Week One

So the kid arrived.  And we like him.  He came pre-loaded with all our material as played on the record, so in theory all we have to do is cover the directions things are likely to go once we get to Showtime.  This shouldn't pose too much of a problem - it seems that against all odds, and in addition to his ninja skills, Vaughn Stokes is a bit of a badboy on the bass.

At some point we're going to have to turn our attention to his need for a job and somewhere to live, but for now he seems happy to potter around Hotheadquarters humming Jaco Pastorius licks (a habit I'll soon beat out of him) and scoring gigs - the kid must have emailed 50 promoters in his first two days.  Hard as I try to break him down with dirt and disillusionment, he continues to splurge smiles and enthusiasm all over every challenge in his path - at 18 years of age, he is an unstoppable torrent of Yes.

What ever happened to Hot Head Show?

Things have been relatively quiet in the HHS corner for a couple of months now.  The more astute among you may be wondering what happened to that groovy little band to which you once so heartily headscratched.

The bald truth is that there have been some personnel changes here at HotHeadquarters.  Bass Player Number One, Mr Stan Dudley, was discovered to be making unnervingly gratuitous films about fruit juice that were so off-brand, so genuinely disturbingly sticky, that we had to let him go.  His replacement, the Most Deeply Progrooverant Jonah Brody, ended up getting sponsored by the Balinese government to relocate to the Indonesian School of Gamelan and Shadow-Puppetry, where he now lives in a mango grove reading Anna Karenina and nursing chronic diarrhea.

There is however a glimmer on the horizon, a glimmer which we might suppose by the nature of its approach to be of not inconsiderably monstrous significance.  A young Canadian player by the name of Vaughn Stokes, having caught wind of the low-end deficit crippling his favorite band, has taken it upon himself to leave his home town of Victoria BC, to travel the 4769 miles to East London, leaving behind his hot girlfriend and his steady job scrubbing woks in a noodle franchise, in the hope that Hot Head Show will accept him into its ranks.  Hot Head Show has vigorously discouraged all such folly, but Vaughn Stokes has made up his mind.

We, the two surviving Showmen, have thus far never met Mr Stokes.  Since his first email correspondence with us just a few weeks ago, we have been assured that he knows the parts inside and out.  The data from Youtube's analytical tools, which show hundreds of plays of our various live videos to have originated from an IP address in British Columbia, would seem to at least reinforce the possibility.

But can the kid really play?  What are the chances of his not being a ignant little shit?  Might he to any extent be homicidal?  The fate of this band has taken such strange turns of late that it seems sensible to begin some record of this here henceforth.  As I type, Vaughn Stokes hurtles high above the Atlantic - in a few hours he'll arrive in London with nothing but a duffel bag, a black fretless Fender Jazz bass, and this band.  Surely he won't last long.