The open mic at the Hideaway is the Church on the Rocks run by the Troubadours of Divine Bliss. It is eclectic, heart-warming, filled with amazing people, it is beautiful beyond words at times. I met some truly wonderful people Sunday night and the next morning we got to have breakfast with the Bliss. It was the first time we’d actually just hung out and talked to each other and… well… I don’t believe too much in auras but if I did, I’d spend a lot of time just wrapping myself in theirs… (the above, just to avoid confusion, is not the Bliss – the above is the proclaimed Shaman of the Rocks and his 7 piece pick up band)
Dazrite bitches.
Heather and I have been hitting night after night here in Louisville, KY – smacking ourselves into the local scene. Being from Maryland, nominally from the north and certainly from the East Coast, you get a certain impression of Bible Belt cities – I don’t know that I could tell you specifics – but you don’t expect to get to Louisville, KY, home of the Kentucky Derby, bluegrass, barbecue, fried chicken.. And find yourself in one of the most wonderfully young, vibrant, artistic towns we’ve visited to date.
Lynn’s Paradise Cafe is just that. Paradise. It’s like Baltimore’s Paper Moon Cafe but a little more light-hearted, a little more whimsical. The Troubadours of Divine Bliss and ilyAIMY join forces to attack omelettes and pancakes, fried green tomatoes and spinach. Life is good.
At Lynn’s Paradise Cafe there are frogs to Love. Giant, blue frogs.
Taking advantage of the beautiful weather, Weber and friends gather on the streets of Louisville, KY and jam in front of Grateful Threads. Susan? Yup – it’s your kind of place!
Now, it’s not the whole city, of course. We tend to be fortunate in our visitations, spending most of our time in arts districts and historic blahblahblahs. whether it’s Fells Point and SOWEBO back home or Soulard in St Louis, NODA in Charlotte, Short North in Columbus, South Side in Pittsburgh, Hate-Ashbury in San Francisco, Rocky Ripple in Indianapolis – the Highlands in Louisville is a step removed from reality. Every town has it’s less glamourous side, the unstylish grit (though I’d argue that the rust and detritus of towns like Baltimore and Pittsburgh are parts of their industrial charm) that is the side-effect of so much humanity packed together. But it’s these permanent oases of light and colour, art and music that we are fortunate enough to visit.
Air Devils in Louisville, KY doesn’t have the pseudo-authenticity of places like 94th Aerosquadron back home and like many things that weren’t built to LOOK real but truly ARE real it’s been built over the years by airmen, not artists. Cartoony murals of men and planes cover the exterior and the whole thing is an amazing labour of Love.
Whitney and Chad (or occassionally Owen?) on stage at the Air Devils Inn in Louisville, KY. He’s a pretty bad-ass guitarist with great hair and she’s a formidable vocalist.
The blues jam over at Stevie Rays had attracted some really great players. No wonder the events there attract the best talent – a great stage, good lights, dedicated sound guy and good sound system attracts a certain level of professionalism. It’s a Place to be Seen and sure enough after we played there we gathered numbers and cards from several local session players and radio personalities.
Louisville just shines. It’s a gorgeous balance of the influx of the East Coast artistic communities with the southern hospitality that I Love so much in our travels. The people in the communities that we’ve fallen into are just KIND. We’re staying with the members of the band Weber, who we fell in Love with at last year’s Gateway Music Festival Debacle. Emily and Neil and everyone are just sweet as Hell – though we’ve gotten to see them for about 30 seconds over the three nights we’ve been here, they’re just another piece of the overall glow of this town.
A lot of that is perhaps centred around the beauty that is the Troubadours of Divine Bliss and the Church on the Rocks SWIRL that they’ve created. It has created an open mic right at the beginning of the week that all the other open mics have to Live up to.
Using that as a spring board has allowed us to meet a lot of people with similar tastes and cares and dreams – and they’ve been our guides for the rest of the week.
Sunday of course, we rolled into town to the Hideaway Saloon (“if you can find it, you’ll like it!”). The Bliss was driving back from Ohio and were getting in a bit later. It was almost frightening to be there without them. The embrace of AimMe and Renee was something I was certainly prepared to fall into after a drive through floodlands and swamps, grey and brown and the destruction of homes. We sat at the bar and watched cartoons, letting the eclectic music wash over us until they arrived and THEN we got the homecoming we’d wanted.
We didn’t know it at the time – but we’d been booked to do an appearance on the local college radio station on Wednesday evening. This window looks out over the cafeteria at Bellarmine University so EVERYONE knew we were going to be on the radio… except us! Luckly we caught on before we were supposed to be charming…
The next morning we all went out to breakfast – it was good to actually MEET the two of them and hear their stories. Over pancakes and green fried tomatoes they talked about their travels to Europe, their start in New Orleans, realizing their Love for music and for one another. I Love people with vision. They glow. Maybe it’s THEM spreading this vision through this city.
The Alex and Emily Experience is, indeed, an experience. They are charming and fun and we had a great hour of snappy banter.
Heather gestures emphatically for radio.
Monday night we’d been scheduled to play at Stevie Ray’s Blues Bar as the feature act of the Lovely Teneia Sanders’ open mic, but the venue ended up having some water troubles and got closed down for the night. It’s really a shame since that’s the THING that’s happening on Mondays. We called around to a couple of backups all of which said that their open mics had slowly been bled out by Teneia’s night. Finally, with nothing else to do we eventually just ate Thai food and watched Friends and made a much-needed early night of it.
