Show Three, The Velvet Lounge, Washington D.C.- After a waking up on the side of a strange street in a strange neighborhood (in the van of course) we set out to find the WTJU radio station in Charlottesville where we were scheduled for a live radio interview. After trusting Andrew's i-phone GPS one to many times, we finally were forced to archaically demand a passerby the way to the radio station. The human directions got us where we needed to be. Thank you Mr. Maintenance man where ever you are. The radio show went great besides me freezing up and sounding like I had just learned to talk five minutes before the show. But who cares if Annabelle is dumb as long as she can sing, right? After our interview, we got to meet the local band who was interviewed after us, called "Six Day Bender" I mention this because 4 days later in New York City, we were sitting in this hole in the wall bar and lo and behold stuck on the wall right above my head was a "Six Day Bender" bumper sticker. I thought "what are the odds of that?? I just thought it was random and funny and reminded me of the philosophical blanket of the film I Heart Huckabees. If you havent seen it Dustin Hoffman has this "Blanket" Theory that everything is connected in some way or "exists underneath the same blanket" Maybe Six Day Bender saw a Cain & Annabelle sticker somewhere and thought the same thing. I would like to think so. Although I'm not sue was significance it has. I guess if it makes you smile its worth it.
Radio show finished we head off to D.C., which is not so far from Charlottesville. It was then that I ventured into unknown territory, having never driven north of Charlottesville afor in my life, nor flown to any city north of that besides Boston. Therefore, a new set of excited nerves set in for me knowing that I was about set foot in new cities and play my music for brand new ears. Nothing happened of note upon our arrival to D.C. besides me goggling at all the sites I had ever only seen in pictures and stopping in my tracks everytime I passed someone speaking French...which happened quite often due to the number of tourists that were milling around. More on the French later. I have story.
Show time: This show was terrible. To start the room we played in was about 45 degrees. Or that is what it felt like. Second, we were booked with two local duos. Which could have been a good thing given they had a good many friends come out to the show which in turn gave us an audience. However, due to the fact that we were the "headiners" we played last. which in turn meant that we did not go on until midnight....on a weeknight...which meant that most everyone went home to their comfy warm beds and left us playing in a morbidly cold room for a handfull of sleepy eyed kind souls. One side note about one of the duo's that played...who shall remain nameless..before. The duo was composed of two girls, one played the viola and one the piano. They wore ridiculous fairy crowns like the one the guy wears at the end of Dead Poet Society when he is about to kill himself. They were both very talented musicans but they used their talents to create some of the most dreadful music I have ever herad. Very dark goth folk music with disturbing lyrics and an even more disturbing sound that acutally scared me. I had to go outside while they played to keep myself from feeling like I was having a giant nightmare. One of their songs, and I find this hilarious, was based on a discarded note one of the girls has found in a piano practice room at her university that read something like "Dear Aaron...I just wanted to thank you for teaching me so many things...How selfishness and pride don't get you very far in love. How screwing other people really is fun for only on party involved. And so many other little things. I will cherish the things you've taught me. And as for your new girl friend, well I hope you choke while eating her out. Love, Amy" That last part was key. The song was called "I hope you choke" and it was dreadful... however funny I found the note to be. the next song was preceeded with the words "this song reminds me of how we used to play toss with my dad's head" and their last song was about a gay werewolf. Doesn't that sound like a lovely set to preceed Cain & Annabelle? I thought so too. Slightly affected by this less than encouraging opening act, we crept on stage. Our fingers were so cold we couldn't play properly and the energy in the room was so dead it was worse than playing for an empty room. Things did not look good from any angle of the situation. So we blazed through our set in an effort to keep warm and called it a night after about 30-40 minutes. The evening was topped out by the fact that no one person bought a CD. And that was that.
HOWEVER...one girl and her boyfriend who had really liked or music, invited us to come stay at their place.(there always seems to be at least ONE redeaming fact about every bad situation we have had so far on the trip.someone is looking out for us thats for sure) Not knowing what else to do we followed them, but were a little aprehensive that we would find ourselves in the same situation we had the night previous. But the two seemed nice and clean and very well-meaning so we took a chance.
