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..
At the After Deck in Pasadena, MD. Rowan grinning his head off at the After Deck. He’s probably up to something. Sharif and I sharing a Moment on stage. I won’t tell you what passed between us. Heather also grinning at the After Deck in Pasadena, MD. She looks inordinately pleased, and though this doesn’t inherently imply the level of mischief that it does with Rowan, it’s still a red flag signalling that she NEEDS to be WATCHED!!!
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.
One of Mike’s primary missions upon arrival in Maryland was to go to a Chick Fil-A. I’m not quite sure of the source of his obsession, but it seemed he might get dangerous if we didn’t oblige.
I was worried about the show last night at the After Deck in Pasadena, MD. We’d never been there before, it was a last-minute gig and we completely responsible for our own sound support. That was all fine and good for ourselves, but combining us with White Rose Confession – well, we have completely incompatable sound needs and almost completely incompatible equipment – all the way down to the fact that they use generic speaker cables and we use Speakons. Wiring everything together as NOT pretty, took forever and frankly, there was a lot of fear that the Frankenstein monstrosity that we’d created would simply not work. As we were sound-checking, we discovered a vibration in one of the speaker cabs that corresponded to one of the frequencies in Rowan’s djembe. Every time he gave it a good firm whack, everything went WHUM. We ended up duct taping it together… which… you know… wasn’t PRETTY… I can spin a woman. I can keep a beat. Despite this, it takes me FOREVER to get into the groove of dancing – so I generally get bored and turn the ladies over to Rowan once theiy’re dizzy. Here’s Rowan and Ari dancing the night away at the After Deck in Pasadena, MD. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
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.
White Rose Confession performing at the After Deck in Pasadena, MD. It was great to have them come down to Maryland and after so much calamity I was so very, very glad that the show went as well as it did. WRC had a GREAT time and we were smiles and joyous radiations. Mike of White Rose Confession has long, beautiful legs. He also has an incredible voice and a growling, intense bass sound that I’ve never heard duplicated by any other group.
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.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Sunday, sans gigs to play, we took Mike and Ari and all their friends down to the Harbor in Baltimore to sample the smells and tastes of Charm City. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Jay had a camera pointed at us through out most the entire visit. Just about any time he wasn’t playing drums, he was documenting and interviewing. We finally got to watch some of the fruits of his labours – it’s going to make an AWESMOE tale of woe / music DVD and I’m eager to see the whole thing put together. Especially the part where we all became over enamoured with the Dyson hand dryers in the men’s room and filmed their useage… and interviewed other users… we got out of Harbor Place BEFORE that became a story that ended with “….and THAT’S how we got arrested!” OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Down in the Harbor is a line in a song to me…. but down in the harbour they have new paddle boats commemorating Chessie, the Chesapeake Bay Monster. (though, as we discovered at the Faerie Festival, she prefers the term “serpent”). OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Between the pollution and the sea serpents, these are the ONLY things LIVING in the Harbor – though I have the suspicion that if you were to gather those Lovely little ducklings to your chest they’d probably a) be venemous and spit acid and b) have lost their toe-webbing since evolution would’ve determined that actually setting foot back in the water would lead to swift disolution. Yup. Come to Baltimore and see poisonous ducks with toes! OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Crowbar vs Ari and 8o. It’s not even a proper battle. They look like such strong hands… pansies. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