The bars in Louisville close at 4am so you have to watch yourself lest you stay out every night till dawn and sleep the day away. Uhm. Like we do.
Ah, artsy cars on the streets of Louisville. It’s a unicorn for Katy and Jamie!!!
And some poop for me! Someone was telling me about how Louisville had this amazing Art Car movement and how it was so amazing and everything… and I was like… Honey? Come to Baltimore
Heather catching up on her jewelry quota at Bearno’s Pizza in Lousiville, KY. She cut herself pretty badly on some wire earlier and drew a happy face with her blood on the napkin cause she’s hardcoreOLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
Whitney and Chad at the Highlands Taproom in Louisville, KY. Each night we saw them I was more and more impressed and Wednesday night we walked in in the middle of their cover of “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen and earned the madness of my respect.
Divinity Rose is dazzling and dangerous. This was actually shot as I poked my hand through the bars of the window of the Taproom and shot up at her… it’s good to surprise one’s subject.
Heather and I performing at the Highlands Taproom in Louisville, KY. Though I must admit I wasn’t a fan of how incredibly inebriated the hosts were, I had a really good time playing to such an intense, intimate audience. Big speakers, loud, loud, loud. It was the first opportunity we’d had to play really HEAVY all week and we proceeded to rock them.
Tuesday saw us hooking up with a new friend from Church to run around with for the night. Miss Divinity Rose is a poet and a singer and excitingly also a children’s book creator. We all hook up at Air Devils, a neat little bar from the 1930’s that has been a watering hole for the pilots for both World Wars. More recently it’s been taken over by bikers and hippies in an uneasy truce. I learn to keep track of the headstock of my guitar at all times because betwixt low-slung Christmas lights and various model airplanes there’s plenty of hazards to get tangled in. I lost some hair to a Spitfire and nearly became illuminated by a string of wires stripped bare by similar accidents. At Air Devils we begin making repeat customers of (and become repeat audience members of) a couple of the other local artists. Whitney and Chad are a couple performing hard-driving country tunes that we’d met at Church on the Rocks, Marcus Danielson is simply a spectacular guitarist that we’d seen Sunday night at a pizza place called Bearno’s in the midst of a funky jam band, Homney and Griff (?) are an eclectic older couple who show up in their Volkswagon minibus and hand out spoons to play. I didn’t find out for another night (and neither did she) but Divinity Rose is a pretty hot spoons player. It’s been a recurring theme of the trip.
Marcus Daniels is a dazzling player, shifting from shred to flamenco and back again with dazzling proficiency. I was really flattered that he Loved us in return.
Heather and Thomas jamming at the end of the night at the Highlands Taproom. He was INTENSE and friendly and really enjoyed us as well. It’s awesome to have someone really, truly rocking out to your tunes.
After Air Devils we’d been invited to drop by and crash the blues jam at Stevie Rays. I was nervous about that because , in my experience, blues jams don’t like being crashed. Between Rose’s advocacy, Teneia’s recommendation and the actions of the owner we do end up on stage and we end up being well-received, but we spent about an hour thinking
we weren’t going to play, just sitting back and watching people jam. Unlike a LOT of other similar events, these players were pretty awesome. Some great voices, a really good sax player, a great jam over all. I’d have been happy to just sit and watch. I’m not complaining about playing – it’s just one of those increasingly rare moments when I was completely content to just watch other musicians romp on stage.
For whatever reason, though Rose is great in a lot of ways, she’s NOT omniscient on the subject of open mic start times. Wednesday night finds us meeting up back at Bearno’s Pizza’s singer/songwriter open mic with hours to kill. We sat and ate pizza and Heather made jewelry and much shit was shot. Rose is a fellow raptor and there’s a level of evil rapport there that I’m enjoying a LOT. Bearno’s is an awkward space, sort of strangely compacted and Heather breaks a string RIGHT before we hit the stage and has to
borrow the host’s guitar. It’s a bizarre set up, with half the audience behind us and the other half peering at us through little gaps between the PA and the walls. Bright blue eyes peek over the head with rapt attention as we play and after our set we sell the owner of those eyes a CD and make a couple of new friends including a guy named Thomas who is like the second coming of Bill Shill.
We get out of Bearno’s by midnight and head over to the Highlands Taproom. though the open mic has a reputation of being really laid back with relatively few participants, the night is absolutely packed. I don’t want to flatter myself, but frankly the place is filled with artists that we’ve met at other venues over the course of the week and the Taproom has been on our schedule that whole time and. none of these people USUALLY come to the Taproom. I think they’re not necessarily there FOR us but I have the feeling we’ve set things in motion for this to be a crowded night. Homney and Griff are there as are Whitney, Chad and Marcus, Thomas has followed us over as well. By the time we’re playing (close to 2am) the place is a little quieter and I’m actually getting a chance to MEET some of these people. My impressions of Louisville and its denizens are reinforced and I really, really like the people I meet here. Good people. Good players.
After the bar I end up running around in the local supermarkets and then off into Cherokee Park till 5am. It’s a good time had, but somewhere my internal clock and personal time table for sleep is being lined up, beaten badly and finally shot.
At the Highlands Taproom everyone gets their own mug. The walls are covered in them – and they’ve recently reorganized them and the night was punctuated with people excusing themselves and leaning here and there and everywhere and peering at the walls, TRYING to find their mug…