It is Hellish-dreary in New England. We had sunshiny skies upon departure from Maryland, just long enough for me to put my sunglasses on – and then take them back off as the skies lowered and darkened and glowered fiercely.
We pulled into Portsmouth, New Hampshire at around 7pm last night, just in time to have dinner with Dan Blakeslee at the Blue Mermaid. We got to meet his family (his mom and brother had come out to the show) and… well… you can never meet all his friends because everyone in New England knows him. But we met another batch of them… the food at the Blue Mermaid was exquisite, and we set up for the show in-between bites of absolutely Lovely mahi mahi salmon.
Demas the Thief at Jammin Java for New Year’s Eve. Oh my GOD when they kicked in with their absolutely magnificent double-bass I thought I was going to swoon – and not just because the wall of noise was like nothing I’d heard for years… it was like getting a really intense massage with some vast Swedish woman’s fists while standing in a darkened bar. They were great performers, and well-deserving of the numbers they brought out. I was just tickled pink to share the stage with them. It was the metal / screamo show that I didn’t even know I’d been missing. I went down into the crowd and gloried in it.
So many people that night were wearing orange. I’m not sure what to make of that, but it was nice to have an entirely different colour spectrum inside the bar, which wasn’t blue at all, but oranges and yellows, firey and warm – decorated with Dan’s artwork all around. I didn’t find out what exactly his connection with the place was, but they are evidently huge fans.
Hee! After the New Year’s Eve show, we retreated to Rowan’s house and hung out. This is midnightish. It was a small little group, but it was the most fun I’d had in a long, long time.
The show was incredible. Dan swapped back and forth with us till midnight and the crowd seemed to enjoy the shifts. We had a guy holding up a sign that said “I LOVE THE DJEMBE”, and another guy drew me a vomiting angel on a napkin (you know, for a drunken angel in Speaking Louder Now? – not really the imagery I’d ever had in my head… but… there it is and there it will stay).
And we danced the night away. I didn’t do no proper dancin’ – I hand-jived and rob-wriggled all the Live long night – till around 4am, when finally we let the White Zombie and Tool and Tori Amos and whatever else die down and we all went our separate ways…
Dan’s voice and persona flooded that space and I’d forgotten how powerful he was. I think I say that frequently, that I’d forgotten how good so-and-so is – and it’s not that I start off thinking OH GOD HERE WE GO AGAIN or anything… it’s just that I forget how music can transport me. I think it’s because I have a limited number of positive adjectives, and after a while I start thinking “fantastic” and need things like “fantastic +1” or “spectacular double plus” – you know, role-playing or Nintendo adjectives. I think I get wrapped up a lot in admiring people’s voices, or how they play, and when I get returned to someone who really effects me emotionally, I’m shattered all over again, because I’d forgotten in the interim how far a real PERFORMER can get into your skin.
Thumb wrasslin! Heather competes for fun and prizes at Sharif’s College Perk open mic.
And I’m using the wrong word. It’s not that I’m in Love with his performance, I’m in Love with this very genuine soul that is being searchlighted out towards me through voice and guitar and passion that I’m only just leaning to command.
Mmm… January, wet, sunshiny and freakin’ 70 degrees.
We met people who knew what Zentraedi were, who got my Beastmaster jokes… it was a very good night. Ren even popped up from New York to come see us. The booking guy for a bunch of Portsmouth venues was in the audience too, and it looks as if we’ll simply HAVE to be back in May.
After the show, after wrestling Dan’s PA out into the cold New Hampshire night, after following him home like cold, wet and snuffly puppies – we find ourselves in a dark and frozen Massachusetts town with the smells of ice and woodsmoke keeping us going.
Telling what is no doubt a very fascinating story at our gig at the College Perk in College Park, MD.
We met the cat, we met the art, we did much Photoshop tutorial, and then we met the bed at speed. The next morning there was to be brunch with many guests, so we grabbed what nap we could.
Dan Zimmerman was our opening act, and our intermissionary (?) act, and our bass player at the Perk. He was awesome.
Mmm… Pancakes and sexy sausage… and some of the best potatoes I’ve ever had. Sunday morning dawned with a continued theme of cold and wet… and ice. The car was covered in sheets of ice, the bushes outside were glazed in thin carapaces of translucent armour – the land was ready for invasion, and all the colours were all the more intense for being magnified through these glass-like lenses.
As usual, I take a lot of time to explore the homes of my old college friends – these creatures who left art school and don’t Live that differently. They’ve aquired wives and inlaws and in less-extreme cases, German Shepherds – but their walls are still covered almost-collage style with old magazine clippings and photographs and friends’ paintings and their own paintings… piles of old toys and models and keepsakes – everything must have a story, and I never quite ask, preferring to simply wander in these museums of Dan, or Sonny, or Will…
When I finally settle down for some length of time, I wonder how I’ll populate my space – some of these bones and paintings and books that inhabit these old, blatantly New England homes have followed their current owners from our time together in college… I guess my action figures (currently Living at Rowan’s apartment in Hyattsville) will provide the seed from which everything else will grow when this rob finally has a hole to call his home… and from them will sprout tentacles of imagery and form and a formidable rob nest that will finally be something I think of as my own. The thought keeps me warm.
Whitlow’s on Wilson (WoW) in Clarendon, VA. A tiny, tiny show – not much audience, but the staff absolutely adored us. Pretty flattering when you consider how long the venue’s been sitting there and how many acts must’ve crossed that stage.
Last night we played Ryan Fitsimmons’ singer/songwriter showcase at AS220 in Providence and then stuck around for their open mic. The showcase had a great cross section of performers, with Ryan keeping his head down on one side of the stage (we’ve seen him play for REAL now, and though he played hard and sung out, we know now what he can REALLY do when he’s play a Ryan show and not just playing host), Allison Calory (God knows if I’m spelling that right) singing sweet, fingerpicked tunes, and Jacob Holler performing bizarre country-esque tunes about a father being so proud of his budding Satanist daughter and drawling out fantasies about killer robots eating people’s heads.
It was a little strange walking back from Whitlow’s and walking past an office building that was always so full of very individualistic decor, action figures, plants and family photographs… they’ve moved or died and left nothing but this one last denizen…
I’m naught but a rob in the rain. I like having a camera that I can set down in puddles.
It was cool.
I must admit, I myself waxed poetic for a bit about Transformers. I even wore my Decepticon shirt to reprefuckingsent. Megatron wouldn’t eat your brain, he would stomp you into jelly.
Above… – the first Saturday of 2007 was spent playing a show at College Perk for the Open Hearth Pagan Association with Dan Zimmerman. You can see that Dan blatantly stole my band, but that’s okay, as we forced him into bass-playing slave labour. Later that night I discovered that Rachel, the woman who appears on the cover of the Fifth Circle, also wears flaming boots!!! And of course, above you’ve got Rowan just making a pretty picture of himself before performing as IO.
So, I’m really far behind on the pictures, I know. Or the text, or something – the text has to catch up with the pictures, so I guess I’m behind on the text…
Anywho, on the left you have Andy James, host of the original music showcase at the Grog & Tankard in Washington, DC where we played the night after Perk. I’m back and forth on the show. Rainy Sunday night, I expected to pretty much be playing to just the other bands, I guess – and the sound was really good for us. But I felt bad for Andy James because the sound guy was so disinterested in the night that noone noticed his guitar was unplugged till the end of his set. Says good things for the acoustics of the room, I suppose. Above is Rupa, who rocked solidly into the night as the closing act.
