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.
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