Don't Talk to the Cops, Punishment and Everybody Weekend at Heartland

Carina and I loved Don't Talk to the Cops the first time we saw them during Reverb Fest in 2011, so we kept an eye out for them. We got to see them again at Bumbershoot and Ground Zero and the Vera Project too, and every show was a hot dance filled energetic set.

We saw they were playing Heartland (a new venue to me) with some bands that were also new to me and decided to go. In the end Carina dropped out, so Heather and I went to the show.

Heartland is a mildly small space on Roosevelt in the U-District, just North of 53rd. The "stage" is the far end of the room from the entrance, it's not raised or anything. They have some lights up pointing at it, and a sound system too, which worked fine for the crowd of perhaps 40 or 50 that came to see the show.

First up was Everybody Weekend. We were a little late getting in, so we weren't too close to the performer.

Everybody Weekend did an intense set of short, emotional tunes. The intensity pulled me out of the dancing some, getting me into more of a spectator mode as I listened to the lyrics. EW wrote complex unexpected lyrics that reward attention. Interesting opening, nice fit for the venue and the evening.

Next up was Punishment.


Similar to Everybody Weekend in that he sang against pre-sequenced or recorded material, he also sang with some emotional intensity. The crowd enjoyed the beat, dancing and moving some, and his voice carried the song well in this video:

On occasion the performance was low-affect, including a bit where Punishment sang from behind the cloth backdrop, but he milked even those odd bits of "he's not there" performance for an additional odd impact. All in all I enjoyed the opening acts and was curious to hear more from both of them if I ever get the chance, and I was nicely warmed up for Don't Talk to the Cops.

Classic hot loud Don't Talk to the Cops, simple loud fun beats with Emecks and Djblesone dancing and singing and rapping and El Mizell rapping and hyping and dancing and the crowd dancing all over and sweating and yelling and having a good time.
Good stuff off their two albums, like this one off of "Let's Quit" They also introduced at least one joint about eighties butt they said would be on their upcoming third release. Kelly Lebrock! DTTTC got a dance circle going with a couple of BBoys for a song about BBoys, so that went well too. DTTTC shows are dance shows. Emecks and DJ Blesone always dance their butts off in some synchronized and choreographed moves, El Mizell works it hard, and the audience always ends up dancing all over to the fun beats and chanting repeating lyrics.

Good fun classic Don't Talk to the Cops show, automatic immediate cure for seasonal afflictive disorder: it may be gloomy out and you can't recall what sunlight really feels like, but you can't stop smiling as you leave the show, wiping the sweat off your brow and letting the rain wash the salt down your cheeks.

DTTTC always puts on a dance party every time they play, and you always leave dance partys happy,.

2013 Vera Gala

The Vera Project held its annual fundraising gala and auction on Saturday, February 23 in 2013. I volunteered to help with the event this year, so I arrived early to setup, just before 1 on a surprisingly nice Seattle afternoon.
The Triple Door donates the venue, staff, and dinner for the guests. Between the Musicqarium Lounge and the Triple Door Main Stage, it's a wonderful venue and they are incredibly generous to donate so much to the Vera Project.

We held the silent auction as the guests arrived, with appetizers (the shrimp toast was great) and free drinks made with donated hard liquor from Oola. After closing the auction out and finishing the initial portion of the evening in the MusicQarium we encouraged the guest to move to the Main Stage auditorium. The Triple Door venue is dedicated to table seating with views of the show. The house lights are down and the stage lights are up in this photo so the tables are a little hard to see, but the whole auditorium is filled with scalloped tables like this with additional counter seating tucked in here and there. That's John Roderick taking the stage as our Master of Ceremonies. You can see some of the seat layout better in this photo: Roderick was great, riffing on the Vera Project and Seattle's variant on "learning it on the hard streets." When there wasn't a safe venue like the Vera Project around to help you channel your creative energies into useful activities, you went and hung out on the Ave in the U-District. I suppose that makes it the mean street of Seattle, singular. I grew up there before the Vera Project too.

