Last night’s show at Victoria Station Café was as wonderful as they always are. Putnam, CT is home to a lot of beautiful people, and the fact that they are as accepting to us as they are is always great. We are welcomed quite literally with opened arms and I feel famous and celebrated in a land not unfamiliar with celebrity. The show is great and we play till we’re too tired for it to be much fun anymore, we wind down with a couple of quiet numbers and break down slowly to the accompaniment of freshly baked cookies.
This area of Connecticut is painfully beautiful, filled with old wood and stone buildings and currently burning for autumn – the trees are all yellow and orange and red and all the colours of fire – and to back up the visual the air is tinged with wood smoke, fireplaces everywhere are already alight and it’s the smell of Christmas everywhere in the air. Connecticut is crisp and crystalline and beautiful, and Putnam concentrates it all into a couple of beautiful square miles of small-town wonder.
We rolled into the area Friday night and checked out the Vanilla Bean Café’s open mic after an absolutely exhausting drive. We got a little bit lost on the tiny roads surrounding the place and rolled into a parking lot the spitting image of the old College Perk’s on a busy night. The sound was the same too: tentative crunching of gravel as cars nosed their way towards potential parking places. But the interior, huge and classy, wooden beams and framed news articles, decent built-in PA system, was a far cry from the Indie-tastic seat-of-the-pants flight of our old home. Unfortunately, the crush for the list was similar and we’d arrived 7 minutes after it went up, landing us a slot at 10.20pm for a night that starts at 7. Unfortunately for us, that meant that by the time we performed (dead last), the room had definitely emptied and we played to merely 15 or so tired bodies rather than the energized, packed venue that the earlier hours had promised.
Still, we made a big splash, decompressing ourselves messily all over the audience after having been packed into a back corner for about 4 hours. It was a smart business decision, but those chairs were NOT soft and I think my ass is still trying to regain its former shape.
Ass masseuse? Anyone? Anyone?
Yesterday was spent wandering Putnam and hanging out at Victoria Station. And by wandering I mean shopping at my two favourite shops there. And by hanging out I mean working hard at future bookings and pushing hard for the 98 Rock show coming up on Monday. (see below for additional meanings of “working hard”)
Shopping was a fortuitous disaster: I normally just go and LOOK at the local games and comic store, Wonderland Comics. I admire their toys, but generally try not to buy anything despite the promise of the typically high payout of our Putnam performances. I’ll generally escape after having browsed for a couple of minutes, perhaps purchasing some Magic cards which I then try to surreptitiously unpack and examine before our show… but they were having a sale. Oh – what a sale!
Get this: buy two action figures, get FOUR free! Holy SHIT! I couldn’t believe it. Everything was included barring some DC Direct stuff which I don’t care about anywho and I spent an hour selecting my future slaves to shelves. I eventually walked out having spent just about $40 on a dragon, some Spawn toys, Muftak (!), Captain Apollo and a mass murderer in a bathtub and another 30 minutes in conversation with Dan, the metal band bass player working behind the counter. The car was already packed tight because we were experimenting with traveling with three guitars and I flinched inwardly when Heather glared with surprise at the gigantic trash bag of toys I returned with.
More importantly though – it should complete my wall. Yay!
The rest of my workday in Putnam went as it usually does: i.e. I met really interesting people and listened to their stories instead of getting stuff done. Yesterday’s big encounter was a man named Myles Connor who recognized me from the posters and stopped to chat. Like many people who stop to talk to me, they are eager to talk about themselves – and like many people who like to talk about themselves, I take it all with a grain of salt, and as his tales progressed I became a little cynical.
After all, what were the chances that I was REALLY talking to a rock star from the 60s who’d also made his career stealing art and gained notoriety with prison breaks and rooftop chases? Minimal I figured, but the woman that was with him, gazing admiringly and reminding him of details here and there backed him up and so I went with it and enjoyed the stories. I figure on the one hand that someone who’s NOT done much with their Life perhaps really, really would like to gain some sort of glow in the reflections of imagined past glories – but then again – people who HAVE done great (or at least exciting) things in their prime years approach their later Life with a desire to bask in their past as well, and probably are almost desperate to have the next generations see them as they once were and not as they are… Just as some day, with slowed fingers and dimmed eyes I’ll desperately wish younger faces to admire me for the places I’ve been, things I’ve done… to evade the easy contempt that youth has for age…
And so I’m an easy sell. And I’m glad to have his tales backed up by news articles and old press clippings. Check out http://mylesconnor.com. I plan to buy the autobiography which is in negotiations to be made into a movie, and maybe I’ll pick up the CD as well since the sound clips on the website are really great. I certainly never plan to take a 30 year timeout from music in order to pursue a Life of prison-time and crime but I sure hope that my 60s see anyone half as interested in me as they are in Myles Connor, art thief, miscreant and rockstar.
Also – met Santa Claus..
Yes indeedy. The whole time I was having this conversation with Myles, in the background we were also overhearing another musical resume. A man with a long silver beard was talking about his time touring with a number of big name musicians and about getting tickets for an upcoming show at the House of Blues. He dropped a lot of names, hanging out with lots of big-names from the 60s and 70s, complained about trying to sit down with a bunch of guys to write a song about a woman in jeans…
I was impressed by the things being said at the next table and kind of wanted to strain my ears a little, but of even greater interest to me was the guy’s appearance. He was like a wizard, the spitting image of Saruman or…
“Santa Claus! Look Daddy! Santa Claus!”
I’m glad a child said it so that I didn’t have to. Heather and I secretly grinned at one another as the embarassed father dragged his child away, a child who was upset because HERE was his CHANCE! The one moment he could converse with this magical man without having to wait in line!
Life is indeed very, very hard.
