The weather’s changing and it’s delicious. Saturday night we played at the Raw Spirit Festival and it was the last day of the summer’s heat, or so I pretend. The Raw Spirit Festival was fun, but slow. I hate things that run late, it frustrates me and makes me feel like I have no control over my Life. That day it was still too hot and we were playing on the OTHER side of the gigantic field… walking with all the gear, hauling drums and guitars and such not. The carts all seemed to be on the wrong side of the festival – we loaded into the green room and then… waited. And waited. We got to start about an hour late.
The actual show was fine – even though we were, as a three-piece – kind of CHALLENGED trying to follow after an 8-piece hip hop band. I was disappointed at that. Though the Love Peace Project of Baltimore City was a spectacular show, our original contract had us as the first band on our stage, with slightly bigger bands getting up after us, culminating in the dazzling Telesma at the end of the night. Good schedule!
A surprise last Thursday came in the form of Brennan’s band, Petal Blight dropping in to my open mic at Java Mammas. Unfortunately they didn’t bring their theraminist (theramineer?) so they didn’t get a change to talk RFs and antennae with Kitsch (or take advantage that a local newspaper reporter was there doing a story on theramins) – but they probably wouldn’t have gotten along in any case. You KNOW how theramin players are! After the open mic, saying our goodbyes – the next night Heather was opening with Dar Williams and she was nervous about it. I’ve never seen her work on a set so hard. Afterwards I heard it went really, really well – but the night before my job was to give her much moral support and send her on her way…
Having an acoustic trio going up after an 8-piece hip hop band, dropping the volume and overall level of bass by about half? Bad schedule. Sigh. We stared off into the darkness surrounding the stage, unable to see anything but light up hula hoops – the only evidence that people were watching came in-between the songs as the crowd responded. Unfortunately, as I’ve discovered before, without someone to FOCUS on in the crowd, I have a LOT of trouble speaking and sort of just bumbled through the talking parts of the set.
However, after Heather left, a bunch of us hung out on the porch of Java Mammas well into the night jamming and playing lots of different tunes. An unfortunate amount of Evanesence was perpetrated, but I enjoyed the rest of it. I got to sit and practice playing with a pick and since Rick had broken a string on my Alvarez, I also got to use that as an excuse to play everyone ELSE’S guitar! Except Ash’s. His Ibanez is right for HIM but it doesn’t get along with me. At all. ] ] … And then the rains came… Ashraf Dawod barely escaped the deluge! Being Of the Desert, he was greatly displeased… … Ana, on the other hand, was THRILLED! Much dancing ensued… And eventually of COURSE I got dragged into it. I was greatly bedraggled. It reminded me of dancing on picnic tables in my bathrobe in thunderstorms back in college.
Still, we put out a lot of energy, a lot of passion. We are a renewable energy source run on attention-based synergy, and I passed my growl to Rowan who passed his pounding to Heather (hehe) who passed it all to the darkness which gave us… not much, really, but we had each other.
Exhausted, we head home and as always when leaving that particular fairground (same place as the Faerie Festival) we’re struck by thunderstorms and heavy rains. I’m sure the Raw Spirit folks were enjoying the downpour even as the musicians scrambled to cover their gear, but I think I was glad to be out of it.
Sunday however – had the mark of autumn. It was the first weekend of the Renaissance Festival and I ALWAYS associate that with the coming of fall. However, we were playing at Hightopps, a huge bar / restaurant in Timonium, MD across the way from the Maryland Fair. We got to play the sun down, watching people on the Ferris wheel, a couple of fans gathered up close. It was sort of a weird space with fans directly BEHIND our heads blowing our hair forward. When my own ponytail holder elastic thingie broke I ended up having to ask for one from the audience to keep from swallowing tonnes of my own hair.
| It was gross.But a good show. And more importantly, the weather has slunk down to the 70s, 50s at night and for the first time since last winter, we slept with the windows open. I got mosquito bites. |