Last night we played an awesome room with an awesome host – the First Capital Dispensary’s open mic hosted by Shane Speal was… awesome.
We rolled into York at around 9.15 or so, and when you drive up to where you’re playing for the night you want to see lights and activity and bustle and busy – Heather and I were a little cynical about how abandoned the place looked as we rounded the corner. The only cause for optimism was given by the fact that the tv we could see through the window wasn’t playing baseball or football or anything like that, but rather Megamind.
I figured these might JUST be my kind of people.
The second thing that let us know we were in the right place was getting a glimpse of the host’s rig: home built and roughshod, it was everything I Love in a pedal board, in an amplifier and even in the instruments. Wood nailed to wood and obviously well-used. The utilitarian beauty of the Millenium Falcon rather than the pampered curves of most rigs – and the instruments in question were cigar box guitars. Plugged into a dirty set of drivers and with a stomp box to boot, the one man Shane Speal show was enough to make me absolutely fall in Love with the place.
Heather and I settled in with our chosen libations and clapped and stomped and roared with the rest of them. Out of the rain we slowly receive bucket bass players and harmonica players and guys with old Guilds – everything worn and weathered and played with a level of passion you rarely see anywhere else.
One of the patrons remarked “yeah, it’s a dive bar, but we Love it” – but I’ve BEEN to dive bars and townie bars and really, really shitty bars – this isn’t a DIVE – this is a pirate ship roaring through the night with the lights turned down low and the volume turned up. The noise threshold inside verged on the painful and the thickness of the smoke in the air verged on solid – but I can’t remember having more fun at a show in a long time.
Up until playing Shane Speal’s open mic at First Capital Dispensing in York, PA I’d never seen a bucket bass at any open mic other than my own. Seeing one in a bar where the rafter were so low that the guy had to keep ducking the stick around them would’ve been comical if it didn’t SOUND so GOOD! Mike Males and Shane Speal performing at First Capital Dispensing in York, PA. The new phone photographs in a “panoramic” format that might prove to be awkward to deal with in the Journal…
We played our little hearts out and sold some CDs and met some really cool performers.
On top of Shane (and accompanying him at one point) we met a guy named Mike Males. He exploded on stage, reminding me of those monsters from Columbia, MO the Hootenhallers. He was simply a FORCE on stage, especially backed by Shawn’s sliding, howling 3-string and the bucket bass and the wailing of an enthusiastic harp player… bad-assery was perpetrated. Talking to him afterwards (and in a phone conversation this morning) I realized that he was on a mission – one of the True Believers that music can do something positive in our pretty shitty world.
I Love and admire people with vision – check out what he’s doing at www.myruralradio.com.
We were exhausted from all the driving, otherwise I’d like to think we’d have stuck around all night. It’s not a terribly late running show, only till about 1am – but we had another hour+ in front of us on the road and a powerful need for dinner so off into the night we went.
