I Love the violence of the weather. For too long it’s simply been hotly brutal. That’s like a bombing. It’s faceless and passionless. Specifically the weather’s been too much like a carpet napalm bomb. Hot and sticky and generally unkind. Today and yesterday though, the weather has been intense and fierce. It’s a crime of intensity… a misunderstood crime of passion. Hot days followed by vicious thunderstorms arriving out of nowhere. Suddenly what was a low, black band on the horizon blossoms into a ripping of thunder and an assault of light and a blitzkrieg of rain, laying siege to the land as the last bastions of dry land are swiftly surrounded and eradicated. It’s the only part of summer that makes the whole thing worthwhile.
Yesterday we got up at 7am, got on the road by 8am – all to get to the gig on time. I’d received a last-minute invitation to take part in a benefit show, and since we were going to be up there ANYWAY (the place we were staying was literally 1.8 miles from the fairground) I figured there’d be no harm in joining in. Good causes, good kids involved… Heather and Kristen and I packed up the new ilySATURN and got on the road.
We regularly go about an hour and a half out of our way to route around New York City – driving through it is just folly and is sort of like walking down North Avenue looking like me with a hundred dollar bill dangling out of your back pocket: you’re ASKING for it. However, we’ve STILL not learned our lesson about I-95 in Connecticut and rejoined the abusive East Coast traffic just north of New York City. Our progress slowed to a crawl and our initial ETA slowly slide from 4.30 to 5.30 to 6… when we eventually pulled in at right around 7pm, we only had about 20 minutes before we were theoretically loading our gear onstage.
Unfortunately, the event fell afoul of that weather that I Love so much. Rain squalls earlier in the day hadn’t shut down the gig (audience and stage were both undercover), but it had eradicated the audience, and it was only family and friends turning out… probably only non-paying family and friends who’d helped the bands load in. By the time it was our turn it seemed like the worst was over – but half way through our second song the sky opened up and a flash of lightning wiped the world clean of colour and also our sound. A second later I realized that the sound onstage had gone dead and signaled for everyone to unplug. Something had been tripped by a close lightning strike and I just count us as lucky that none of us took anything through our instrument cables. It was clear there wasn’t any sort of fuse between the gear and the blast, so I imagine it was just the breakers in the amps themselves that kept voltage from coursing up into our instruments. As I write this it occurs to me that I haven’t actually tried plugging in my guitar since then and that I don’t know for certain that it’s unharmed.
Speaking of Gibson – another cool find from probably a couple of decades later: a beautiful Kona Hawaiian made of Hawaiian Koa. The Gibson wasn’t tuned up and I was kind of afraid to play it, but the Kona was easy to work on and I spent some of my morning playing the riff from Rob’s Lament on it with a steel tonebar. a Gibson harp guitar Rowan drops in to HMT too – and was checking out this badly-injured double-neck. A FRETLESS guitar neck is what’s sitting on the top there!!
In any case – ilyAIMY – the band that has stood proud as the last performers at many a rained-out event, was finally rained out. We finally reaped our karmic whirlwind, and sure enough, when we got back to our host’s house for the night, the news was awash in tornado reports. We stopped for dinner at a KFC / Taco Bell whose entire fryer system had been down for an hour plus. They had no tacos and few pieces of chicken. The soda machine died while we were there and so did the lights. We got a lot of free stuff which I GUESS is the upside of the whole experience.
Today’s got to be better. We’re in Putnam! How can things NOT be better?
The thunderstorm came and went a couple of hours ago. Hopefully it won’t turn around and head back for us.
Our friend Jade came down to Owings Mills for Heather’s art yardsale. There was jewlery from Amy Law and from Shy Lotus and books from To Boldly Fold…. and lots of Power Ranger toys and clothing and a big pink chair. Good times were perpetrated. Chris of the Honest Mistakes popped in with his new kid, CJ. He and Joylene hung out most of the day at Heather’s artsy yard sale…. OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA Before we wandered off to New England this time, Heather had a big yard sale at her parents’ place. Even I found something I kind of enjoyed and broke out some March of the Rabbit on a 50 year-old sylophone!
