All about Bob

Tel Aviv’s One-Man Band Festival features Bob Log III’s blues guitar dance party.

By JORDYN SCHWERSKY
One-man band Bob Log III (photo credit: WIKIPEDIA)
One-man band Bob Log III
(photo credit: WIKIPEDIA)
One-man band Bob Log III is bringing his blues guitar dance party to Tel Aviv this Saturday night for the city’s first One-Man Band Festival.
Log, from Tucson, Arizona, has been performing since 1990 and has released six solo albums and numerous singles.
Some of his musical influences include ACDC, Screaming Jay Hawkins, The Residents and Speedy West. He’s eclectic, and fellow musician Tom Waits admires him for that.
“There’s this guy named Bob Log, you ever heard of him?” Waits told Time Out London. “He’s this little kid – nobody ever knows how old he is – wears a motorcycle helmet and he has a microphone inside of it and he puts the glass over the front so you can’t see his face, and plays slide guitar. It’s just the loudest, strangest stuff you’ve ever heard. You don’t understand one word he’s saying. I like people who glue macaroni on to a piece of cardboard and paint it gold. That’s what I aspire to basically.”
Log would be exciting to watch even if all he did was play music, but he tends to get a little crazy. He plays slide guitar with his hands and bass drum and cymbals with his feet. He also performs wearing a full cannonball suit and a full-face motorcycle helmet wired to a telephone receiver, which is how he sings while playing multiple instruments.
That craziness is just as important to Log as the music is.
“Rock and roll invented it,” he said of his on-stage persona.
“I loved ACDC when I was a kid. Loud guitar, crazy suit, lots and lots of sweat. It’s important. Rock and roll is at its best when it’s over the top.”
“Over the top” seems to be Log’s constant state of being.
He brings people on stage to sit on his lap while he plays, or, alternately, he goes out into the crowd and plays while crowd-surfing in a blowup boat. If this seems like an easy way for things to go very wrong very quickly, it is.
“I am hoping things go wrong,” Log said. “I am trying to stir everyone’s soup up so much that things go terribly wrong, but in a sweaty, smiling, dancing way. I like when people are having so much fun that they don’t care what their hair looks like. I want mistakes.
Any book you read about rock and roll or touring, the best stories are when things go wrong. It’s a guitar party. No one gets hurt. The only thing that will hurt is everyone’s face from smiling too much.”
Log will certainly be smiling as this will be his first time in Israel, and he’s hoping to party.
“I have a rule,” he said. “I will play my guitar anywhere there is a room full of people having a party. I hear there is a party at the Yellow Submarine in Jerusalem on November 7. I will bring my guitar and bang on it. Very excited to be playing in a new town and country for the first time.”
The One-Man Band Festival will take place at Tel Aviv’s Pasaz Bar on November 8. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the show starts at 8 p.m. Noga Erez, Uzi Ramirez, Danny Dorchin, Yogev Haruvi will also be performing. Tickets are NIS 100 and are available at https://www.tixwise.co.il/he/onemanband. Bob Log III will also be performing at the Yellow Submarine in Jerusalem on November 7. The show starts at 10 p.m. Tickets are NIS 55 in advance and NIS 60 at the door.