September 6th, 2010.

I remember falling asleep to the gentle grind of the tape player, hoping that the soft thud of the auto-reverse wouldn’t wake me. After recording for 45 minutes on one side and nearly-silently flipping over for another 45, the sharp SNAP click of the cassette snapping off WOULD be enough to wake me, and so one of my mother’s emery boards usually found its way towards being wedged under the keys to soften the blow. Some nights I even rolled with one of those greatest of prizes… a 120 minute Memorex!

All in all, this weekend was a high-mileage sample of insanity. The previous Sunday we’d played with White Rose Confession in Connecticut and then driven home to play a couple of shows in Frederick, MD – both nights at Brewer’s Alley. The first night was a showcase with our favourite twins, Michael and Matthew of Transcendent Third. The second night was our first-Tuesday show, a leisurely bar gig. By Thursday we were back on the road at Milkboy Coffeehouse in Philadelphia with Seth Horan. We wandered around the city with Seth, had an incredible lunch (free, thanks to dubious connections!) at an incredible restaurant where we were treated like VIPs (“Would you like to tour the kitchens now?) and a sadly underpopulated show. The next night we played in Connecticut and then drove all the way back home after the gig. We got back, exhausted, at around 5am. However, we had an incident with a rooster that convinced us we were probably in the right place at the right time. Above is Thor and his human at a truck stop somewhere north of the New York State line.

And thus it was that rob recorded the Sunday night Live concert series most every Sunday night after he went to bed. Through much of high school it introduced me to how familiar tunes by Led Zeppelin, Ozzie Osborne, Queensryche, Judas Preist – whoever was featured that week – could sound so dramatically different in a Live setting. Long before my first stadium rock show (Van Halen on their F.U.C.K. tour with Alice in Chains) I was fascinated by the ferocity of the chanting crowd, the susurration of tens of thousands of human bodies and feedback reverberating through huge spaces. By the time I saw Metallica Live for the first time, I already knew to chant “DIE! DIE!! DIE!!!” through the bridge of Call of Ctulu and that there would be an immense drum duel in the middle of the show.

We got home to perform the next day at the Town Green in Old Town Bowie, MD. We had a lot of surprises in the audience, including my old friend Syl Smith (from Chimaera’s Bridge) and Deanne Carroll, our friend from Wilmington, NC.

This entire Labor Day weekend 98 Rock has been doing non-stop broadcasts of concerts. I’d forgotten how cool it was to hear these unreleased shows – not simply the Live CDs that artists pour over, picking and choosing the finest moments over the course of a year’s tour, but sloppy, mostly-house-mix, wow-he-fucked-that-note performances. Stupid, incomprehensible exhortations to unknowable acts. Long strings of bleeped out unknowable desires….. I LOVE Live CDs. The Indigo Girls’ “Back on the Bus Y’All” is one of the finest discs out there, along with Dave Matthews’ “Listener Supported” and Ani Difranco’s “Living in Clip”. Bon Jovi should perhaps not show off where his voice goes Live, and there are a couple of releases out there that are just downright embarrassing, but what we’re listening to right now has a bootleg feel. It’s more a reminder of the passed-hand-to-hand-to-hand-dubbed-and-redubbed “I GOT THIS TAPE FROM MY FRIEND IN GERMANY!” copies of copies of copies of Ministry that my friends prized so greatly in high school. A reminder of my friend Chris’ great success of recording Fugazi in a crowded church basement, and his later downfall when the security guard at that Van Halen show said “no, I DON’T believe you’re that happy to see me” and took his recording-ready Walkman out of his pants.

*a great shot of us talking through the setlist before our set on the Lyrikplatz at Bethlehem’s Musikfest. This was shot by a photographer from the Lehigh Valley….*

Made me nervous as Hell – I was carried a switchblade that night – cause, you know we THOUGHT we were looking for trouble…

While performing at Musikfest in Bethlehem, PA I met someone else who rolls with a pink capo! Meet Maura Jensen – formerly of Boston, MA – currently moving to Baltimore, MD. We’re looking forward to having her as a local.

Amazing (if occasionally embarrassing) moments are caught. The gunshot as someone tries to kill the singer of Rage Against the Machine – and he never misses a beat when he falls over a monitor. Hearing Ani start a song in entirely the wrong key. Realizing that an excitable Lars Ulrich really CAN start a metal anthem FAR too fast and seeing that the lead guitarist from Korn really CAN’T keep up with Kirk Hammett. I hope that artists never clamp down so much that we ever think that they’re infallible.

Tonight is a different generation of artists: though Ozzie’s still in the lineup (we had to turn him off because he just doesn’t do the whole “singing in key” thing anymore) and Pearl Jam’s frenetic 2009 show highlights much of the material I grew up on, it’s cool to hear new favourites for the first time like “The Crowing” from Coheed and Cambria burning forth from the speakers…. The singer’s vocal is a full octave lower than how he performs it on the CD and the audience struggling to sing along as the band rips through it at least 50% faster. Disturbed is up next and though I’ve heard they’re terrible Live, I’m curious.

*I was REALLY excited to see the Red Elvises and we forced our exhausted bodies to make it through the day to see them!*

And so last night I set Audacity to record from an internal audio source direct to 320kbs mp3, tuned the built-in FM receiver on my laptop, adjusted the USB antenna, and fell asleep after muting the speakers and hoping the whole thing didn’t crash.

Stone Temple Pilots? Even with all the vagaries of Live performance, I’ll still NEVER want lipsynching.