Someone posted this to unclevinty.com’s facebook page. Cool!

Nearly There What Are You Gonna Do Tomorrow by AirshipAl

In a surprising and delightful turn, I received in the mail a recording of Vinty playing an hour-long concert on TVOntario’s Nightmusic in 1976. The quality of the recording and the performance are great. Many of the songs are new to me. This is really pretty wonderful stuff. Thank you, anonymous fan!

Live Uncle Vinty concert, Nightmusic, TV Ontario, 1976 from unclevinty.com on Vimeo.

The video is also on YouTube, where it’s broken up into bite-sized chunks.

A long-time Vinty fan, name of Bish, recently sent me a pile of Vinty CDs, a VHS tape and a couple of color copies. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only had time to post one album, but post it I have. Apparently, it’s a recording from Vinty’s time with Those XCleavers, a Milwaukee band with which I was not previously familiar. It’s labeled “Lost Rehearsal,” but it sounds great.

Download UV and Those XCleavers Lost Rehearsal

I thought I’d convinced the web server to stop asking for a username and password, but apparently I have not. I’ll give it another try, but in the meantime you can use login “plants” and password “animals.”

More to come!

A couple of UV fans from out there on the intertubes have stumbled on this site and sent me pictures and mp3s. Their contributions have been languishing on my hard drive for months, and I’m sorry for it. I finally found a few minutes and …

Pictures, press clippings and a hand-written note from Rich are up on flickr:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

And two new (to me) recordings from Richard are at unclevinty.com/downloads. The double-secret login and password are “plants” and “animals.”

Huge thanks to Rich and Richard!

A side note: I’m closing a few of the older posts to comments. The spam-to-ham ratio on them is sort of shocking.

On a sad anniversary, a poem by a friend. We miss you, Uncle Vinty.

Through Those Colors
for Vinty, dying of AIDS

“Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.”
– Paul Simon

In your world the moon
was a man, its full silver face
sprouting thousands of stars
that tumbled down to you
like great, bright hands
to touch your eyes and fill
your head with music.

Your fingers unfurled to touch
thousands of keys—dreams
you left walking one step
behind—the sounds and colors
of the times you were in love,
you were an animal, you were
lost in someone else’s story. And
the words and notes you held out
like offerings—cupped and bright
in your hands.

Your face is star-dappled
with the reds of the last lights of life,
your finger bones surfacing
in your skin, your eyes deep back
into a head of visions, your voice
burrowing its way up out
of a throat of coughs to emerge
like the single color in a room—
the anchor line, the melody.

And I gather up my words like wildflowers—
trying to say anything but goodbye—
until language fails me and the colors
fall from my hands like the last
breaths of stars that never, never land—the moon
looking down at me with the face of a man,
letting me down into the music of tears—
its arms stretching out, going
straight ahead forever.

Brittney Corrigan
Copyright 1994. All rights reserved.

I’ve got a few UV songs available for download here: a couple of vintage live tracks and “Uncle Vinty’s Family Album.” Since I don’t really have any right to distribute these, I’m going to refrain from publishing the URL. But drop me a note (webmaster at unclevinty.com) and I’ll gladly send you the URL and the login/pw.

If you’ve got any Vinty recordings (or video) that you’d be willing to share, please contact me. That goes for photos, posters, stories–whatever.

From page 2A of a newspaper dated October 24, 1973

I took this picture in, of all places, a cemetary out 99W from Tigard where I lived at the time. There are several others; I’ll post them soon.

[Note from Admin: post closed to comments 2009/11/07 due to alarming quantity of comment spam]

I found this pic on a Leica forum with the caption that’s now the title of this post.

Image by Brent Nicastro. Posted with permission.

[Note from Admin: post closed to comments 2009/11/07 due to alarming quantity of comment spam]