Frederick is a weird town. An appreciative town. A good town for Live music. But a weird town. We’ve seen bar fights and anarchist skaters and orange-throwing contests. Meat market antics, dance parties, seductions both successful and failed. Vomit and grace and amazing food and an owl attack, all while never leaving our positions, up against the back mirror, behind the microphones, playing whatever we damned well please at Firestone’s Culinary Tavern.
Before heading to our gig, Heather and I dropped in at what COULD be a regular haunt, Ayse – a Turkish place on the edge of downtown Frederick that has an all-day Thursday happy hour menu that’s absurdly good and absurdly cheap, and a regular jazz band that we’ve caught a couple of times before.
This time around the place also had about five friends / fans hanging out at the bar to smile at and chat with. The band, a rather generically named quartet called “Jazz Connection” consists of a great guitarist, a wonderful sax players who seems to call the shots, a tight drummer in the back and Robert the bass player who we kind of bonded with during their first break. Great five-string fretless action, watching them all toss riffs back and forth and play with one another’s solos is a lot of fun – a good way to gear up and get inspired for our first Thursday at Firestone’s, which often-as-not can be kind of grueling.
Firestone’s.
It’s an interesting place, and yeah, it’s owned by the same Firestones as the tire place. Delicious food, great bartenders, wonderful staff. It’s beautiful, old wood and elegant ceilings. And it’s chaos.
Last night we had a number of people out specifically to see us, which DOES kind of throw us for a loop there : I keep telling myself I need to NOT advertise the gig because it’s definitely NOT where I want people to come see us, and yet one or two people make all the difference, making the place feel welcoming, whereas if we can’t quite break the ice on any given night, we play to the backs of people’s heads all night, playing while watching television commercials in-between interruptions for football.
We had a couple up front who’d discovered us through Ayreheart. We had a couple of our regular friends off to the side. We had our favourite bartenders and that guy who’s usually in the back but comes up to the front to sing along with Taylor Swift covers. We had a guy come up and TikTok us (to great success) and no-one harassed us. We had a couple of guys in the latter part of the night pushing into each other in a way that was either really aggressive or really erotic and even while the one was telling the other (who was dressed in pajama pants and a t-shirt) that he’d better “go home and put on some fucking khakis” we never DID really figure out if they knew each other, if they were going to fight or fuck. The bouncer sort of followed them around the room but never quite got involved.
It was an interesting show. The one of them eventually settled back in the bar loudly proclaiming that if everyone he Loved died “you know and Christina, this girl I’m into… I mean… she’s my GIRL… I mean… if she died I just wouldn’t wanna go on, you know?” and the other was re-encountered as we were loading out at 1.30 in the morning, talking to another drunk on the street. Eventually Pajamas told Tall Drunk “no, you don’t understand, I’m like… really really sick” to which Tall Drunk said “well, you know you need to be more careful while casting spells”.
Tis an interesting Life.
