The world echoes to the sound of damp and I’ve gone from hateful and annoyed to euphoric to worried to ecstatic to damp and miserable to foot-sore, tired and slightly depressed all in a couple of hours.
Heather and I went and played the Cantab in Cambridge , MA tonight. Just an open mic night, advertising for other gigs later in the week. We’ve been there once before, but it was an atypical night – their 13th birthday or something, and so we really didn’t know what to expect.
Whitney Living in the middle of Cambridge is frequently not seen as a blessing, what with the nightmarish parking and the noise and high cost-of-Living, – but I Love hanging out with her and her cat and her quiet sense of humour – and it DOES mean that we can walk to a lot of the shows we’ve been playing. So, I didn’t bother to shower, walking even just a mile in Cambridge on a summer afternoon was going to be enough to fuck up my charming shower smell, and my hair would certainly be plastered to my face one way or another. Besides, my hair really needed a break.
And so we walked, watching for hawks and skunks and other apparently familiar Bostonian examples of urban fauna.
As is my wont, of course we arrived early. Sign-up had just started, and though normally being first is a great thing, they do everything by lottery there, so even though we were there before any other performer, we didn’t end up playing until about 10.30pm or so. Not too bad, but it was disheartening. We walked across the way to a bookshop and I picked up something to keep me occupied. Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve got the attention-span of a 5 year-old and if I’m going to be sitting still for any length of time, I need to have something to do or I’ll drive Heather crazy.
It was a long night. The Cantab is folky. Very folky, and we didn’t really fit in. As the night progressed, though were some very good performers, I lamented getting any sort of positive response for a crowd that was really turned on by old gospel tunes put to blues riffs.
As always, though, I’ve learned that my expectations are almost invariably wrong.
After a long night of waiting and fretting, we were received really, really warmly. People bought us drinks, offered to buy us dinner (what the FUCK was I thinking turning THAT
down?!!?) and bought a good number of CDs (I was especially flattered that John, a volunteer at Club Passim bought two CDs. I mean – he must listen to SO much music, and for him to enjoy US that much was really, just – a huge compliment). We also discovered that about half the audience was from Baltimore City in some capacity or another, including a guy from the Baltimore Sun, where Heather used to work.
We got about four feet out of the bar before it started to rain.
Now, I Love the rain. I Love walking in the rain, and for a while I felt pretty bad-ass stalking the streets of Cambridge with lightning flashing all around and the storm pounding down. But that gets pretty old carrying a guitar and a drum on your back through a mile of dimly-lit city streets. and then remembering you’ve got to move the car because of street cleaning bullshit.
Sigh.
And so, when we got near the Saturn, I handed the drum off to Heather, handed my bag off to Whitney, and struck out fo the car. And for a bit, the bad ass feeling returned. My boots were mighty, flaming and leather. My hair streamed down in lank tentacles around my throat. I was darkened and daemonic and strutting. So much so that I walked right past the car and had to turn around in front of the only other person stupid enough to be out in the rain. he biked by me at high speed, but was still witness to the turn – still stalking, but obviously turning.
Got into the car, tried to find a dry patch of ANYTHING to wipe my glasses off, clicked the windshield wipers to high and began the hunt.
It took a while. Everyone else had already done the parking dance, and I was actually halfway back to the Cantab before I found a spot. And then it REALLY started to rain.
