March Retrospective

March is winding down and spring is here, the days are getting longer and we've actually had some sun. Plenty of rain and wind too. While it's warmer than Winter, early Spring evenings are still best spent indoors, and watching live musical is one of the best ways to spend time indoors.

One of my New Years resolutions was to see lots of bands and blog about each and every one. Going to several shows a week and writing about each takes a level of creative discipline and consistency I haven't achieved before. I'm not even claiming to write good or interesting blogs, but I am getting the photos and videos uploaded, backups run, blogs written, edited and published and promoted, repeat as needed, so I can claim to be writing and publishing pretty frequently, even if it's only self publishing on a free blog that not many ever notice. The creative discipline and efforts of writing about the shows are good for me on many levels. I try to be more open to the musicians and the songs at the shows, looking and listening for interesting bits to comment on, seeing if I can find any themes or patterns between the bands at a show. Trying to be both in the moment living through the show and also in the collective space of ideas, metaphors, allegories, concepts and correlation to recent and past examples. I feel like it stretches my cognitive and writing mental muscles in a way that can only be good for me. I get a glow out of volunteering and creating on multiple conscious and unconscious levels that brightens my outlook and gives me many fond memories. I hope any readers out there get even a fraction out of this blog of what I get out writing it, and thanks for reading!

This March I managed to see 25 bands. Adding that to the first two months I have now seen 60 bands/sets/performances, 49 for the first time. Duplicates were PWRFL Power, My Parade, Kinski and the St. Marks choir performing a capella.

Highlights:
Playing with my new Nikon digital SLR at shows.
The Lonely Forest pumping out great song after great song sounding like they might be positioned to break out to national awareness.

Marnie Stern shredding, singing and bantering, so many good performances like Marnie and Tera Melos and Kinski - all in one show.

My Parade setup on the floor again, no hierarchy for them,
the haunting impact of Knowmad's the River Runs Deep.

Several shows with packed houses and the occasional sellout like the Knowmads kept things lively. The grace and the spiritually centered and comforted feeling granted to me at Ash Wednesday mass and the sense of coming home it kindles in me.
Yet another great Veracity show, best attendance yet and a variety of talented bands with several (most, 3 of 4) using horns.

Diamond Rings and PS I Love You on stage together with that surprisingly low voice from the lean and lanky young fashion icon adding some low end punch to the guitar riffing and wailing high end falsetto vocal coming from the big shambling hairy guitarist as the drummer smashes his way through the beat underpinning it all, I wish they did a full set as a supergroup!


The creative wacky Magmafest show with my first Skype-in and PWRFL Power on stage for the first time in years.


Pogo-ing until my feet hurt, and then pogo-ing some more at the Ex show.

Great volunteers dealing with messy customers professionally and well, noticing that my example gets some of the kids to get a little more focus and polish - mentoring and volunteering are very positive for my self esteem!

Conclusion:
Good music exalts us just a little, taking us out of our little internal rat races and exposing us to some corner of a larger collective creative universe in an immediate and sometimes powerful and urgent way. When the creativity somehow spans the audience and feeds back to the band with the positive energy flowing and the creation - to steal a beer company motto: life just doesn't get any better than that!

The Ex and My Parade at the Vera Project 3-16-11

I signed up to do lead front door (sell tickets) at the Vera for the Ex show and I also had a Veracity committee meeting to attend, so I headed over at 6 for the meeting. Show volunteers need to be at the venue at 6:30 except for steering which needs to get there at 5:30, so I had plenty of time, I thought. On arriving I found that nobody had signed up to steer, so I volunteered to do that as well.

After meeting with the Veracity chair I headed downstairs to organize the volunteers. We actually had most of the same crew from the night before, so everybody already knew what they were doing and putting on the show was pretty simple - especially since others handled the sound and the bands, we just ran the venue.

The first band up was My Parade, a local act that Dustin (who works at the Vera) plays keyboards for. I saw them before at the All Ages Movement Project show in January opening for Kimya Dawson and enjoyed getting another chance to see them.