Twenty minutes later we pull up in front of a mansion of a house with a lexus and a mercedes parked out front. "You guys live here??" "Well yeah." said the girl Jessie "But its my parents" "OHHH. got ya." So we knew we were safe with this house. No crickets in the bathroom. Nothing but pristine floors and well decorated walls. Since Jessie's parents didn't know we were coming, we opted to sleep in the van instead of the house since the neighborhood was nice and safe. But we got permission to take a shower the following morning. Something we hadn't had since we left Cumberland Gap.
After a good night sleep we walked into the house to find Jessie's dad making us pancakes and eggs. We found out after much talking that we had just parked our van in front of a house of spies and agents. Jessie's dad Chip is an ex-CIA agent/field artist who had some insane stories about being a sniper in Vietnam and some lovely paintings he had done of foreign dignitaries and village common folk alike. Jessie's mom was an FBI agent who ratted out foreign spies in the United States. There was a time when neither could tell the other their profession. I chuckled and thought of that movie Mr. And Mrs. Smith. When I saw it I thought it was far fetched. But now I know there was some basis of reality lurking inside of it. Oh the things you learn. All I can say is a CIA agent can make me eggs any day of the week. and he even invited us to stay an extra night. What a chip off the ol' block :)
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Tolls, Hippies, and Acoustics Part II
Show Two-Charlottesville, VA-Very Blearyeyed from my previous night of fitful sleep, I struggled to keep my mind on driving to Charlottesville. Andrew snoozed in the back while I sang all of our songs in my head just to keep from falling asleep. The light was bright and the air looked swelteringly humid. All the sleepy air and light just stood there, very still and groggily laughed at me as the our big silver van bumbled its way through like a mindless insect. Upon reaching Charlottesville we found a parking space and proceeded to see the town. In five minutes we were drenched in sweat. The reality that we had no way of showering off two days of sweat and grime dripped to the ground with our sweat and I wondered how we were expected to dazzle people with our music when we ourselves looked like we had swam through a muddy pond and then baked in the sun. We walked around town promoting the show, handing out fliers, hanging posters. I met a girl named Loon who gave me a free ginger iced tea when she found out I played the piano. The tea made my stomach tingle. I met an owner of a vintage music shop who had a gray handlebar mustache and whose specialty was vintage men's playboy magazines and old pull down maps and diagrams. He had a huge pull down map of Europe that was pre-world war two. He spent twenty minutes pointing out to me the difference in Europe then and now. But I was glad of this lesson. It was a good vintage reminder that all things change and mold and grow and shrink whether for the better or for the worse. C'est la vie. He also had a giant pull down diagram of a heart from the sixties. He tried to sell me a typewriter because I said I liked to write but he coulnd't get it to work so we parted. I left him a Cain & Annabelle flier.
Too hot to think strait, we decided to find our venue which was an art gallery....or should i say a concrete rectangle with white walls and no art. The Bridge PAI. We parked the van across the street in some shade so we could take a nap but thirty minutes later realized we had parked in a mosquito den. By the time we figured this out we both had about 15 bites each. So we spent the rest of the time before the show running form the heat and mosquito in the air-conditioned van.
