August 5th, 2007.

What can I say? I Love White Rose Confession. Fridays really, really suck, but I LOVE White Rose Confession.

This past Friday was truly a day from Hell – one of those days where the moment you get up (late) everything’s already going wrong at full tilt and it never, ever turns around..

I woke up (late) to a message from Mike of White Rose Confession saying that they were stuck on the side of the road, still in Connecticut. Their truck had broken down, and with an eight hour drive ahead of them, a dead vehicle and nine hours to show start, they were almost definitely going to be late, and quite probably going to miss the show.

The hits were rapid after that – right after Heather finished the posters for the 8.13 Festival at College Perk (on 8.11), one of the artists dropped off the roster. As I’m trying to send messages out to artists to fill the slot, our internet slowly sputters and dies, WITH the cable as a whole… my computer slows and stalls, chugging over simple things like email and browser windows… the show at College Perk was uninteresting without White Rose… I don’t really like playing the Perk if we’re playing indoors – not for a full show – I mean, it’s just too small. Cramped and sweating, we play too long with too little attention to our watering needs, make about $20 and make our way home, sweaty, tired and discouraged…

But we roll up at EXACTLY the same moment as White Rose Confession shows up in Owings Mills and everything turns around. I Love their presence – Mike is just one of the funniest people I know, Ari one of the sweetest and their whole little crue one of my favouite groups of people.

We hang out in the basement till 3 or 4 in the morning, slowly dropping off and retreating to our beds, quoting movies and joking and throwing accents and impersonations at one another. I Love them, but I’m so tired…

Today, drama continued. Again, the first thing we wake up (late) to is bad news. The WRC friend who drove out to deliver the backup truck to them had gotten pulled over on the way home, and the officer saw fit to impound the car. Money has to be wired back home to Connecticut ASAP to avoid further charges – Heather and I never have to wire money anywhere – we sometimes do money orders from the post office, send money home that way… but most of the time we operate on a cash basis and don’t have to deal with any sort of crap like that. Begin the hunt for a Western Union.In this day and age, there is absolutely no reason why sending money should be this much trouble – we have Paypal, all sorts of little internetty kind of methods – but Western Union it HAD to be… we went to four locations before we found one who’s machines were working. It took several hours before we actually found a way to send money to Connecticut, at which point it was time to go play a show…

We were really, really worried about the show. Knowing that it was going to be relatively easy to get people out to Friday night’s College Perk gig, we had already been focusing our efforts on getting people out to the After Deck – but the After Deck itself was something of a mystery. After plans had fallen through with a couple of other venues and larger bands (you know, the ones that are too big to have to give you prompt answers?), we’d really been flailing to find a show for the night. Heather finally landed the After Deck in Pasadena, MD. I knew the area but not the bar and we worried about what we were walking into right until we walked into it.

The After Deck turned out to be a pretty nice bar populated by friendly people, a big stage, a big dance floor… as we FILLED the far end of the bar with equipment, we realized that there truly was NO crossover between White Rose and ourselves – even our sound equipment was pretty specialized. Rowan rose to the occassion and really was responsible for wiring everything together… though it took us FOREVER to set up (we got there half an hour early and started about half an hour late), we kicked it off with Locomotive Breath and never looked back.

It’s always a really amazing feeling when we manage to show some of our out-of-state friends the full band – whenever we’re NOT playing with Sharif and Rowan, WE at least know what’s missing, and miss it intensely. Though most of our fans scattered across the country only ever see the duo, reducing the four-piece to some figment of CD recording, we know what they SHOULD be hearing. Most people are won over by Heather and I – but when I finally get to expose them to the full-out monster, it’s like letting them see the rest of the painting.

THIS is what I MEANT.

upComing & inComing

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