7 days @ 3 hours behind
Ok, I'll try to assemble a rough version of the past week out here in the wild wild west. Last time I checked in, we had arrived in Long Beach but hadn't yet played our show. It went really well, the LB warehouse is a great space (a little bigger than it needs to be for most shows, but apparently not for the recent Tragedy show that I'm told drew 700). Our crowd was a little lower than we anticipated, but at some 150 (guesstimate) folks, it's been by far our biggest show. I got some beach time before the show with some of the Imperial Leather dudes and dudettes, but it wasn't as remarkable as I hoped it would be. The beach, Sunset Beach, isn't particularly scenic, and the bodysurfing conditions were pretty poor: choppy waves breaking close to a sharply angled, pebble-strewn shore. But still, I was in the Pacific Ocean while you were at work, so there you have it.
We would have liked to drive up the coast to Oakland, but time constraints dictated we take the inland route. We had been added to the bill a little late in the game, riding Imperial Leather's coattails. (If I haven't mentioned it before, they've been very generous in that way.) It was a five-band show with two locals and a SoCal band. For some reason, the promoter had us play second, which was odd though not distressing. More distressing was being told, as we were still setting up, that we had 15 minutes of allotted time from that point. Rushed and confused, we played a shitty 10-minute set. The local bands - one before us and one after us - each played for at least 20 minutes. The promoter iced the cake by having his own band headline. We still don't know why things went down the way they did, despite spending the next day and a half spending a surprising amount of time hanging around with said promoter. Not a bad dude, but... who knows.
The next day, we wrangled our way onto Imperial Leather's show at Gilman Street in Berkeley. For those of you who aren't familiar, 924 Gilman Street falls somewhere low in the first tier or high in the second tier of legendary US punk venues of the past 30 years. If I remember correctly from glancing at the recent book about Gilman, the first show there in 1987 featured Neurosis. (For those of you who aren't familiar with Neurosis, well... your loss.) The bookers at Gilman were kind enough to give us a 15 minute slot, which we were perfectly happy about. Taken as a whole, we played a decent set, but it was marred in the middle by one complete trainwreck and one other sloppy-but-not-disastrous song. Our performance put me in a pretty foul mood, especially since the previous day's pile of crap hadn't stopped steaming in my mind, so I spent most of the rest of the show walking aimlessly around the neighborhood. Hopefully we'll get another shot at Gilman some day so that we leave a somewhat less, um, desolate legacy.
We had a day off on Monday, so we spent it eating, drinking, and record shopping in San Francisco with Imperial Leather. I made my second pilgrimage to Aquarius, which was a personal goal for this trip. I've been to SF three times now, spending a day, a few hours, and half a day respectively; and I really need to carve out a significant block of time there at some point.
On to Reno, Nevada, where we played once again with Imperial Leather. The last hour of the drive there from the Bay area is through the Sierra Nevadas, and specifically through the Donner area - Donner Pass, Donner Lake, etc. (Apropos of which, I read a recent Atlantic article about how a thorough forensic excavation of the Donner site yielded absolutely no evidence of cannibalism, contradicting some early testimonial evidence given by survivors and, of course, the popular wisdom.) We also passed quite near Lake Tahoe, which I don't think I could have point to on a map beforehand. The Reno show was decent, and it turned out that our roadie knew the promoter and his girlfriend from their Boston days, and we stayed with them.
I've gotta run, but that almost catches you up. It took 12 hours to drive to Portland yesterday, and we spent today bouncing around record stores, Powell's, etc. We play here tomorrow night with Imperial Leather, which should be a pretty high-energy show, Portland being the punk mecca that it is.
We would have liked to drive up the coast to Oakland, but time constraints dictated we take the inland route. We had been added to the bill a little late in the game, riding Imperial Leather's coattails. (If I haven't mentioned it before, they've been very generous in that way.) It was a five-band show with two locals and a SoCal band. For some reason, the promoter had us play second, which was odd though not distressing. More distressing was being told, as we were still setting up, that we had 15 minutes of allotted time from that point. Rushed and confused, we played a shitty 10-minute set. The local bands - one before us and one after us - each played for at least 20 minutes. The promoter iced the cake by having his own band headline. We still don't know why things went down the way they did, despite spending the next day and a half spending a surprising amount of time hanging around with said promoter. Not a bad dude, but... who knows.
The next day, we wrangled our way onto Imperial Leather's show at Gilman Street in Berkeley. For those of you who aren't familiar, 924 Gilman Street falls somewhere low in the first tier or high in the second tier of legendary US punk venues of the past 30 years. If I remember correctly from glancing at the recent book about Gilman, the first show there in 1987 featured Neurosis. (For those of you who aren't familiar with Neurosis, well... your loss.) The bookers at Gilman were kind enough to give us a 15 minute slot, which we were perfectly happy about. Taken as a whole, we played a decent set, but it was marred in the middle by one complete trainwreck and one other sloppy-but-not-disastrous song. Our performance put me in a pretty foul mood, especially since the previous day's pile of crap hadn't stopped steaming in my mind, so I spent most of the rest of the show walking aimlessly around the neighborhood. Hopefully we'll get another shot at Gilman some day so that we leave a somewhat less, um, desolate legacy.
We had a day off on Monday, so we spent it eating, drinking, and record shopping in San Francisco with Imperial Leather. I made my second pilgrimage to Aquarius, which was a personal goal for this trip. I've been to SF three times now, spending a day, a few hours, and half a day respectively; and I really need to carve out a significant block of time there at some point.
On to Reno, Nevada, where we played once again with Imperial Leather. The last hour of the drive there from the Bay area is through the Sierra Nevadas, and specifically through the Donner area - Donner Pass, Donner Lake, etc. (Apropos of which, I read a recent Atlantic article about how a thorough forensic excavation of the Donner site yielded absolutely no evidence of cannibalism, contradicting some early testimonial evidence given by survivors and, of course, the popular wisdom.) We also passed quite near Lake Tahoe, which I don't think I could have point to on a map beforehand. The Reno show was decent, and it turned out that our roadie knew the promoter and his girlfriend from their Boston days, and we stayed with them.
I've gotta run, but that almost catches you up. It took 12 hours to drive to Portland yesterday, and we spent today bouncing around record stores, Powell's, etc. We play here tomorrow night with Imperial Leather, which should be a pretty high-energy show, Portland being the punk mecca that it is.
1 Comments:
lol so i hear you're spending july 4th in the wrong nation's capital, eh? maybe see you then!
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