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Seattle--The Blue Moon

So...basically if you took Mr. T's Bowl and moved it about a thousand miles north, and replaced the Highland Park burnouts with old hippy burnouts, that would be The Blue Moon. It's just a few blocks away from our hotel, which is nice, except that it takes me about 20 minutes to find a parking space and I get all uptight after we load in--because of parking and because there really isn't anyone there. We figured out that this is a bad time of the year to play up here because it's the 4th of July weekend and apparently the entire bar-and-clubgoing population of Seattle is out camping. Seriously.

The saving grace, though, is that everyone (who didn't go camping), and I mean everyone that we've met, is extremely nice in Seattle. I was talking to my friend Stefan about this, and he guesses that people are in a better mood here in general 'cause the rent isn't so high and people aren't scrabbling so hard to make ends meet. So even though the hippy burnouts aren't really all that interested in our set (except for one--I'll get to him) the other bands waiting to go on have been very enthusiastic and supportive. This doesn't always happen in Los Angeles.

So we play, and as I felt all uptight I kind of blew it and played not so well. Not embarrassingly bad, but kind of amateur hour. Mary, on the other hand, completely destroyed me, as she did last night, playing just beautifully. We played with Portland's Prick And The Burn, who reminded me a lot of our pals Chooka, except that they played some country songs with what sounded like really funny lyrics that I could have understood if I wasn't so deaf. During both our and Prick And The Burn's set we had an old hippy burnout named Tim screaming at us, bellowing something along the lines of "Doesn't it feel good!" and "how do you experience the experience!" or something, I dunno. He had a tie-dyed t-shirt (which, I have to admit, I used to sport myself...when I was about 17 and didn't know any better) and a white-guy afro and looked like what I imagine, say, that Wavy Gravy guy looked like. Afterwards he came up to me and told me how beautiful everything was and then he said I was a young hippy. "I am?" I said. He said that I was the next generation of hippy, and that it was really beautiful, and that he had a nephew who looked just like me and was really beautiful and wore his hair in a ponytail, and how beautiful it was that there are still hippies like me in the world. So I shot him.

No, not really, but still--I want to cut my hair now.

Also on the bill was Seattle's Chicken Starship, who are a bunch of guys who dress up like chickens and play songs about camping. Can't go wrong with that! Note: I didn't take the following picture, it's from Chicken Starship's website--like I say, our camera is not cooperating:



There was one more funny thing that happened, which was that the bass player from Prick And The Burn got about three seconds into their first song when he broke a string. This almost never happens, and as he didn't have a spare I lent him the Monolator bass. Then Chicken Starship played and their bass player broke a string about three seconds into their first song, so they played their set with The Monolator bass too. The dear little thing has gotten a lot of action lately, I hope it's happy...

posted by Eli Monolator @ 3:04 PM