ok, well since this one wasn\'t taped, i\'ll expand my initial, hungover comments and try to give y\'all a better feel for this great night.
to begin with, it was a crappy night weatherwise, so no one was really expecting much of turn out. in fact, the 8x10 even closed off the upstairs portion of the club. that helped by keeping what crowd that there was in one big group, as opposed to letting it spread out and seem emptier. i will say about 50 folks were there, but i never actually did a head count. more than i thought would show up (including a couple of those die hard fans i met, thar are without the internet that you are surprised to see wearing shirts and knowing the words- who are they?!) given the weather, though. now, we got there for the last song or so of the opening band. they were very young, but had a lot of the right ideas. hopefully they\'ll stick together long enough to really get good. but then it was breakfast time!
i was a little afraid that they\'d be in no real rush to set up and get playing, but i was impressed to see them jump right to it and not give the folks in the crowd for the first band a chance to get bored/finish their drinks and leave. i was also happy to see that very few folks did split (those that did seemed like parents/siblings of the first band). now, i will say upfront that this was one of those shows where everything came together in such a way as to make you think you were the center of the universe. to that end, ever time i went back to the bar to get a drink, it was during an intro jam, which always seem to end and get to the song itself just as i\'d gotten back to my spot and settled in. you just gotta love synchronistic nights like those!
so they opened up with a nice space city affair-ish intro jam (in all honesty, i can never tell what\'s a space city and what\'s just a jam, but hey, sounded space city-ish to me!
) into great big firey ball in the sky. in another synchronistic moment, i had been talking to my best friend about the show earlier and he said, \'i hope they play gbfbits fo ya, and i hope they play it really long!\' see, he\'s one of those guys who has to rag on something just because i like it so much. so he rags on the breakfast, almost exclusively about/because of gbfbits. the first time i took him to see PB, they played it and really kinda over-psychedelic\'ed the chorus. drawn out, slightly askew vowels, playing up and down with the melody line, very pseudo-60\'s psychedelia and he happened to decide to pay attention just then, and he didn\'t like it. i liked the idea, but thought that the actual result hadn\'t worked quite as well as they were hoping. its also something i haven\'t heard them do any time recently. anyway, that\'s where it lies, the repeated chorus being sung kinda forced-psychedelically, the sing-songiness of the chorus, and he\'s a big tuff guy who likes the drive by truckers, and voila! he\'s got a place to rib me about my favorite band. he likes the breakfast and even was newly impressed when he saw the camp barefoot show, admitting a newfound liking of the edge of the three piece version. but nonetheless, there\'s the song he wished upon me, starting things out!
i leaned back to my buddy josh who lives just up the hill from the club and laughed, \'this is the song usry
hates!!\'
he laughed back and said, \'yea, i know!\'
so into the sun they went. knowing what i know about this band, i know that the jam in gbfbits is one of the best things they can do. maybe not every time, but when it really gets fired up and going, it can reign supreme. and this one Took Off after just a bit of gathering of the energy and setting tone. i like that about the new changes they\'ve been working on to their sound. yeah, i still want an 8000 notes per second blitzkrieg, but they need to come from somewhere so that when they do become unleashed they\'re even deadlier! and that\'s what tim\'s been working on for a while now and bygawd its really starting show its fruits! it allows the band to give whole new levels of depth and weight to their jams and gives the listener a much more sophisticated sonic palate to enjoy. then they slipped quite nicely into dimension 5.
again, it seemed really appropriate to me, what with the engagement and all, so i smiled real big for my baby who was at home with the flu and danced my ass off. at one point, during the exultant jam, i had my big-ass shiteating grin going full steam and opened up my eyes to see timmy grinnin\' back.
oh, and i forgot to mention. this crowd was waaay into the boys! in fact, i wasn\'t even the first to start hootin\' and hollerin\', which made me happily surprised! there was a ton of energy and lots of love for the boys in that room *all* night. there was even a \'three or four more songs!\' chant during the encore break, but i\'m getting ahead of myself here.