We arrived back at the venue on time for the show where we were met with the booker, Jacob. He wore a sky blue shirt that had a picture of a beaver on it wearing a necktie and sunglasses. He was very serious but it was hard to really believe in his professional aire due to the absurdity of his t-shirt. The band who was bringing the PA system (called the Tiger and the Lamb) was an hour and a half late. They were a group of recently graduated indie rockers who all wore horn rimmed glasses and tight jeans. In fact most people is Charlottesville where funny glasses. It was a theme of the town. Our show got cut short by 20 minutes due the late arrival of the sound system but people liked us anyway. Things might not have gone so well had I not washed my hair in the bathroom sink before the show. A joke. (A girl did tell me I had cool hair though. Which would not have happened had I not washed it.) After the show Jacob took us out for a drink after he had to take care of a friend of his we ran into in the street who was tripping on mushrooms and who had lost her way home. She could not get over how the rain drops looked on her hornimmed spectacles and was weaving down the side walk smiling strait up at the sky. After she was shown home, we met up with his friend James in an old bar that looked like France. This person James never stopped talking from the moment we sat down til the moment we got up. He told of his riveting exploits in NYC and L.A which might have been fairly interesting if it hadn't been 2am and if he didn't laugh like a baboon each time he finished a sentence. One common theme of touring, I have found, is that our time is constantly highjacked by people who take advantage of the fact that we are new to town and therefore must have nothing to do or nowhere to go. Sometimes this is grand but sometimes all we want sometimes is to unwind, write, think. But it seems we are often at the whim of others who take us round and talk us into the ground, sharing all the musical jargon they can muster because they think that is what we want to hear. Don't get me wrong, I love meeting new people and interesting company, it is just difficult when you don't get to choose who these people are. They choose us. After hours of listening to James talk making movies and decribing songs, he offered to let us stay at his place. We felt obligated to accept since we had already said we had no place to stay besides the van. We followed James home on foot. I felt like I was in a highschool gang. We went down an alley, down some falling apart stairs, under a bridge of an overpass, through a hole in a chainlink fence, accross some train tracks, and finally up a side street that led to Jame's house. We entered the house and were met with a banner that read "Shalom" along with an unsettling stink of mold and old garbage. He gave us a tour of his "humble abode" as he put it and informed us "if you walk in the bathroom with shoes on, feel free to squash any cricket you see." The toilet was black with god knows what diseases, the bathtub was blue with mold, and the sink looked like someone had shat in it and then poured their coffee down the drain, and the floor had thousands of bugs and crickets hopping too and fro. The couches we were supposed to sleep on were both caving in and the only couch that was looked fit to lay on was on the front porch. Andrew and I were speechless at such a hovel. The outside of the house looked perfectly normal. It was in a nice neighborhood. James seemed like a clean guy. We sat down on the edge of the couch and politely said goodnight to James. As soon as he shut his door we crept out the front door like criminals and then ran like a nose down the street to our van. We drove off and found a nice quiet neighborhood to park in and slept better knowing that we had left all those crickets behind. I still wonder what James thought when, thirty seconds after we crept out of the house he came out of his room to say ...."oh by the way guys....um...you guys?"
Too hot to think strait, we decided to find our venue which was an art gallery....or should i say a concrete rectangle with white walls and no art. The Bridge PAI. We parked the van across the street in some shade so we could take a nap but thirty minutes later realized we had parked in a mosquito den. By the time we figured this out we both had about 15 bites each. So we spent the rest of the time before the show running form the heat and mosquito in the air-conditioned van.
We arrived back at the venue on time for the show where we were met with the booker, Jacob. He wore a sky blue shirt that had a picture of a beaver on it wearing a necktie and sunglasses. He was very serious but it was hard to really believe in his professional aire due to the absurdity of his t-shirt. The band who was bringing the PA system (called the Tiger and the Lamb) was an hour and a half late. They were a group of recently graduated indie rockers who all wore horn rimmed glasses and tight jeans. In fact most people is Charlottesville where funny glasses. It was a theme of the town. Our show got cut short by 20 minutes due the late arrival of the sound system but people liked us anyway. Things might not have gone so well had I not washed my hair in the bathroom sink before the show. A joke. (A girl did tell me I had cool hair though. Which would not have happened had I not washed it.) After the show Jacob took us out for a drink after he had to take care of a friend of his we ran into in the street who was tripping on mushrooms and who had lost her way home. She could not get over how the rain drops looked on her hornimmed spectacles and was weaving down the side walk smiling strait up at the sky. After she was shown home, we met up with his friend James in an old bar that looked like France. This person James never stopped talking from the moment we sat down til the moment we got up. He told of his riveting exploits in NYC and L.A which might have been fairly interesting if it hadn't been 2am and if he didn't laugh like a baboon each time he finished a sentence. One common theme of touring, I have found, is that our time is constantly highjacked by people who take advantage of the fact that we are new to town and therefore must have nothing to do or nowhere to go. Sometimes this is grand but sometimes all we want sometimes is to unwind, write, think. But it seems we are often at the whim of others who take us round and talk us into the ground, sharing all the musical jargon they can muster because they think that is what we want to hear. Don't get me wrong, I love meeting new people and interesting company, it is just difficult when you don't get to choose who these people are. They choose us. After hours of listening to James talk making movies and decribing songs, he offered to let us stay at his place. We felt obligated to accept since we had already said we had no place to stay besides the van. We followed James home on foot. I felt like I was in a highschool gang. We went down an alley, down some falling apart stairs, under a bridge of an overpass, through a hole in a chainlink fence, accross some train tracks, and finally up a side street that led to Jame's house. We entered the house and were met with a banner that read "Shalom" along with an unsettling stink of mold and old garbage. He gave us a tour of his "humble abode" as he put it and informed us "if you walk in the bathroom with shoes on, feel free to squash any cricket you see." The toilet was black with god knows what diseases, the bathtub was blue with mold, and the sink looked like someone had shat in it and then poured their coffee down the drain, and the floor had thousands of bugs and crickets hopping too and fro. The couches we were supposed to sleep on were both caving in and the only couch that was looked fit to lay on was on the front porch. Andrew and I were speechless at such a hovel. The outside of the house looked perfectly normal. It was in a nice neighborhood. James seemed like a clean guy. We sat down on the edge of the couch and politely said goodnight to James. As soon as he shut his door we crept out the front door like criminals and then ran like a nose down the street to our van. We drove off and found a nice quiet neighborhood to park in and slept better knowing that we had left all those crickets behind. I still wonder what James thought when, thirty seconds after we crept out of the house he came out of his room to say ...."oh by the way guys....um...you guys?"
