The last couple of days have been very up and down. Fantastic moments – my two open mics especially have been incredibly marvelous. Hell, let’s extend to the last three days – the gig at Dogfish Head in Gaithersburg was ALSO marvelous. Such a good group of people, great performances – the open mics had massive turnouts, full lists and amazing players.
Friday I went over to Sharif’s place and finally recorded the last couple of tracks for the CD. Unfortunately while I was recording my phone somehow ate it’s SD card and my tire slowly bled out. Fortunately I don’t really need the former and Sharif had an air compressor for the latter – but the compressor died shortly after we plugged it in. It was enough to get me down the street to where I could really fill the tire though – we went and got lunch, watched the tire carefully and then came home and recorded Kristen’s last bits o’ cello.
Joe Isaacs Frank Cassell
Saturday I double-checked the tire – all was pretty good as far as I could tell and that evening I shipped out to Gaithersburg to play at Dogfish Head. As always, this is one of our favourite gigs. Relatively low stress, friends and fans ALWAYS come out, the room is pretty separate from the bar so it’s not too painful to overcome the native noise threshold and they let us play what we want. Unfortunately over the course of the night one of my cables died AND the power adapter on my Zoom mixer / recorder started fritzing out. I managed to keep it working by taping it into place but ordered another adapter as soon as I got home.
Joash Lavender at Teavolve. Jocelyn Faro w her trademark smile.
In any case – Sunday rolled around and I slept deliciously late. It was an office day for me and I did a lot of band work, some audio mixing, crafted myself some new Daedric armour in Skyrim and then rolled off to the Old Bowie Town Grille for my Sunday night open mic. Even though I was the sole representative of ilyAIMY for the night I didn’t feel too lonesome – lots of performers, a huge audience, it was a marvelous night. Unfortunately ANOTHER channel on my snake went bad – I routed around the problem and wept a little, but Life goes ON. I came out to the edge of a thunderstorm and loaded out and made my way home – lightning created a spectacular show in the clouds in the distance – I had flashbacks to my favourite apartment in college – the one that overlooked the northern part of the city and let me watch the thunderstorms as they rolled in over Baltimore…
Koye Berry. Frank Cassell and Bruce Leibovitz.
Monday morning I checked my tire and it was low again – Kristen and I were already running late but we ran over and filled it up. I scheduled an appointment to get it fixed with one of Kristen’s favourite shops down in Takoma Park and figured while the car was there I’d go down my maintenance list. Tuesday morning I’d just have to get up stupid early and roll on down to the People’s Republic – but it’s the price you pay for a mechanic you trust!
In any case it was a short day at the shop sans too much incident (a good bass day though – I got to play a bit on a customer’s brand new Fender IV reissue – holy crap that’s a marvelous instrument – and a tiny hollow body electric bass) and then battled rush hour traffic to make it up to Baltimore for my Teavolve open mic.
Teavolve’s been frankly OVER-crowded for the past couple of weeks and I’ve been turning half a dozen people away from the list every week and last night was no exception. It was also no exception to the fact that the talent level has been almost painfully high, the features have been amazing and whoever’s been making the shrimp andgrits has been ON THEIR GAME! It was a marvelous night and we ran a little late despite the fact that the Zoom’s power supply finally gave up the ghost – finally the end of the night rolled around and … my tire is completely flat.
Fortunately I was parked right in front of the venue. Fortunately I spotted it before I started loading stuff into my trunk and could get to my spare. Fortunately Ash was there. He’d saved my ass by having a spare power supply for the Zoom and then held the flashlight for me as I changed the spare. Fortunately Teavolve kept the doors open till I was done changing it and ready to roll… a lot of fortune. For a bad situation it was just about as good as it could be. UNfortunately I DID take a little chunk out of my palm…
So Tuesday morning finds me still in Catonsville. I canceled one appointment and made one closer to home as I didn’t need to roll 30 miles south on I-95 on a spare. I’m sitting in a Panera listening to college kid Christians chatting about how drugs are terrible in the same breath that they’re complaining about ‘why did God give us hangovers’? I’d gotten a different impression from them at the beginning of the morning, but slowly their conversation is dissolving into frat boy talk sprinkled with talk of grace, racist vitriol, the presence of Christ, some pretty spectacular anti-semitism and how grateful they are to God for big tits.
What a world, what a world.
