Best Buddy Dave turns 26
Hey, folks. This is my best friend Dave. He’s the man. This the most recent picture I have of him (that’s not his kid, if you’re wondering). Dave turned 26 on February 27th, and while I wrote him a quick birthday email on the day, I forgot that I’m supposed to be adding to this blog on a frequent basis, in case anyone is out there reading, so here goes. Dave has recently taken a job with a new band. He is a real showman, a frontman singer who really gets the crowd going. His current band, the Chicken Slacks Soul Revue, is really great, and you can check them out at www.chickenslacks.com. They have an album, Soul Stack, which you should most definitely buy, because it is packed with feel-good soul and funk, and half the songs are Dave originals. But Dave is moving on from the Slacks, and going to Soul City, which is a few steps above what the Slacks have been doing. Their website (www.soulcityband.com) features video clips of them appearing on ABC TV and pictures of them hanging out with Bill Clinton. So it’s a big, exciting move for Dave (whose stage name is actually “Big Daddy Dave.”)
Dave’s musical career began at the age of 9, when he told me that if we started a band together, we would be totally cool. We started that band, “The Street Boys” but never became cool. We were dorks. We used to run around behind his house and his neighbors’ yards, shooting each other with toy guns, wearing ski goggles to appropriate army masks… or something. We later changed the band’s name to “The Force” and gave a concert in my driveway, for which we charged our families $1 admission fee and had my sister Gia introduce the band as we emerged from the garage. Should I find those pictures, I’ll gladly post them for their humorous appeal.
While I have kept up my music on the side, Dave has been doing it full time. He attended prestigious Berklee College of Music in Boston, concentrated on voice (he is also one hell of a piano player, and used to play guitar, though he’s not been seen holding one of those for a few years now) and soon got started with the Slacks. He has remained in Boston, a town which he loves and which, incidentally, Yoyo loves too (we visited him last winter and had a great weekend watching a show of his, shopping on Newbury St, and ordering Chinese food.)
Dave is my best and oldest buddy and we can talk about anything together. Even when we lose touch for awhile, maybe a few months (it happens), when we get back on “The Buddy Train” it’s as if nothing has changed — because, of course, it hasn’t.
Happy Birthday, Dave.
[...] Today is August 4th, and it reminds me of August 4th, 1993, the day that “Sniper” was released on video. Oh, how I anticipated that day. My buddy Dave and I were very eager to get our hands on this film, as it was rated R and we hadn’t been able to see it in theatres, being only 13 years old. I was returning from Camp Sea Gull around August 12, and so it was Dave’s job to rent the flim in time for my arrival. We immediately set up two VCRs on top of the TV to record a copy of the film for ourselves. Later we used our copy to splice scenes from the Tom Berrenger classic into our own movies, which we were always making (though never finishing). We got especially good usage out of the gunshot sound effect, and used it in a number of our feature films, including our tour de force, “Child Killer,” starring Dave as a homicidal teenager. In fact, that really deserves to be uploaded to YouTube… [...]
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