I have been sick. Oh MAN have I been sick. Today we’re down to congestion, but Thursday morning I woke up with one of the worst sore throats I can remember having, like swallowing sea urchins, a swollen feeling in my throat – just horrible. It harkened back to the devastating illnesses of childhood, the ones that add the congestion of weeping in pain to the rest of your troubles. Lying in bed Thursday morning, slowly becoming conscious of it, then the first conscious swallow of the morning jolting me to vicious consciousness.
Things are no longer vicious. Saturday morning I woke to find my sore throat just as suddenly gone. Now things are merely viscous.
Thursday was spent in bed. I got up eventually, got out to a supermarket and picked up the few things my addled brain registered as desirable. Some Tylenol Cold medicine, a box of clementines, two thingies of soup. I dropped off the rent, came home, dropped off to sleep almost immediately. The space heater and the humidifier cranked to provide my lair ideal womb-like properties – I don’t remember much of the day. Heather took my open mic. I don’t remember the last time I was sick enough to cancel out of a show.
Growin it back growin it back!
Friday was rough. 333 Coffeehouse is one of the premier folk venues in the area. An older crowd than Cellar Stage, where we’d played with Ellis Paul, but a similar reputation. 333 is based out of one of the most beautiful Unitarian Universalist churches that I’ve ever seen. Exotic construction, big stage, great acoustics. After much discussion with the sound guy, we’d all agreed to show up early to deal with the tricksiness that is ilyAIMY… unfortunately ilyAIMY (as usual) was the only party to keep to that schedule. We showed up, sat in the dark, eventually got let into the building, and then sat in the dark INSIDE the building until Heather found some light switches.
“This looks promising”. The building sprang into light! It was like watching the Cygnus throwing aside its shroud of secrecy in The Black Hole. I remember one character turning to the other in carefully mimicked zero-g saying “Like a tree on Christmas morning”.
From NC…. … to NY….
Well, swiftly it appeared that all the advanced preparation had been forgotten, and I had to provide on-the-spot input lists and by doors-open we had a bunch of audience members and house volunteers coming to ME to complain that our band was too loud.
Dude. I’m standing on a stage with an acoustic guitar. Do you see a volume control here? Do you see an amplifier? Heather and Rowan, even dropped out of the system, were still playing at half-bore as the rest of us “trusted” (resigned ourselves?) to the volume and mixing controls of our sound engineer. Two gentle sets later, I feel that we’d gained the grudging respect of our audience, but I don’t think they Loved us for who we were….
Of course, Thanksgiving is ALSO about the family saying “so what kind of music do you do?” and demanding a demonstration. We ended up doing a quick cold-truncated rendition of the Stray Cat Strut. You know. For kids. Thanksgiving is about many things. One of these things is getting that healthy apple OUT of that kid’s mouth and replacing it with whipped cream! Yum!
My mental filter DID stay firmly in place – but I had to hand things over to Heather halfway through since my voice was simply failing me. Not even Chloraseptic (something I’d not resorted to for almost a decade) was keeping my throat functional. Lots of people (including many who’d begun the night by complaining about the sound) were very complimentary by the end of the night, but there were few mailing list sign-ups, fewer CD sales. Perhaps it wasn’t a good fit for us.
Saturday was a little more productive. I spent much of the day avoiding sunlight in my lair, catching up on a couple of band things, a couple of personal things, a couple of random things, and a little bit of Buffy. Our second show at the newest of the Dogfish Heads seemed to come far too soon, and yet far too late in the evening. It’s amazing how late a 7pm departure seems at this time of year. You head off into the night with over an hour’s drive in front of you and no matter how many times you do the math, it still feels like you’re leaving late.
The show was alright – it’s the only Dogfish Head that seems big enough to handle the band – but really that means it’s the only Dogfish that clears enough space for the whole band, which REALLY means that it’s the Dogfish where we have to wait for about 8 tables to be done with their checks, rather than just two or four. We weren’t able to start until much later in the evening, which is always frustrating. We get paid the same amount, but we always feel like we’re gypping both the venue and the audience when we only get to play for part of our allotted time. The different Dogfishes are all… well… I different and though some of them want us to play two hours from our start time, this one’s a little more hardcore about the END time for music. It makes sense with their clientele. After we were done it was about 15 minutes before the whole place was an empty building.
Still – I’m always flattered by the response there. The bar tends to enjoy us, we always capture a couple of new fans, and the staff lights up around us. Even the people who haven’t heard us before always say they’ve heard that we’re the best band that comes there, the house favourite, the most polite…. Sigh. How are we gonna get rock star cred by being so POLITE?
Well. It’s Sunday by now. There’s a huge orange moon on the horizon as we head north on I-95 and the pain in my throat is just a ghost brought back by coughing and congestion. I need a new drug. Sigh.