The Grizzled Mighty performed on the Main Stage with a drummer and a guitarist/vocalist. Small group but they pumped out the volume and noise so it's all good. The Grizzled Mighty crank up the guitar and drums and make a great loud racket, grinding and crashing away. Fun loud music!
The auction went well and Andrienne Pilapil's speech about her Vera family was quite powerful and moving. I've known Andrienne for over a year - she took over as the Veracity chair after me - but I learned more about her from this talk than I had in a year of booking shows with her. She got very personal and shared details of her emotional life and the impact was palpable to the 400 guests, staff and volunteers in the venue.

We also got a surprise bit from the mayor as a bonus. Perhaps he was inspired by Roderick and Andrienne, he was mildly funny and interesting. Roderick was having some fun with smartphones while the mayor was talking so he probably got some amusing tweets out.

While the Main Stage events kept the crowd in the auditorium we broke down the silent auction remains, got the paperwork sorted and forwarded and put things in place for the After Party.

The Physics played the After Party back up in the MusicQuarium lounge. Fun hip hop with two lead vocals (and a guest on one cut) plus a couple backing vocalists and a guitar. This picture of their sound check shows most of them, except the guitarist is obscured: The guitarist is more visible in this one: The Physics have a great sound and flow, and the multiple vocalist and live guitar in the mix keep the songs moving and evolving. The sound is mildly lousy since my camera ended up just about in the speaker, but you can get an idea what it was like. The live sound was actually quite good, the problem is with my camera's ability to record it.
I enjoyed the Physics, dancing and bouncing a bit to their numbers as the night wound down.
My feet were pretty sore from going up and down the stairs repeatedly, not to mention standing for 11 hours, but it felt nice to be part of a successful team putting on a great event. Anne O'Dowd and Kristina Goetz and Tristan Carasino and Andrienne Pilapil and the whole Vera crew and John Roderick and the bands and the Triple Door staff put on a killer event. There were many generous sponsors and the guests were more than generous, enthusiastically bidding the Macklemore Thrift Shop shopping trip to around $7,000 and donating generously to help a cause that means a lot to me and many youth around the greater Seattle area and beyond. I'm thankful that so many people support the Vera Project so enthusiastically, and that we can have so much fun building on our successes and funding another great year at the Vera Project.

Damien Jurado and Naomi Wachira at a Seattle Living Room Show

I went to my first "Seattle Living Room Shows" event to see Damien Jurado and Naomi Wachira. Damien Jurado has been a local fixture for a while, but somehow I had never managed to see him until last Summer at Bumbershoot, where he totally blew me away. He writes powerful, often bleak songs that just totally hit home with me, and I was looking forward to seeing him in a more intimate setting.

The process of seeing the show is a little secretive - you sign up electronically, then a bit later they give you the details. We got there within a few minutes of the doors opening and already more than half the seats had been claimed, but we got reasonable seats together. That was kind of important because Heather was on crutches, so there's one tip: come quite early if you want to get seats at a Seattle Living Room Show!


It wasn't actually in someone's house, it was in a space near the Seahawk's stadium that I think is a gallery, but it was the intimate setting I was hoping for.


The crowd is seated in front of and to the right of the performers, with around 40 seats, and another 30 or 40 watch while standing behind the seats. The technical crew (audio and video, more on the video later) took the left side space. A small table was laid out with free snacks, bread with a spinach spread and chips, salsa, and multilayer dip (beans, cheese, sour cream, onions, a few peppers) to munch on, and a paid bar with beer, wine and hard liquor.

They had a single bathroom which also made it feel like a house show - standing in line to get into the bathroom took a few minutes.

The show was a benefit for the Melodic Caring Project, and they streamed it live to several hospitalized kids and teens.

Both Naomi Wachira and Damien Jurado have kids, and you could tell they took the charity to heart. They spoke to the kids during the show, and they both got choked up doing it. Having your own kids, the thought of kids being deathly ill hits too close to home for comfort. That's OK, the world is full of things that are not comforting, and too often our culture stays in denial on the subject. It's important to acknowledge how tough things are for some, even if it makes me cry in sympathy.

