I awoke, incredibly hungover, to a text message from my good friend Megan: “Just farted so bad that it went through my pants and left a spot on the couch.” Sometimes, I could just marry that girl.
We celebrated St. Patrick’s Day a few days early on Saturday. We had the uptown parade, and I happen to live on the route with my roommates, David and Lillie. Five weeks prior, I had ordered a Kelly green windbreaker that bore the CAKE logo – it was really awesome – but it never arrived (you can see it here). Later, it would arrive just in time for real St. Patrick’s day, but I had work and couldn’t party. I was pissed.
Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to try my first taste of crawfish for the season at my friend John’s house, so I wasn’t that pissed. Before I dug in I asked John, “Are they good?”
“My boy Cusimano makes ‘em HOT,” John replied in a thick New Orleans accent. You know you live in New Orleans (or Jersey?) when your “boy” is Cusimano, whoever he is. But John wasn’t lying, Cusimano indeed made them hot, and by that I mean great.
Across the street, we had the opportunity to see a seemingly one-off performance from Broken Smokes, who played on a front porch. If you’ve ever had occasion to meet Charles, the lead singer and songwriter, you know that Broken Smokes’ live show is the perfect forum for his one-of-a-kind sense of humor.
Later on in the evening, when it had gotten genuinely dark and dangerous out, my roommate David and I decided to ride some bikes over to Matt’s house a couple of miles away and get ready for Saturday night at Foburg. I walked in to Matt’s house and found a Schlitz waiting for me on the counter, wrapped snuggly in a Sun Hotel coozie. I literally said, “Let’s go to work.” I’m such a douche.
We were greeted at Maison by Aaron, who at this point informed us that we didn’t need to buy the expensive drinks from Kristen in the front. “Didn’t I get you guys press wristbands? You can come to the VIP section to drink.”
The VIP section was a good place to get a bird’s eye view of what was going on at Maison’s back stage. Matt and I helped ourselves to some pizza and had chat with some of the guys from Sun Hotel (as an aside, I had taken my Sun Hotel coozie off a long time ago). “We caught the Matt & Jack Podvast,” Devin the drummer said to me. “It was really fucking funny! And I liked that review you guys did of our show. Awesome.” This is going to sound really pretentious (amateurish?), but I genuinely appreciated Devin’s good review of our good review of their show (Keep listening!).
After some Fresco pizza and a John Michael sighting, Aaron, Matt and I headed to Blue Nile Upstairs to catch Big Blue Marble, a local rock band that’s apparently been around for some time. All I can say about this band, other than that they were one of my favorites of the weekend, was that they were loud as fuck. It’s been 8 days and my right ear is still ringing. And I’m pretty positive that it’s from this set had something to do with it because I remember saying to myself, “Gray, you really shouldn’t be sitting with your good ear up near the speaker.” I can be such an idiot.
Downstairs, we checked out Flow Tribe, where we were greeted by the partial cast of the Real World. This was the first time all weekend that covering this festival felt like work. The cameramen were standing in the exact place you have you walk if you want to get from the stage to the bar. And these cameras were humongous. I had always assumed that the cameramen held little minicams or something more practical. As it turns out though, no. “Unless that guy’s making six figures, that literally has to be the worst fucking job in the entire world,” I yelled to Aaron.
At a certain point we had to cut our losses and kick this pig, so went back to Maison. Matt and I had been discussing all weekend what we would do about the fact that Sun Hotel and Smiley With A Knife were playing sets at the exact same time. “Crisis of the Century” we were calling it. We decided that I’d cover one and he’d cover the other, and he’d get to pick because I’m a dynamite guy. “I’ll take Smiley,” Matt said. “I did declare them my favorite live band last time we saw them… But we’ve also been blowing Sun Hotel so hard recently, so maybe I should do a write-up about them.”
Now, it was of no consequence to me which one I saw – they’re both great. But this was the internal conflict that faced Matt Rosenthal. On Saturday alone, he told me he wanted Smiley With A Knife, then changed his mind to Sun Hotel, then changed his mind back to Smiley with A Knife, then back to Sun Hotel.
Luckily for Matt’s constitution, that conflict never took shape. Thanks to some good fortune, Sun Hotel started early and Smiley With A Knife started late. Maybe it was planned, but Matt and I thought of it as a sign from above. But just for the sake of splitting up the work load, Matt watched Sun Hotel from below, and I watched them from above.
A while back, when I asked Aaron LaFont about this band because I found them kind of exciting, he said, and I quote, “Yeah dude, these guys don’t give a shit.” At first I didn’t quite get what he meant by this. Generally, not giving a shit is a job for bands that aren’t really that great. But these guys have just released an impeccably-recorded EP, and they seem to have their shit together in terms of songwriting and arrangement. However, tonight on stage I understood what Aaron meant when I watched the second guitarist playfully antagonize the multi-instrumental percussionist by intentionally trying knock over his crash and table of trinkets. As I observed the percussionist try frantically to hold his setup together with a massive grin on his face, I got it.
Upstairs I caught Smiley With A Knife with my old friend Geoff (@thinkrich). “I haven’t seen these guys play yet,” Geoff told me, “but I used to be in a band with the drummer Jared. Great fucking guy, but he would come into our practices with these ideas of songs. He would come in and say, ‘Okay guys, I have an idea: let’s make a song that mirrors itself. So like, we’ll play the first half of the song normal, then the second half will be the exact same arrangement, but backwards; vocals, guitars, drums, and all.’ And I’d sit there and tell Jared, ‘Dude, that’s a fucking awesome idea, but we’re a punk band. There’s no way we have the musical talent to do that.’”
Jared however, as Geoff would imply, did have the talent. And Smiley With A Knife is the perfect group of musicians to play the type of intense and heady mathrock that he was aiming at.
Smiley was mind-bending, but the acoustics at Maison Upstairs were shit, and I personally blame those acoustics for my current bout of tinnitus. When you hear Jared give one of his routinely timed yells and you hear it echo three times, but you notice he has no microphone, you know something is wrong.
After this set, we rushed to Blue Nile Downstairs to catch the pros, The Revivalists. Matt and I were relatively surprised to find our buddy from the information tent, Michael, onstage adding horns to the mix. “That’s kind of bad ass,” I told Aaron afterwards.
Off the subject, but does anybody else expect the lead singer of the Revivalists to yell “I’m on a plane! With cocaine!” at any moment? Just me? Fine.
Say what you will about the “headliner” on Saturday night, but MynameisJohnMichael puts on one hell of show. I caught these guys with at the back stage of Maison with Geoff, who was brandishing his very own music erection. By the final song (I could hear several people in the audience saying to themselves, “Please be ‘The One’, please be ‘The One’”), it was obvious that MNIJM had rightly earned their place as Foburg headliners.
After completely getting his rocks off at this show, Geoff turned to me and said, “NOMA. Quintron. Let’s do it.” However, I informed him that I had one more band to see, beloved local rock band Rotary Downs, and that I’d hit NOMA after, since it was going until 5 am.
Matt, Aaron, and I walked into d.b.a. to catch the second half of the Rotary Down set, and who did I see on stage railing some noise guitar? My man, Michael. I turned to Matt and asked, “Is this guy a total bad ass?”
“Looks like it, with that guitar,” he replied.
“Well wait ‘till tomorrow night,” said Aaron. “Big Rock Candy Mountain will blow you away.”
Rotary Downs’ encore was massive, and I think it may have only ended because the drummer busted his kick drum. Nonetheless, they still managed a song or two after the damage was done, ending at about 5 am. Live music from two in the afternoon until five in the morning: Vitus Tinnitus. “Sorry Quintron, not tonight.”
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