A particularly long night. Or at least it seems it. I’ve been at Perk since about 2 in the afternoon, and I didn’t really sleep much last night. Took a nap from 10 to midnight , then woke up and was up and stayed up till 7. I managed to sleep till 11, but mostly it’s tossing and turning. I feel like I haven’t slept this weekend at all and I’m fiending for unconsciousness. The night here at Perk is ending with Proverb, a very solid reggae band. I think if I was less exhausted I’d be really into them, but at the moment I’m just annoyed that they didn’t bring enough equipment and that they’re using my mics and my cables so I can’t… go… home. Home being Owings Mills. Where there’s a bed.
I want to watch television till I fall asleep. Then I want someone to wake me up and I want to groggily almost make it up the stairs under my own power, stumbling halfway, and to not remember how I get the rest of the way to bed.
The last couple of days really have been great – down in Richmond we met up with the rest of the band and played a pretty spectacular (and spectacularly exhausting) gig at Café Diem. There’s something that really lends energy to you though when you hear that the booking agent, the kitchen manager, and two waitresses have rearranged their schedule to work the night you’re playing. The flattery in that is immense.
Other than that, Cafe Diem was pretty straight-forward. High energy, push push push. The recording from the night turned out great, and a couple of those recordings may well find their way onto the Diskompression CDs whenever they come to exist (which ought to be damned soon!). It was good to have Chelsea’s Dad come out, though when we’d already been running for fifteen minutes and I was worried he wasn’t coming, I called Beau to get Chuck’s number… but he hadn’t turned off his phone, and he answered it on stage, and it was just silly. He called back and tried to catch ME on stage, but I shut my phone off. Sheesh. Silly hippie.
Friday night we left Richmond at 1am and headed out to Brooke’s place in Virginia . It was about halfway between where we were and where we planned to be and so we got on I-95 and listened to Antje Duvekot and Murder by Death and watched my battery dwindle as we headed further and further into the Virginian nowhere.
Arriving at Brooke’s, everything is dire quiet. The stars are relegated to one clear patch of sky, and the rest is covered in the glazed icing of moonlit clouds. Sharif and I both have whipped out our cameras and are documenting everything in sight, braced on the cars, the trees, the old wooden fence.
I’m not going to talk about the bird at this point. Or the cat. For later – breakfast with the band, driving to West Virginia , the Avalon Folk Festival, escaping, punchy Home Depot visits and the Tentacle. The politicians and the Perk. Homecoming.
