Well, I’ve got to admit that the weekend’s been rough. A number of gigs that by rights should’ve been fantastic have been fiscally dismal and the rain’s beginning to conquer my normally sunny disposition. (shut up, I’ve got a sunny dispofuckingsition). Friday night’s show in New York City was, after tolls and dinner a slight positive, which was better than I was expecting, but I was really hoping that the follow up show in New Jersey would net enough to really justify the night in the Big Apple. Unfortunately, the Barrington Coffeehouse, despite its beautiful scenery and Lovely food, just didn’t have a built-in audience and I disastrously underestimated our ability to draw from neighbouring Philly. Despite the mere 15 minute drive from downtown, there’s a $4 bridge betwixt point A and point B, and that plus the cover for the night added together to make the show pretty pricey.
A beautiful morning. This is the lake outside the house this morning. It’s sligthly overrun with ducks, but there are worse things. We took the morning to walk down to the beach. When you’re three blocks from the ocean, you HAVE to drop in – but DAMN – so very cold! No-one could’ve blamed us if we’d just stayed indoors next to the radiators! They just got to bury themselves in the sand so as not to BURN through the EARTH!
Our performances have been great! And frankly – our audiences have been great too – it’s just the size of them that’s been painful. Sunday night in Philadelphia we hit up the Triumph Brewing Company’s open mic, somewhat at the suggestion of Kelly Zullo. We had a small and mixed audience, a couple of people sitting to our side were REALLY enthusiastic (and one turned out to be from Owings Mills), and there was a couple of other really wonderful players – from ukulele’s and loop stations to Emerson B’s pseudo-Spearhead sound on acoustic guitar to the host, Dani Mari, who’s just a very elegant combination of simplicity and affectation. However, my rough count on the room was perhaps 25 people, which meant we played that night to almost twice the number we’d played to with the previous shows combined. Especially with Frederick’s gig drawing over a hundred heads, the contrast was painful.
I got a little emotional! Fortunately, last night we got to stay at our friend JJ’s house in Philadelphia. (of the Osage House Concerts) Even though JJ is off in the jungle somewhere, no doubt taking amazing photographs, the house itself has enough charisma even in his absence. His housemates are every bit as wonderful and his kitten (who has groooooown since we last saw her / him!) brought a grin to our collective face with his / her antics. The food at Triumph was also just delicious (we dropped 70 bucks on dinner and it was worth every penny), and so with full bellies and a cat’s pointy Love, we retired with cartoons and comforters… it’s amazing how simple comforts can make everything okay.
As always, a high point of touring is the pets. This fluffy monstrosity was Kitty of Philadelphia, PA. She ruled the house with an iron paw and DEMANDED attention, especially from those of us who tried to get a shower. 7am is apparently when the cats wake up. Fatigued musicians, not so much.
Today is the second longest drive of the trip. The longest one will be the return trip, a straight drive from Boston all the way to Baltimore. Today we go from Philadelphia up to Connecticut, avoiding toll roads as much as possible, with Google maps, Streets and Trips and Heather’s GPS all giving conflicting suggestions. I’m doing my best to make Good Choices.
Man, everyone’s got a regular gig. Some are open mics, some are features, some are actual repeat shows – once a month at some decent venue. Over time the band builds a really rabid following, the venue’s spectacularly pleased and the fans Love the venue and the
band is Loved by everyone. Great relationships are forged and joy is spread in a lucrative fashion. But I’ve NEVER been able to land a regular show for ilyAIMY other than my little open mic at Java Mammas.
But today, all of that changes!
Yes, in the grey and the cold of southern New York, driving hard through the driving rain, the General Manager of Brewers Alley picked up the phone, and had the time to talk to me, and booked the first Tuesday of the next couple of months with ilyAIMY.
Now all we’ve got to do is convince people that we’re what they wanna do on a Tuesday night in Frederick, MD. I have high hopes that we can do that. Start thinking about it now, how you can be in Frederick on a Tuesday night to catch your favourite acoustic grunge act. All it takes is planning my friends. All it takes is planning!
For Susan – some metal parrots flitting around in the brush in Philadelphia, PA. I’ve never been on LSD. I’ve never been on any sort of hallucinogen other than sleep deprivation – but despite this I was still a little bit nervous that this mutli-coloured pachyderm (painted by CK Beagle) wouldn’t still be on my camera when I got to downloading images.
With nothing to do before the gig and little money to do it with, we took to wandering the streets of Philadelphia. We encountered many interesting things that were closed. We also encountered fascinating things. They were also closed. I’m particularly curious about Life-size Jellybean Children/ Unfortunately I didn’t catch what this building was (there was a homeless guy sleeping by the placard), but it was a beautiful building and it had pleasantly friendly lions – one alert and growly, and one tired and snoozy. he view from the hungry lion. We climbed to the top of the stairs and sat with the beast for a while, just watching Philadelphia go by. Unfortunately, since we were also watching Philadelphia kind of shiver and get rained on, we didn’t stay up with the lion for very long.
When we first kicked off our Road Warrior Lifestyle we had printed Mapquest maps to assist us. I think it didn’t take too long for us to decide that actual atlases were next to useless by comparison – especially when on our first night out our newfound friend Shane introduced us to Microsoft Streets and Trips. Despite it’s lineage, this is an uberfine product, only causing difficulty with newer housing developments that weren’t in its database, or new exit numbers… or …. well – any number of strange idiosyncracies that we just had to work around. Really, only Boston remained a complete mystery to us, and we were almost never lost again.
Once Google Maps finally came into its own, showing a vast superiority to either Yahoo Maps or (shudder) Mapquest, we got into the habit of comparing our S&T with Google
Maps, allowing us to plan trips even more carefully.
And then came along new-fangled GPS systems… everyone kept asking, “oh you MUST have a GPS then!?” We got our first one in trade for a couple of CDs, but before we could become TOO reliant on it, it was stolen out of my car. It actually wasn’t until recently that Heather’s parents actually gifted her with another one, talking to us andmuttering esoteric things like “Take the motorway.” and “you have deviated from the route”. It tells me I’m doing a lot of things wrong.
Slowly we’re learning about how I can’t see its colours at night, and sometimes you’ve got to be on top of the arrow to know exactly where it’s pointing. We’ve learned now to consult the GPS (for immediate where-the-fuck-are-we-ness), Kristen’s iPhone (for when we’re in the midst of cities where GPS signals reflect all around leaving the poor device screaming “turn around! turn around!), Microsoft Streets and Trips (for when we think both of the above are just being stupid) and finally – we DO check Google Maps before departing as a way to sort of nail the smartest route, avoiding tolls, etc.
Relaxing back at JJ’s house – the home of the Osage House Concert, Kristen battles a kitten while Heather battles her cold. Neither are very fair fights.
In general, we do okay. But there are still difficulties…