They set their equipment up on the floor of the venue, rather than the stage.

I saw Monomen at the Exhibition Hall during Bumbershoot do the same thing a few years ago, and I think it was a good call in both cases. It brings the audience right up on top of the band, making the performance more immediate and engaging. Of course, the Monomen show is the only show I ever saw get shut down in the middle at Bumbershoot, apparently security felt it was getting too violent or risky or something, they always hate it when the crowds start moshing (which I think makes for a much better show) and always wondered if the vocalist mooning the crowd might have figured into their decision to stop the show, but that's a different story.

For My Parade it worked well, the crowd was still a little light as people trickled in and the energy level was much better with the lack of separation between the performers and the crowd. My Parade is very political, into inclusiveness and against prejudice and hierarchy, with the vocalist spending a fair amount of between songs patter on the topic and the songs also reflecting their concerns. I had to stay near the front door so I only got some mildly poor video (the band being on the floor makes it hard to see them through the crowd and my camera work sucks, as usual) but you can get a feel for their performance anyway:

The video stops right as the vocalist is singing "freedom and liberty" - good note to end on for the band, that's what they're all about as far as I can tell.

Next up was the Ex. The Ex have been around for more than 20 years and have many long term fans, so we got a much older crowd than is typical for the Vera Project - for once I didn't feel like I was selling tickets to my kids, this was more like a crowd of my peers. The younger crowds are more energetic but the older crowds are more calm and controlled - no puke to deal with at this show, that's for sure!

The Ex perform with a drummer, 2 guitars and what I would've called a 5 string bass but another blog I looked at called it a baritone guitar, either way it was a deeper pitched instrument than a normal guitar, so it added a solid bottom end to the sound. The guy on the left playing left handed has the baritone guitar, and given the way he played it (plenty of chord strumming, more so than single note sequences) he was pretty much playing it as a baritone guitar.

They played fast and loud tunes, but they weren't your typical short completely simple punk tunes, they had more internal structure and dynamics, and songs usually lasted six to eight minutes. They often got into interesting grooves and added some solos and a bit of intricate rhythmic play on occasion.

They also mixed up the instrumentation a bit here and there, with one of the guitarists playing a keyboard for a song, mostly playing left hand single note runs on the bottom keys - basically a bass fill, making up for lack of a bass player on the song I suspect - and another song where the drummer came out front and sang a folk song (rocked out a bit, though) and played a cowbell during it.

The beat was fast and catchy, and the grooves and rhythms kept me bouncing around - probably the most pogo-ing I've done all year, and that's about as close to dancing as I ever get at a show. By the end of the show I was sweating and my feet were hurting, which is definitely a sign of a kick-ass live show.

The band was fun to watch, they definitely loved performing, and the crowd was very appreciative in it's quiet way, bouncing around very politely (no real mosh pit, but plenty of sweat and motion).

I'd never heard any of their music before and that didn't matter at all, it was all great fun even when they sang in a language or languages that I didn't understand - the beat and the joy in the moment of performance kept that buzz going for the whole 90 minute set and left us all sweaty and out of breath, wishing they could continue playing for another hour. Like all good things that must come to an end, we wish they could've squeezed out a few more songs - we're always greedy for more of what we love!

January Retrospective

In January I saw the All Ages Project show (Kimya Dawson rules! and I enjoyed seeing Duston's band My Parade) with 3 bands; I'd seen Kimya Dawson before (CHBP and 2x at the Vera).

I saw the Veracity show with 3 bands, all new to me. (Dead Coats, the Masque) I got an some excellent audio recordings, I'll have to figure out how to post those to the web.

I saw Jon's 50th Birthday Bash with Ryan LaPlant and Wired, got some good audio recordings from this too.

I saw the Rock-N-Roll carnival with 6 bands, Hounds of the Wild Hunt, Eric Miller, Mini-Rex, Sex Offender, Badlands and Creem City, I'd seen Badlands before at a Veracity show.

