60 days? A good deal more impressive. 100 days? Dan, one of the teachers at the studio did it last year—twice. Then again, teacher training involves nine weeks of taking two classes a day, five days a week, and a Saturday morning class before getting Sunday off. That’s 99 classes in 63 days. Not that it’s less of an achievement, but if you’ve been through the training, I’m guessing 100 days will probably not intimidate you.
When we think of streaks, certainly there’s Dimaggio’s 57. There’s Cal Ripken and Brett Favre’s iron man streaks in baseball and football. But the most impressive individual streak I know of: Ed Hamell’s Song-a-Day in 2010.
Hamell, best known by his nom-de-guerre of Hamell on Trial, is a punk-folk dynamo, what you’d likely get if you dropped Howlin’ Wolf, Woody Guthrie and Bill Hicks in a super-collider. His guitar should read, “This Machine Kills Assholes.” He’s a must-see live performer; he gives you 90 minutes of high energy punk on a beat-up 1937 Gibson acoustic, broken up by hilariously coarse jokes and stories. He’s the complete package. Of course, I’ve never seen him play for a crowd bigger than 30 people—a shame for him, because he’s great and ought to be heard by many more people, but a good deal for those of us who can actually enjoy him up close and personal, and even occasionally get heckled him for going to the bathroom—which is exactly what he did to me at the Tin Angel in Philly in 2006.
His Song-a-Day actually started as 30 songs in 30 days. He decided to present about fifteen more polished songs he’d been working on before going back to his one-a-day routine. He explains the whole concept more lucidly and humorously than I can. Go ahead, click the link—Hamell always gets the final word anyway. If he comes to your town, make time to go see him. You might think I’m using hyperbole, but when you see him, you’ll probably think it was more like understatement.
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