Adopt a one-man band from Portugal

My old friend Fernando Pinto got in touch with me yesterday about a one-man band from Portugal that he manages called The Legendary Tiger Man. Dude is coming through in June and looking for a gig. I passed word on to Brett Underwood at The Tap Room and Fred Friction at Iron Barley, but also promised Fernando I would blog about this opportunity, in case some other local promoter or band guy shows interest.

No promises, but if the (now somewhat distant) past is any indicator, good things could come from working with Fernando. He used to book my old band Enormous Richard onto great bills in New Haven, Connecticut. Thanks to him, we played with Flat Duo Jets and Blood Oranges, and would have played with the Jody Grind, but they had a fatal accident on the way to the gig.

New Haven also was home to my very favorite road galpal from all my years on the road, an open heart with an open bed named Kelly Lynch, but she moved to Alaska to work on a fishing boat, and New Haven meant a whole lot less to me after that.

Legendary Tiger Man comes advertised as "a one-man band show following the tradition of the roots and original blues from the Mississippi's Delta, where the bluesmen performed playing and singing alone, and improvising rhythms in the dance halls of the Deep South."

Sounds like the idealized portrait of a Portuguese dreamer, but great things come when European fanboys take a ride on a halfcocked fantasy of the blues. I've kicked down some of the dusty roads that Legendary Tiger Man (aka Paulo Furtado) dreams about. I spent part of an afternoon in the Hill Country of Mississippi, on Yellow Dog Road in Senatobia, with a one-man band called One String, after his instrument, which had, you guessed it, only one string. 

At the time, One String felt that music was passing him by. He was hoping that a new cover song, "Happy Birthday," might bring him some new work playing local birthday parties. The kids weren't standing still for him at country picnics, they were walking the road with hip-hop in their heads, and the grown folks at Junior Kimbrough's (R.I.P.) jukejoint wanted something with much more nasty oomph than his one string could provide.

As for Legendary Tiger Man, we are told he is ex-Tédio-boys and Wraygunn and that his instrumentation is a bit more detailed than that of One String: kick, hi-hat, kazzoo and guitar. That's him looking at the naked lady in the image, drawn from his MySpace page, where you can contact him; or email my buddy Fernando Pinto.