weekend

I’m watching the 2004 Rock & Roll Induction Ceremony and Prince started shit off with his new band doing a slew of songs. You know, sometimes you just gots to see a muthafucker do his thing to remember what made him so great. He looked great, he sounded great, and if this is his touring band, all I can say is damn. Full horn section, killer rhythm section, they fit him like a glove.
On Friday “Sleepytime Gorilla Museum” played at the Hurricane. Sleepytime’s one of my favorite bands, but only live. Put on one of their CD’s and it doesn’t do shit for me. I have to see and hear the whole package to dig em. It’s Broadway theater, metal, mountain music, classical, and that’s just the shit I’m familiar with. But put it all together on stage and its one hell of a show. One of the best things about seeing em is watching the reaction of people that’s never seen em before. Plus who can’t dig a band that drives cross country in an old ass city bus. As a matter of fact I cornered one of the guys in the band to ask him if this was a different bus they were driving. He told me I was right, their prior bus was built in the seventy’s, whilst the current one was built in the sixties. I had to tell the cat no insult intended, but I wasn’t aware there was a market for old piece of shit buses.
On Saturday I ended up meeting Mito up at the Madrid Theater to see the band "Boomstick". They were having a CD release party and were doing the big blowout thing along with a bunch of other bands. The Madrid’s one of those old restored please don’t tear it down theaters you see in every city. Very nice and very pretty, but I’ll most likely never go in there again. First off their fuckin box office is the gas station next door. And one you got inside the first thing you ran into was everybody crammed into this tiny smoking area just inside the front door, cause the main area was all non-smoking. But my main complaint was the sound. I really felt bad for the musicians who were playing their asses off, cause in the main area it sounded like they were playing thru a wet blanket. I’ve never understood how clubs or places like that can spend thousands of dollars on state of the art sound equipment and entrust it to some cat who apparently learned to mix sound in his moms basement. So I split for a while to see what as going on at the Hurricane. I got there in time to hear this killer band from Chicago called the “Cougars”. They were a hard rock/metal band with this really out front lead singer. But the thing about em that held my attention was that they had a three piece horn section? Who the fuck ever heard of a horn section in a metal band? But it all worked together. After that I stuck around long enough to hear “Pigmy Love Circus” do a few tunes. But then I had to split to get back to Mito and hear the headlining band Boomstick at the Madrid.