Ok, wait. What is this? It’s like… rush hour… but… in the morning…?
Oh yeah, I remember this shit.
We’re leaving Wilmington at the ungodly hour of 9am. I can hear you, dear reader, I can hear you sniggering. Please, keep in mind that for YOUR entertainment we play till 1am, and then stick around places cleaning up and wrapping cables and haggling with bar owners till 2am, and then wind down with reruns of Friends and Aqua Teen Hunger Force until 3. And we do it all for you. All for you. Man, I’d so be in bed at 9 ever night if it wasn’t for you guys.
Ok, so that’s a lie. My point is that we haven’t seen a 9 in the MORNING in weeks or months or longer, except for once when I stayed UP till then. This morning, when Deanne put her hand on my shoulder at 8am, I reacted in a panic and put nails down claw-style. I don’t think I actually did anything too forceful, but I reacted with defense reflexes and almost snarled.
I couldn’t fall asleep last night. My brain was too full of whirling images and fragments of songs and ideas and the panic tizzy of creativity. I haven’t gone back to my Little Black Book to see if anything that I went into the bathroom to record was worthwhile, and I haven’t looked to see if anything that I didn’t bother getting into the light to write is legible. I don’t think I want to know what my 5am brain was spitting out.
“Love Her Madly” by the Doors.
Thursday morning, 12.01am, Heather and I were sitting in our seats taking a Star Wars quiz stolen from a remarkably cute fellow fan who probably wasn’t old enough to have seen the originals. She made up for her age in rabidity and knew her shit pretty good. I think she might’ve given me a run for my money in a Star Wars Trivial Pursuit challenge, and might’ve even bested me in a more worthwhile challenge like some of the quiz-books that ask about about how blaster rifles work and what planet “Hammerhead” came from. Ah, if we hadn’t both been there with evident significant others, it could’ve been Love.
With all the newer theatres around, the older cinema we ended up at wasn’t even sold-out and we got decent seats. We only stood in line for an hour, and only sat in our seats playing dirty hangman for an hour and a half, and the movie only started 20 minutes late (to the almost riotous dismay of our fellow Star Wars fans). We’d already played an open mic and sold CDs to cover our tickets. We’d eaten an incredible dinner. We were ready for the wait.
The detritus of those who’d gone before us: plush divan chairs, discarded Mountain Dews, McDonalds wrappers and pizza boxes.
When all was said in done, we got back to Deanne’s house at 3 in the morning, extremely pleased with that galaxy far, far away. I could be nitpicky. I could pick it apart. Empire it wasn’t. But what could be? Somewhere in his old age, George Lucus discarded any semblance of subtlety and replaced it with a child’s glee of “isn’t this cool?!?”-ness. There’s something to be said for someone’s who’s so fascinated and in Love with their medium that they really do push it to extremes. George Lucus created the eyecandy genre to a certain extent, and I don’t begrudge him the opportunity to cavort in the playground he’s created.
He’s earned the right to do so. I do wish that his attention to detail was a LITTLE more even-handed, and I certainly wish he hadn’t discarded that beautiful subtle humour that made the original trilogy so personable.
But it was passionate, it was playful, there wasn’t anything too excrebly cuddly, and it deserved it’s PG-13 with a whole lot of child-killing and burning flesh. The flick delivered, and I had a good time with it.
Thursday afternoon (after getting up at a perfectly reasonable 11am), Heather and I got out and about and wandered Front Street down in Wilmington. We bought strings and settled down in the front window of a Port City Java, plugged ourselves in and answered emails till the sun went down.
Deanne has come a long way since we first met her last August. She hadn’t touched a guitar in 20 years before she brought us home. Heather transcribed a couple of songs for her and we didn’t think too much of it. We left her playing a G-chord here and there, and singing along with CDs.
Thursday night, Deanne hosted her first singer/songwriter showcase at Costello’s. She played a mix of originals and covers for the first hour, and then turned things over to her first guests, the fabulous and eclectic ilyAIMY.
We’re always cautious with Costello’s. Though the owner, George, Loves us and keeps inviting us back – we’re always wary of the clientele, who always seem kind of plus or minus about us. The clientele is also always different. For an elegant male gay bar, there are nights when it’s mostly women, or nights where there are mostly families, or nights where the clientele is entirely made up of well-manicured older men with neatly trimmed and greying hair, other nights when it’s young and hip and flaming and requesting for us to leave so that they can listen to thumping dance music. Oh, and our first experience with it was that the clientele simply wasn’t there.
A couple of much-needed and well-met newly-made and often-hyphenated new friends at our gig at the Soapbox Laundrolounge. I don’t wear my glasses on stage, so I was guessing when I thought to myself “hey, our audience looks like it might be a bunch of hot chicks!” But I was RIGHT! I screwed up a lot of lyrics that night. Heather says that apparently they found it endearing. Hrm.
Last night we had a mix of just about all of the above (including starting out empty). We had aimed for a mellow set, relieved to only play for an hour (since we knew we were waking up this morning at heinous hateful huit), and the audience was in it’s take us or leave us mindframe, indifferent to our existance, and semi-determined to trample our heart-felt performance with their conversation.
And then Liz walked in. We’d met her a couple of months ago at the Reel Cafe and she’d apparently been lamenting our departure ever since. She walked into Costello’s on a whim and looked up, recognized us… “Oh my GOD it’s ilyAIMY!!!!” was a heart-felt yell invigourating enough to push us through a driving extra half-hour. She’d brought a table-full of friends and called for more on her phone, and we had the place howling for more by the time we were done. A good night.
You should’ve heard the bar singing along to Heather’s version of “Sorry I Am”. A good night indeed.
So, back to 10.15am and morning rush hour, which has petered out and left us with a thinner but steady stream of rusting South Carolina plates as we head towards Myrtle Beach. The bikers are getting thicker on the ground, and the signs erected in their honour (“Loud Pipes Illegal”, “Speed Limits Strictly Enforced”, and “All Weapons Prohibited”) are getting almost as frequent as the omnipresent (and increasingly exotic) mini-golf fields. We’re playing our second of two Kickstand’s shows, worried about the weather. A hurricane of the coast is throwing a more-than-hint of thunderstorms in our direction and the skies are indecisive. Sunny enough to abuse our tired eyes, and grey enough to make the frequent red-lights stand out in stark contrast.
Seven miles from Murrell’s Inlet. I’m wondering how the threat of rain will effect the show. My brain is slowly approaching something like normal rob-speed, though it’s being dulled back down by the steady drizzel of drivel from the radio. There are a couple of gems mixed in. Some old Garbage on the radio. We saw an interview with her last night and I was shocked to hear her speaking voice and her thick, thick, thick Irish accent.
I should really stop typing at this point as I’ve run out of things to say, though I could bitch about how the Velvet Revolver singles all have a spectacular intro, and then devolve swiftly into inane, simplistic riffs. The mindless power chords of Nirvana without the creativity, passion, or teen spirit. I wonder how much of that is the fault of the band though, as it seems that modern production values really are focused on the mechanical precision of click tracks, the cold grind of digital distortion, and the dynamic-less, unchanging levels of for-the-radio compression.
And now, Hanson. Yeah, we shut THAT off.
