June 16th, 2011.

We’re departing Columbus, OH and the city expressed its displeasure with a great downpour from the skies.  The heavens have opened and sent upon us a great deluge.  Thunder is rolling over Placebo on the stereo and the streets are running with people running for shelter.  We are full of New Orleanian cuisine and topped off with chocolate dainties and it feels like a good day.  It’s not a long drive.  We’re just driving from Columbus to Columbus, afterall.

Last night we played the Drake Brothers Meadery in Columbus, Ohio alongside a thoroughly incredible lineup.  The Shaw Brothers and Eric Nassau were familiar entities. 

Great players, great storytellers, great voices.  I hadn’t realized it before but I’d encountered both Chris and Andy Shaw separately before, one as a violinist sitting in with other musicians for Saint Patricks Day and the other as a solo singer/songwriter somewhere.  Combined they are a force to be reckoned with.  Eric Nassau is a great writer and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever met.  I feel bad not knowing him better, step back and think that he must have such a HUGE network of friends he couldn’t bear to have one more, and then wonder at how he makes each and every person feel special.  It’s a rare trait, one that I admire intensely.

The other artists were all fellow roadwarriors.  Mikal Shapiro from Chicago, IL had an almost Gypsy edge to her sound.  I didn’t catch many words but I enjoyed the rhythms a lot.  I kept thinking that if Tom Waits was a thin, beautiful woman born to wear flowing sundresses with sass and verve, he might’ve blossomed into someone like this.  GB Mojo was a couple of singer/songwriters from Austin, TX who outpolished everyone else.  Imagine sahffi and her sister but an octave lower.  Tight harmonies, great rhythms, great djembe playing, piano and guitar – and something you don’t often hear: contrast and change within each song so that each tune was a  beautiful journey.  I was really blown away by them on a couple of different levels, one of which being the “writing for audience” thing that I will probably never grasp.

Again I’m suffering from my own wallflower self.  I go inside and listen, I wander back outside and listen… sitting on the pavement or stealing a moment on one of the few seats scattered around.  I’m feeling the aftershocks of the adrenaline – we only played for 35 minutes in this thoroughly amazing but overladen lineup, and I was ready to play for another hour, if only because I truly have nothing to say.

But because I’m looking around and watching I catch a moment that’s invisible to everyone else.  I nudge Heather so SOMEONE else will bear witness:

The eye candy had been stunning all through the night.  One of my own favourite crushes is in the audience and I try to soak her in so I was already receptive to the two tall, lithe, panther-like women who step out of a car that pulls up across the street.  A man approaches them outside asking who they’re there to see – they kind of brush him off, saying they’d just seen the crowd and was wondering what was going on, then stand right next to me, a thigh brushes my cheek as one of them sways to the music.  They’re only there for a moment and then decide it’s time to go. 

They don’t walk back to the car, they dance.  It starts with a twitch of the hip, and then one pirouettes – not a simple spin, but a full balletic movement – up on one toe, her other leg curls up and arcs perfectly and the other woman swirls away from the first matching the movement.  They dip and sway and swirl and legs parallel bodies as Heather and I watch, stunned.  They cross the street and open the car doors fluidly.  One woman spins into the car, the other leans up against it, brings her leg fully extended above her head and then suddenly folds, vanishing into the car.  It was utterly surreal and so breathtakingly beautiful.  Heather and I look at one another and laugh.  I’ve never felt anything so sensual occur in the middle of the street – not since Aleksandra and the Traffic Kiss…

An hour outside of Columbus, OH and the weather’s turned dramatic on us.  I Love that you can see forever in every direction and the rain’s moved off to the horizon but the clouds are marching all across the sky, letting only jagged moments of the sunshine through to us.  There are vivid, intense moments of gold between the shadows of thunderclouds and 18-wheelers and the rolling fields around us reflect what they’re given – molten and shining one moment and leaden and silver another.

I think the music must be getting to me.

On a side note: It sucks to be so very dramatically misunderstood.  Amidst all the magic of last night, there was a nasty dose of reality.  Early in the night I’d been watching a woman shooting a lot of angles of wine glasses – I’d been curious as to exactly what she was trying to capture and she said that she was trying to get the “Ohio” – she was trying to photograph a glass of locally-made Drake Brothers mead in such a way that you could see the word “Ohio” reflected from the bottle in the background, yadda yadda… some interesting camera angles were perpetrated and she finally seemed happy with the result.  I noted that she was shooting with a Canon and I’m always semi-looking for a new camera, with the search becoming a LITTLE more serious now as my current one seems to be shooting kind of fuzzily and the prices of SLRs have come down so dramatically.  I’d been looking at Canons earlier that day online but I’ve always been a Nikon guy so we chat a little bit about her camera, whether she likes it… she tells me a story of dropping it off an elephant and how it was fine despite this and I remark that that’s exactly what I look for in a camera… we go our separate ways and music ensues.

In any case, I’m standing outside watching some the employees of the meadery talking with a couple of women outside the venue later in the night and the photographer woman approaches me.  She looks over at them and looks back to me and says something like “They’re just like guys like you really.”  And I wondered what they meant and she said that bar owners were sort of like “rockstars” because at the end of every “workday” they spent their time trying to figure out which 2 or 3 girls they were trying to fuck.  She wished me luck looking at other women’s cameras and ducked back inside.  Sheesh.