6/25 - sitting upstairs at the club, listening to some horrible live social distortion track on the house stereo. ewwww. sleeping in the car was almost comfortable and thank goodness i didn’t experience any weirdness in the night. got up early and grabbed breakfast, then checked out some sights around oakland. i totally made up for my lack of luck at eide’s the day before and found a great comic book store called phantom of the attic. picked up 50% off trades of ultimate spider-man, the first milk & cheese trade and ultimates #11. went and read outside the carnegie mellon library until the museum opened. spent a few hours there and then drove over to the pittsburgh cafe. due to rain, the outdoor afternoon show was cancelled but i still had an evening set to play with time so i walked around town some more, read a little more of snow crash and grabbed a squid in hot sauce dinner from a korean place in town. i could totally live around here!
6/26 - i’m at a days inn in harmar(superstar?)ville PA, i ended up staying here after an unexpectedly late night. the show at the pittsburgh cafe went from lame to fun to absurd. since the afternoon show was cancelled, i ended up hanging out at the club for an interminable amount of time waiting for the show to start. i watched parts of two movies on the PAX network. one starring lorenzo lamas (i couldn’t tell if it was a pre or post-renegade performance) and the other was a tom selleck western where he gets dragged from a wagon for about thirty miles.
the deal was that i would play a set, then this guy john (who books shows at the cafe and plays in a band called the goods) and his brother chris would play a set, wash, rinse, repeat. john looks kind of like a blazed sideshow bob. however, the show was close to starting and it was freaking dead. the promoter, missy, told me that there were people on the patio and maybe i should play a set outside until the club filled up. i’m a can-do guy but i’d already played the last two shows sans PA and it was starting to get to me. there are two reasons that i prefer to play acoustic shows with a PA. one, i don’t have to play and sing as loud as i can just to be heard and two, that way people can talk during my set without feeling like their intruding or interrupting. i think it’s totally arrogant for acoustic artists to demand quiet from the audience when they just want to have a good time.
regardless of my apprehensions, i played a pretty long set and people were polite and supportive, although i don’t know how much fun it is trying to eat wings and beer while some jerk is caterwauling in your ear, and vice-versa. someone asked for an america cover and i played a verse of ‘horse with no name’ sarcastically enough that they didn’t ask me to finish. enough people had come in that we could go inside, where john and chris set up for a set. let me tell you, these guys redefined the term ‘acoustic jam duo’. the interplay between the two was simply transcendant and listening to them was like riding a rainbow over a big head todd and the monsters concert while smoking salvia divinorum. OK, in all seriousness it was immeasurably boring and that entire genre needs to be erased from all records of human history. i was way more interested in the infomercial playing on the tv behind them for windsor pilates: many celebrities have used windsor pilates to improve their lives. elle macpherson! rachel hunter! daisy fuentes! melanie griffith! DANNY GLOVER! huh?
it was late and at this rate i wasn’t planning on playing a second set. i was depressed about playing outdoors and even moreso now that a more receptive crowd was coming in to watch granola & roses wanking away. then rachel, a bartender from the cafe that i’d met earlier in the day had come back with some friends to catch my set. she was pretty cute in a punk rock way; tall, athletic, huge tattoo on her arm, the type that would totally be into my music. yeah, right. my music is for guys who live in their parents’ basements reading wizard and eat fritos by the handful. she then proceeded to take me by the hand and lead me upstairs. alan 1619’s words from 2004 rang in my ear: ‘i love being on tour!’ the first thing she said was, ‘come on, let’s do some shots’. she cooled off towards me considerably after i told her i didn’t drink and then totally lost interest after she asked what i thought of dashboard confessional. a smarter man would have started drinking and worshipping at the altar of chris carabba that night. not me. i turn down free drinks and say that dashboard sucks. i’m like a desiccant of fun, do not eat. i found out she skates with a pittsburgh roller derby team called the steel city derby demons. we talked about that for a little while and then she and her friends told me to cut the acoustic jammers off and play another set. i’d already packed my things but they went to the promoter, who got me onstage again.
i played another set, there was a nice crowd. someone yelled for me to take my shirt off, i rolled up my sleeve and did the ‘do you have your tickets to the gun show?’ gag from the office. can you believe that most people left soon afterwards? so after one of my songs, chris (hippie guy #2) came up to me and goes:
‘man, you are awesome - i’d LOVE to play guitar on one of your songs.’
‘that’s a really bad idea. i can barely play these songs as it is, i think you’d mess me up.’
‘OK’
i get back to playing and a few songs later, i hear this weird slide-y guitar to my left. i open my eyes and look, and chris is playing! i yell, ‘what are you doing?!?’ ’sorry maaan, i couldn’t help myself!’ WTF! at the end of my set, missy comes up to me, and everyone thinks it would be a great idea if i jammed with team legalize it. i declined, saying that i really didn’t know how to play guitar. then someone came up with the idea of me just singing over their music. these people had all been really nice to me so far and i wasn’t going to get out of there any sooner if i said no, so i said sure. so picture me, holding a microphone while these two hippies are grooving out. i was hesitant to start singing and john, with his eyes closed and sideshow bob locks around his face, said the line of the week:
‘hey dude… don’t be pressured… just feel it.’
i proceeded to rap, starting with MIA’s ‘U.R.A.Q.T.’, then moving on to wu-tang’s ‘protect ya neck’. by the last you best protect ya neck, it was 2:00 and all that remained were three indie kids by the bar. after loading out, it was closer to 3:00. rather than wake up the kids at the CPOF house, i made it out to the highway and ended up staying at the aforementioned days inn, where the woman who checked me in had a CRAZY mustache. it was so long i thought she was going to tie me to some train tracks and then fiendishly run away.
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