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Tolls, Hippies, and Acoustics
Hello to all. I have had several requests from various people to update my blog. So here is an update. It has been difficult to find time to type due to the infrequency of which I am exposed to an electrical outlet so I can charge my computer and the scarcity of the internet. I am a bit overwhelmed with what to write seeing how I have just undergone two and a half solid weeks of non-stop characters, crazy happenings, and big city madness. But I guess I will just start at the beginning and give you the highlights.
Show Numer 1: The Acoustic Coffee House-Johnson City Tennessee: This was the first show in our tour. We played the longest set that we had and had a fairly attentive audience. After the show we had no place to stay so we just sat around in van for a while with the doors open. I was sitting there by myself with the doors open when this rickty old van came barreling in the parking lot. My keyboard was sitting in its case right next to the van and and almost got run over. A man with a gray beard and hair down to his buttox wrenched open the van door and hopped out saying (very drunkenly I might add) "DID I HIT YOUR THING?" I laughed and said "No. you did not hit my keyboard" This man then proceeds to talk my ears off for thrity minutes about how he drove all the way from Pensicola, Florida to see me play music because he had heard about me. He claimed to have played music with Greg Allman and to be a world class guitar player who dabbled in the keyboard. He asked me to sing, no begged me to sing something and I obliged and sang these words: "I'm singing, I'm singing, la la la la" The man clapped and jumped as if I had just sung a masterpeice and said "I knew it!" Then he walked away. It was the strangest conversation I have ever had. It make me chuckle to say the least. That night the Acoustic Coffee house where we played offered to let us sleep in their adjoining music venue. So I slept in a smelly couch from the seventies, while Andrew slept in the van and guarded the gear. Before falling asleep I took a deep breath, covered my head with my blanket to block out the red EXIT light that flashed above me, and prepared myself for the most many more nights of less than perfect sleeping arrangements.
Show Numer 1: The Acoustic Coffee House-Johnson City Tennessee: This was the first show in our tour. We played the longest set that we had and had a fairly attentive audience. After the show we had no place to stay so we just sat around in van for a while with the doors open. I was sitting there by myself with the doors open when this rickty old van came barreling in the parking lot. My keyboard was sitting in its case right next to the van and and almost got run over. A man with a gray beard and hair down to his buttox wrenched open the van door and hopped out saying (very drunkenly I might add) "DID I HIT YOUR THING?" I laughed and said "No. you did not hit my keyboard" This man then proceeds to talk my ears off for thrity minutes about how he drove all the way from Pensicola, Florida to see me play music because he had heard about me. He claimed to have played music with Greg Allman and to be a world class guitar player who dabbled in the keyboard. He asked me to sing, no begged me to sing something and I obliged and sang these words: "I'm singing, I'm singing, la la la la" The man clapped and jumped as if I had just sung a masterpeice and said "I knew it!" Then he walked away. It was the strangest conversation I have ever had. It make me chuckle to say the least. That night the Acoustic Coffee house where we played offered to let us sleep in their adjoining music venue. So I slept in a smelly couch from the seventies, while Andrew slept in the van and guarded the gear. Before falling asleep I took a deep breath, covered my head with my blanket to block out the red EXIT light that flashed above me, and prepared myself for the most many more nights of less than perfect sleeping arrangements.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
The Tuscan Van
Greeting all. It is hard to fathom that in two days I will be setting our on this first music voyage that will last the month of August. Thinking back to this time last year, I remember myself toiling away in a farmer's market, cracking green beans, rubbing elbows with the local color, and wondering if that would be what my life would amount to. And now...I am about to travel untraveled roads and sing my songs to the world. It is amazing what time can bring into being.
