dylan cover
²John Prine cover

John Wesley Harding - Vocals & guitar
*Megan Reilly - vocals

NOTES:
From the JWH tour diary:

A remarkable and rather odd night at the Cafe Fontana.

To start with, my guitar, with which I rendezvous-ed in Philadelphia, was broken. I even went out to buy a soldering iron ('soldering' is a very hard word for an Englishman to pronounce and be understood: probably because in England we pronounce all the letters, including the 'L') to mend the guitar - I'm no handyman but this is a do-able task, and I was last spotted managing the same situation before a gig at The Bottom Line many years ago. (The battery falls out of the guitar, generally when being handled as plane luggage. Occasionally this happens with enough force to detach the battery entirely, breaking the wires. Once every five years. Well done, Virgin America.) Anyway, a soldering iron wouldn't do this time (though a guitar shop in Durham today might be able to) so I had to play with a broken guitar - the guitar itself was fine, but the electrics were bust, so I couldn't amplify it, meaning that I had to play into two microphones. Firstly, my guitar of 21 years is not a very great sounding acoustic guitar; secondly, playing into two mics and all that requires (standing still, for one thing, and actually aiming the guitar into its microphone, for another) requires a little practice that I hadn't had, and have tried to avoid, all my life. Anyway, considering all this, and not even considering it, the gig was good - at least I was able to go on a lengthy exploration into what it might have been like listening to Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festivals before acoustic guitars plugged in at all. And if my guitar doesn't get mended, who knows: I might do it again tonight.

So the audience witnessed something unique. Whether it affected the song-choices I can't really say, though I think it made me play harder on the strings. All that aside, the gig was quite strange - to start with, we were in a banquet room, a very cold banquet room with Marie Antonoinette type chairs, and doric columns, and fake statues, above an Italian restaurant. In fact I'll just list a few odd things: our chaperone to and from the dressing room, Buster, was a large, white-bearded man, wearing red and green, who was quite obviously waiting for the christmas season to begin so he could give presents to some children - he later told me that he'd never worked at Macy's because he had his own beard, whereas Macy's like their Santas to be unbearded, so the Macy's Santas have identical, perfect white beards... Buster on the other hand belonged to a "Real Bearded Santa Claus Society" "out of California" - you can imagine how the members of this society look down on the baldies; the dressing room to which he was taking us was in a different building (apparently, I was offered this or the restaurant kitchen) in the same building as "Shear Energy" (hairdressers) and "Tough As Nails" (you know what that is - those two names were why I played, or why I retitled a song I was going to play anyway, "People Love To Watch You Dye"); in these dressing rooms, for some reason, were hundreds of gift baskets, as though ready to be given away at a school prizegiving; I had a steak and cheese pizza. I hope all these little details are adding up to give a full picture of quite how odd things were in Maple Shade.

And this made for a memorable evening. Everyone was very welcoming, extremely helpful, and the regulars such as Penny (who made the set-list below, and helped me out - with her iPod - with the lyrics to People Love To Watch You Die) and Bill, used to the fairly short sets at The Tin Angel, thought I played for a long time. I must have talked a lot (there was a lot to talk *about*) because I only played 16 songs, which doesn't seem like a lot to me, but the set definitely went on the right amount of time.

LINKS:
http://www.johnwesleyharding.com
http://www.myspace.com/wesleystace
http://twitter.com/WesleyStace

http://www.meganreilly.com
http://www.myspace.com/reillymegan

SEEDING HISTORY:
Initially seeded November 08, 2009 on http://www.dimeadozen.org