i think tim said a hey howya doin before starting up see the light.
at this point, i leaned back to josh and said, \'this one\'s gonna be
really good! its a meat of the second set type tune...\' his response? \'Sweet!\'
and boy howdy was it!! the drive through the hurricane from dc to baltimore was bought and paid for right there! i know epic is tossed around a bunch, but this version was beautiful, transporting and celebratory all at once. when you closed your eyes, you were taken off on a soaring journey and when you opened them again it was in excitement and joy! at one point, tim was on both the synth and his guitar, making the most gorgeous, swelling chords and harmonies with the two voices at once.... and of course, at points you were bouncing around around giddily.
in all fairness, the transition into no glove, no love was a bit bumpy but quickly forgotten. josh was really groovin out on this tune, which made sense, considering how much funk was being flung! i\'m not normally a very hip-y dancer, but you\'d\'a thunk i was a big black woman the way my hips were gyratin\'! its a good thing was drunk by then, i may have embarassed myself otherwise...
i was excited to hear doughboy\'s reworking and i gotta say, i really like ronnie\'s bass breakdown in lieu of keys. i was wondering who was gonna take what and how it would sound, but i\'d say that, even if another keyboard player comes along, that ron should keep taking that line, cuz it just hits you so well!
another jam intro, another drink, another song starting as soon as i\'d got back and things were going along just swimmingly.
superfly phaddy fat was ballsy, but to be honest, for some reason i was having trouble getting into it for the first little while. their energy had been so high all set long that maybe they were getting tired, maybe (and more likely) i was getting tired (i had sweat dripping off the ends of my hair at this point), maybe it was because someone was standing between me and my backup drink (josh and i kept buying each other drinks at the same time so we often had to put down the extra drink) and i wasn\'t comfortable being seperated like that, but whatever... it was another huge version with lots of fun but as it ended and animal went into his short but sweet drum solo, tim wasn\'t quite ready to be done just yet and called out for surreal radio.
and surreal radio has some big, nasty, hairy balls indeed! i looked over to josh and said just two words.
\'Arena rocker!\'
and it was! a stomping, rumbling tear through the woods kinda feel, floor shaking, heads thrashing, devil horns flying, good old fashioned rawk!
during the first set, timmy was tapping bunch. there was a guy standing over stage left who i think was the opening band\'s guitarist, and he was throwing out encouragement and fun to timmy throughout. \'get it nasty! dirtier!\' and timmy would then do so and blow everyone\'s minds. lots of feeling coming out of him all night, but particularly the first set.
for setbreak we stood around pulling our meager little minds back together- re-coagulating, if you will- getting more drinks, chatting with ron and adrian briefly, and finding an out of the way spot for a quick smoke. but seeing as how it was a very short setbreak, and that we\'d been warned that we were in for \'a LOT of notes!\' i kept my foray brief.
now, for the sake of honesty in storytelling, and to save myself from having to figure out how to say the same things over and over without repeating myself, and to save myself from having to come up with filler when i don\'t quite remember all the bits and details, i will say this- i was pretty good and feelin groovy by this point, so perhaps i don\'t remember all of it quite as well as maybe i could. i\'ve been prescribed a pain killer for my stomach and the last thing i need is to have an attack at a show (its happened before and its not a good scene), so i took one. and seeing as how i was walking home after the show, i saw no reason not to imbibe a coupleafew liquor drinks and steal away for a quick smoke. so i apologize that my review of the second set isn\'t quite as detailed as the first, but here goes anyway.
space city affair>jam, was, as i said before, time to get another drink and get settled as mayfly began. my neck really hurts still today and it is because of this second set. it wasn\'t just high energy, it was thunderous and assaulting. standing in front of animal al night, its just incredible to watch how much force and sound can come out of one guy! and ronnie really stepped it up second set, i thought. i found my body following his bass lines more and more throughout the night and it started during mayfly.
