Oh Yeah, You Blend

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club….oh do I love this band. Do I have a favorite band? I have several. But they’re it anyway.

I bought my tickets the second they went on sale, sitting at an agility trial on a Friday morning refreshing the page on my phone. I went with my cousin Susan, who is AWESOME to see music with (we went to Luna together too). We discussed trying to see them the next night in Toronto, but ringing ears made us nervous about a second assault on our hearing 24 hours later….I still kinda wish we had, though. I think needing a hearing aid sooner might well have been a reasonable trade for another show like this one.

They were at the Town Ballroom and what an AWESOME venue to see a band in. Intimate but big enough, very good sound (ringing ears notwithstanding), just a cool place.

THEY. WERE. AWESOME.

Set list. They played Berlin AND Stop AND White Palms, plus most of the new album (which is awesome).

Opening band Pete International Airport were also excellent, and Rob came out and sang with them for one song, which was cool.

About the only thing I’d have changed was to have situated ourselves on the other side of the stage (by Peter), or even better in front.

Holy shit Leah Shapiro can drum. I am not easily impressed by drummers, but she’s really, really good.

We danced, we shouted, we WOO’d, we sang.

Hope they come back soon, but I’d drive to California to see them again.

Shitty phone pictures and video (not much makes me want to get a real camera again as much as live music does):

This is awesome. That is all. (except to state that I am old)

…I got a phone call telling me that my best friend of 26 years was dead, and that the cause was initially thought to be foul play, but after finding a note, is now thought to be suicide. It happened Thursday, and that’s really all I know at this point, his friend who called me said that they’d played last Sunday and he’d seemed if anything unusually cheerful and talkative – had he already decided at that point? Did something happen between then and Thursday? All I can think is that I can’t believe it, and that maybe there was something I shoulda woulda coulda done…but… I hadn’t talked to him in a while, we’d done a bit of phone/email tag but we had always had that kind of relationship, where we could pick it up and put it down, and neither of us were any good at keeping in touch by phone. I saw him last November, and he seemed like himself, although I know he wasn’t happy, and I didn’t think that the last time I saw him was going to be the last time I saw him. He sent me an email with a link to the Myspace page of a band he played in on February 25, and three days later he was gone.

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