It’s strange to be so close to where I grew up. Not that I’m never here – every time we play the New Deal Café I’m within a mile of my high school girlfriend’s high school, within five miles of where I grew up. But for some reason tonight the memories are fast and furious. New Deal is the last place my father saw me perform. A place where I THOUGHT the thought as I was playing “this could be the last time he comes to see me”… I’m remembering a first kiss on a dirt pile at a construction site. A strange experimental kiss in the park in Greenbelt. A weird, almost forced and awkward kiss in the woods by Roosevelt High. Hook ups and break ups and fumblings and cursings, broken hearts and yearning.
It’s strange. I haven’t thought about those lips in years. I’m remembering holding the hair of the first person I ever saw absolutely off-her-head drunk. I’m remembering a party where I watched a friend try to burn his hand through with a torch because he was tripping on… well… whatever it was he was tripping on. We’re close to the swing sets where Nathan died, and close to where another friend killed himself, and then that leads me to thoughts of ANOTHER high school about 20 miles away where I went… where I learned to paint and draw and first sang and first saw someone shot and first had someone try to choke the Life out of me. Where I stole a bank of lockers with screwdrivers and crowbars and where I built a gargoyle out of 2x4s and broken glass because I just didn’t know how else to process the things inside my head.
It’s a strange emotional aftermath that has nothing to do with the show we just saw. Roosevelt Dime was a … sort of swing band (?) that we encountered at NERFA up in New York at the end of last year. They were at the New Deal Café and we HAD to go check them out. It was awesome to hear them amplified, to hear them do more than just a couple of tunes, to watch them really do their thing. They are spectacular players, and I was particularly enamoured with the drummer and his bastardized kit. He just controlled the rhythm so precisely and got so many amazing sounds out of his kit – he was fascinating to watch.
It was great to watch them whip the crowd into a frenzy, especially people that I generally regard as being pretty sedate. Dancing and wriggling and hair whipping? Yes please! I’m a little jealous, I know it’s not what ilyAIMY does – but mostly it just feels good to be in the room.
Other than the trumpet player and the percussionist (who had quite ENOUGH going on) everyone else kept swapping instruments. Above, the bass player puts down his electric for a sec and switches to spirited gutbucketing. A nice little frenzy at the New Deal Cafe in Greenbelt, MD, whipped up for you by Roosevelt Dime from New York.
Of course, the REAL question everyone has is: how are the toads?! Doing just fine, thank you! They’re getting big enough to go hunting now. I place them on the ant trails and they eat voraciously twrr. Blech. This is the opposite of twrr.