but honeybutter>merge>honeybutter was when they really started to unleash! i simply can\'t tell you how fast, tight and wicked this honeybutter was. it was like a machine gun on meth, like a tiger shark in a frenzy, like popeye mainlining spinach. sinew-y, taut, focused and intense. and just when you thought it couldn\'t get any wilder, merge finds an extra gear and the energy is like a furious thrash band!!! and the tension keeps gathering and the pace keeps increasing then Snap! back into honeybutter!!! to be honest, i had lost my place during the honeybutter jam and merge had come out of nowhere to me, then i\'d lost myself in merge and the return to honeybutter was just as surprising. seamless and sudden, like that\'s just the way they\'re supposed to be played. i was dripping sweat by this point.
another intro jam, another drink and that\'s when i could swear i heard a crowwtown traffic tease, in fact, whoo hoo\'d \'cause i thought that would be a perfect commentary on the region\'s godawful traffic issues, but drunk monk bar started instead and i wondered if maybe i didn\'t just hear wrong. i did, however, then think that drunk monk bar was a perfect commentary on me and josh, at least.
as honeybutter was laser-tight, dmb was full bodied and massive. hearing tim sing the vocals is still a bit weird (you just expect jordan\'s voice, ya know?) but that\'s all that was out of place. that song still works as a balls to the walls rocker, undulating and thumping, screaming out the chorus just releasing the built up muscularity of the song you suddenly find yourself filled with....
another jam, another two drinks each (oops) and into the fray again. remember how i mentioned some unknowns i said hey to before the show? well, one of them had said, \'man, i hope they play buquebus! i fuckin\' love that song!\' now this guy (who\'s name i should remember, but, alas...) was an older guy who\'d first seen the breakfast when they\'d opened for project object there in 2003 and has seen every baltimore show since. so, when \'queeb got started up, i gave him the tap on the shoulder and and said, \'i guess you\'re getting your song, man!\' and he took a second, then realized that he was, in fact, getting his song and smiled big. and what a buquebus it was!!!
its kinda become a joke between jill and i that every buquebus seems to get labeled as \'the best buquebus ever\'. whenever we read each other a setlist containing buquebus, it automatically gets read as \'the best buquebus ever\'. all in good fun, but when you\'ve got such a monster of a tune in your repetoire, you can certainly undrstand why folks are continually blown away by it. and friday night was no exception. i can easily say that its the best post-jordan buquebus ever, and honestly, i\'d rank it high in my personal ones seen. did it beat the puppethouse one? probably not. but was it of the same ilk? definitely! i actually didn\'t miss the swirling synths during the first trancy jam (which didn\'t drop too much energy, which is occassionally the case, i feel, with doing trance stuff) in part because tim was filling in the sounds that needed to be there with his keys, but also in large part because he was playing more guitar than keys. they just did the same thing they always have done, they just did it with less synth. they still had a thick trance groove going, but tim didn\'t take as much time away from the guitar as he did in, say, the camp barefoot version. ron and adrian locked into a ridiculous groove, with ron playing a lot of lead bass and that carried the tune, allowing tim to layer on top. plus, we got more of the second, guitar-based jam than at camp barefoot. it really was great!
a quick breather (no drink) and into the trimuphant wild pack of asscracks. fun, fast and joyous, it was a wonderful high energy exclamation point to the night\'s oddessy. the crowd was hollerin\' long and hard as it crashed to a close and didn\'t stop until they\'d come back on stage. i started yellin \'one more set\' but the guy next to me started \'three or four more songs\', so i went with that. and so did the entire rest of the crowd! one guy (bowman?) said something to the effect of \'the crowd wants three or four more but you only have time for one more. what\'re ya gonna do?!!\' their answer? they were gonna keep on rockin\'!!
when i saw adrian come back out with the guitar strapped on, i leaned over to josh and said, \'rockin\' in the free world, man! here we go!\' and sure enough they jumped right in! more high energy, more fun, more freedom ringing and more catharsis, it was the perfect way to wind down the night. everyone in the crowd afterwards was happily worn out and struggling to gather themselves. while it wasn\'t a huge night numbers-wise, the crowd that was there fed the band and the band exponentiated it right back at them!!!