I am sitting here looking at my suitcases full of too many clothes and a pile of books I want to bring along with me and thinking to myself that no matter how prepared I might be materialistically, I do not think that my mind will ever be prepared for what I am about to do. To bare my soul to so many unknown ears and eyes night after night...to not know where I will sleep...if I will eat..all these unknowns loom over my head making it difficult to breath sometimes. But this heavy uncertainty is the price I must pay for leading this kind of lifestyle. In the end I suppose every path of life is strewn with those unavoidable unknowns. It is merely up to me to accept them gracefully or to revolt against them and cause myself sleepless nights. I guess I must choose to smile at them.
In other news, Andrew (Cain) has recently made the first of many sacrifices will no doubt will make for the band and traded in his car for a band van! We had to travel all the way to Gainsville, GA to pick it up, so it was a long trek to get the thing but we are glad we did. It will be perfect for our travels. The make of the van is a "Tuscany" (a ford 350? i think) which I feel is an excellent name for our new mode of transport. Tuscany is silver with a pop top and leather bucket seats. The back seat folds out into a little bed so that when we do wind up with no place to rest our heads, we will at least have the van to host our tired bodies. The van has a DVD player and TV so we can kick back and unwind every once in a while as well as some kick ass mood lighting we can use when we throw wild parties.... ha. I am looking forward to traveling around in this van..it is big enough so that we can play our instruments en route and is very homey. It even has room for a couple of passengers if we ever acquire anymore band mates (which we hope to do in the near future). And when we are not traveling I will have a good time making fun of Andrew for having to drive around a van.
We finally got our EP's, our T-Shirts, and our bumperstickers in the mail so we have actual merchandise to offer people. Here's to hoping people like us enough to purchase our wares! thats it for now....I go to practice practice practice and pack pack pack.
I am sitting here looking at my suitcases full of too many clothes and a pile of books I want to bring along with me and thinking to myself that no matter how prepared I might be materialistically, I do not think that my mind will ever be prepared for what I am about to do. To bare my soul to so many unknown ears and eyes night after night...to not know where I will sleep...if I will eat..all these unknowns loom over my head making it difficult to breath sometimes. But this heavy uncertainty is the price I must pay for leading this kind of lifestyle. In the end I suppose every path of life is strewn with those unavoidable unknowns. It is merely up to me to accept them gracefully or to revolt against them and cause myself sleepless nights. I guess I must choose to smile at them.
In other news, Andrew (Cain) has recently made the first of many sacrifices will no doubt will make for the band and traded in his car for a band van! We had to travel all the way to Gainsville, GA to pick it up, so it was a long trek to get the thing but we are glad we did. It will be perfect for our travels. The make of the van is a "Tuscany" (a ford 350? i think) which I feel is an excellent name for our new mode of transport. Tuscany is silver with a pop top and leather bucket seats. The back seat folds out into a little bed so that when we do wind up with no place to rest our heads, we will at least have the van to host our tired bodies. The van has a DVD player and TV so we can kick back and unwind every once in a while as well as some kick ass mood lighting we can use when we throw wild parties.... ha. I am looking forward to traveling around in this van..it is big enough so that we can play our instruments en route and is very homey. It even has room for a couple of passengers if we ever acquire anymore band mates (which we hope to do in the near future). And when we are not traveling I will have a good time making fun of Andrew for having to drive around a van.
We finally got our EP's, our T-Shirts, and our bumperstickers in the mail so we have actual merchandise to offer people. Here's to hoping people like us enough to purchase our wares! thats it for now....I go to practice practice practice and pack pack pack.
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