I also was a table host at the Vera 10th Anniversary auction, so I got to see Thee Satisfaction - I saw them at Bumbershoot last Summer in the Sky Church. Here's a photo from the Sky Church show:

Highlights: Ryan Laplant rocking our butts off solo, Kimya Dawson brilliant and unpredictable, making me cry twice, Wired's intelligently composed tightly performed suite of rock history, the Masque playing an awesome song that I missed in real time due to cooking tacos that knocked my socks off when I played back the recording, lots of talented and appealing performers that I'd never seen before, lots of music and good times.

Lowlights: the things I missed: Forgetters, the head-liners of the Rock-N-Roll Circus: RepoMen, Church for Sinners and Strong Killings, the Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger


So I made it to 4 shows and an auction in January and saw 15 bands including 12 bands that were new to me. Not a bad way to start the year!

Nothing special going on for the next few months, festivals don't start for a while yet. I don't know if I can keep up a 15 band/month pace for the next couple of months, most likely it'll drop off to 6 or 9 per month, we'll see how it goes.
The festivals should help pump the numbers up, but it'll be hard to actually get caught up with blogging about them: so many bands for days on end, an embarrassment of riches.

All Ages Movement Project show at the Vera

Heather volunteered as a front door assistant and I volunteered for cleanup at the All Ages Movement Project (AMP) show in January. The headliner was Kimya Dawson (awesome!) but I'd never heard of the intro bands. I was checking out "My Parade" on youTube and enjoying some political punk music and the camera finally panned enough to the left that I saw a guitarist that looked familiar. I could swear that was Dustin, the guy who sits at the front door a the Vera Project. The camera tracked back to the middle so you could see the female vocalist and the rest of the band, so I wasn't completely sure but it sure looked like him.

The day of the show I ended up chatting with a dude I had never met before the bands started. I mentioned tracking down the band's video and thinking I'd seen that kid from the Vera Project - Justin (doh! I knew it was Dustin, I just mis-spoke). The guy laughed and said "yeah, Dustin is in the band." Turns out he was the bass player. I didn't know until later when they took the stage.

First up was these guys, they may be Silicon Girls but I'm guessing.


They put on a solid short set, and the Vera was lively with people staying from the AMP stuff and more dropping in to see the show. One guy came in all made up in green so I had to talk to him. He was coming from an appearance at a kids birthday party.


He asked about what we did at the Vera and I told him about music, the art gallery, the screen-print and recording studio.

"What about performance?" he asked, and I could see what he was getting at. We've had the occasional break dance show, fashion shows, and quite a few seminars. Not much in the way of acting or plays, and not a whole lot of spoken words stuff.

Next up was "My Parade" - the band with Dustin in it. The mix wasn't great, so it was hard to hear the lyrics or much else clearly over the bass, but the beat was fun and the band got the crowd moving pretty well. I got a CD from them so I can listen to their lyrics and hear the different parts.


We had Selector Dub Narcotic spinning disks, turns out he runs K-Records in Olympia so he's a local legend and a bit famous. He got a crowd up on the stage dancing for a bit right before Kimya went on.


...and finally Kimya took the stage. She was in rare form, comparing rose petal tea to bath water and playing her numbers briskly. The sound was a little ragged at first - there's a charming bit where she screams due to the feedback in this video:



...but they dialed in the sound after that and it was a classic fun upbeat Kimya Dawson show. She took a couple of requests and Yoda did yoga and ended up on stage for an extended bit with Kimya, riffing on corporate control and having a great time.


Kimya did a rap song that was interesting, she's always had a way with longer less repetitive lyrics and the rap format actually fitted her odd song structure approach fairly well. She had Your Heart Breaks playing a simple drum line against the rap for surprisingly effective result - quite political of course, which is what you expect from Kimya: intensely personal, highly political, life and death, suicide, depression and friendships, the subjects are what Kimya's passionate about.

She played a song I was unfamiliar with about a transgendered pre-op friend dieing of cancer that made me cry, and I discovered new depths in "I Like Giants" that made me cry as well. Really a very moving show and a great way to start out the new year.