Naomi Wachira took the stage first, she's bee n in Seattle for some time and is originally from Kenya. She told us that she was going back home in the next couple days and would get to see her child, who is being raised by her grandparents. It was interesting how personal the stage chatter was, I think that was the influence of the charity and knowing that kids in an extremely tough situation were watching.

Some of her songs were personal, about lessons learned, songs of strength and self determination like this one:

She had some tasty backing vocals on this and some of the songs, the backing vocals were from another band, but I promptly forgot the name of the band. Sorry about that, I'll edit this and add the name back in if I ever track it down.

Simple, heartfelt, fairly stripped down with guitar and vocal and tasty backing vocals, very nice for the intimate setting.

She finished up with "African Girl" which is also the title track on the CD they had on the merch table. A beautiful song that looks back on her roots and her life, a song of faith and identity. I like how it frames things and lays out what matters to her. Lovely voice, complex lyrics that avoid the endless repetition so common in most modern music, definitely packed full of more ideas in one song than most bands manage to get in a full album. Great match for Damien Jurado, who has similarly dense and meaningful, if challenging, songs.

Damien Jurado took the stage for his headline set next. Jurado is an interesting performer; when I saw him at Bumbershoot he really didn't have much in the way of patter. He often looked down while singing and playing, or looked straight out, above the heads of the audience. He doesn't get much if any eye contact - I can't tell off hand if he doesn't like it, or just isn't concerned, but either way it makes for a slightly introverted yet powerful experience.

As Damien sat down he laid out various sheets of paper on a seat near him and mostly looked at them while playing.

After his first song he said "I'm not going to do these songs, I'm tired of them" and he shuffled through and skipped down the stack to some new songs. He told us he was working on a new album, and that he was going to do new songs. As a result I didn't recognize most of the set, but that's OK since the songs were consistently excellent
I noticed that Damien also was talking a bit between songs, which was a new experience for me. He mentioned his two kids, and told us the story of how "Museum Of Flight" came to be. It was a very personal story involving his adolescent child, and once he told us the story he said "I never explain my songs, so now you're the only group who knows where it came from" or something like that. I think the fact that he had an audience of terribly sick children watching streaming video of the performance was what pushed him into opening up. The audience is there to hear his songs, but those kids deserved more communication from him, somehow, and I really respect that artistic choice.

He continued opening up in ways I suspect he never had before on stage. If you notice in the first picture of him above, his shoes are off. He mentioned that, saying something like "this is a living room show, so I'm getting comfortable like I would in my own living room." Then he paused, and said "Well, if it was my living room, I'd be in my long underwear, which I'm wearing under my pants." After that it didn't take much encouragement before he ended up - after saying "this is entirely age appropriate, I'm not stripping!" which he emphasized by repeating - then he took his pants off. As you can see in the intro to this song, he riffed on that and turned it into a wonderful moment of solidarity with the kids watching from their hospital rooms.

If you look closely, you can see that sure enough, he's playing in his long underwear.

Here's a picture so you can see it more clearly:


As he wound down his set and got to the final two numbers, he gave a sweet testimonial that made us all choke up and made me cry. I caught it on video here:
The other thing I notice about it: he never looks at directly at the audience as far as I can tell, but he insisted on tracking down which camera was operating and looked directly at it, directly at the kids in the hospital watching the show, and spoke to them, thanking them and expressing his love. Mortality hitting the young is one of the toughest things there is to process, and something we strenuously avoid talking about. I feel uniquely privileged to have been there for this, to have experienced the love and pain and emotion in a simple 40 minute set with Damien Jurado opening up on stage in a way I've never seen before, and I suspect in a way he never has before. Wonderful dedication, a compelling example of a show dedicated to those who weren't there, who were watching from their hospital beds.

As if that wasn't enough crying and snuffling, he topped that with his final song, "Cloudy Shoes."

The chorus breaks my heart and makes me cry, even now just listening to the video:
"One day you will be taller, taller than the sky,
Til that day, you will be, here with us, below.

Such a beautiful heart-breakingly appropriate song for this benefit show, and a perfect downbeat ending for a "depressive songwriter" (to use Damien's term) to end the show on.