Seattle You're a Lady

Quotes: What’s Carol Channings pussy taste like? Depends – Chuck

Did you smell that bathroom last night? It was like someone was shitting pennies. –Chuck and John

Fauna: Osprey, Hare

I will warn you now that this post will be mostly of the gushing variety with possibly no snark whatsoever. Our day in Seattle was just lovely from beginning to end. We were to play a live set on KEXP and we were late because sometimes GoogleMaps lies. The thing you have to understand about KEXP is that they were the first major station to start playing us way back from Funeral Dress on. Because of their support we actually have fans in the Northwest. So when we got to meet a bunch of the staff at SXSW and they were sweet and super professional it was a delight. Well yesterday at the station everyone treated us like long lost family members. Not just family members but the good kind with money and attractive, polite children as opposed to the second cousin by DNA testing with chaps made out of road kill opossum.

We played a four song set, got a tour of the station, and then met our friends from Wenatchee out in the parking lot, where a crow began attacking our friend. It was awesome. Whenever he turned his back it would swoop down and strike him on the shoulder. It also stood on a lamp post and dropped things on him. It didn’t hurt so we just hung out for a bit while he turned his back on purpose to encourage the behavior. Crows have long memories so I just have to assume he or an ancestor did something in the past so evil and murderous to crow-kind that perhaps this great-grandson of the original four and twenty is still seeking retribution in a kind of Corvidae Jihad. After that we went down to the Pike Place Market. Lisa really wanted to see the fish throwing. Don’t know if she actually saw that but it was an apparently rare beautiful sunny day and the whole city seemed to be outside and in a good mood. I had the best meal of the trip so far at Lowell’s, while looking out at the Sound. You see where I’m going with this. It was that kind of day.

We were playing at a club called Barbozas but used to be called Neumos I guess. It’s the basement bar with a different club above it. The show happening above was a 5 band death metal night. The only band name I remember is 3 Inches of Blood. All the little death metal kids waiting around on the sidewalk for the show were so cute in their uniform of blues jeans with black shirts bearing images of Iron Maiden and others disparaging religion. I’m not being a smart-ass, I didn’t look all that different in high school, they weren’t dicks at all, and at the end of the night Chuck bonded with them in their collective distaste for the dance music the dj was playing after the Wussy set. However, the room we were playing in was gorgeous; the perfect place to play for a band our size. The sound engineer deserves mention here as being actually and genuinely cheerful, not to mention very good at her job. So remember us playing to five people in Spokane? To end up a few days later playing to 130 or so the first time in a town, well you would be correct in imagining that it felt really good. It was exactly what I hoped being in a rock band would feel like after I saw Springsteen in 10^th grade and decided that was what I was going to do with my life.  It is really fun to get to play rocknroll. Rehearsals are fun, playing to five people in Spokane was fun, but on a night where you feel like you’re really making people happy for a little while, where the energy goes back and forth between the band and crowd, well that’s when I can see the direct line between 10^th grade and now. A lovely evening.

Finished up, by the way, with a cream cheese veggie dog from the cart outside the club that will linger like the memory of that beautiful Italian girl I met carrying a too large suitcase from the train station in Venice back in ’97.*

Tomorrow is Tacoma with a duo show. We get to spend two nights in the same hotel and do laundry.

*never happened