dragonlady7

Went last night to see a blues show down at Nietzche's with Z. The owner of the place, Joe, is Z's magazine's first advertiser, and so in gratitude to him being their first real paying customer and thus getting them off the ground, the magazine has never increased the price for his ad. In return, he keeps a tab open for them at the bar.
We didn't avail ourselves of this open tab, but we did get in half price, because Joe saw Z as he came in the door and told the man taking the money that he was on the list. Which was nice.
I like the place-- it's a great venue, has had live music 7 nights a week for 20 years, and is pleasantly laid-out, cozy but not cramped, and full of little nooks where one can actually sit to listen. Whoever is playing is on a raised stage at one end of the place, and along each side in front of the stage is a raised balcony-kinda-thing about five feet up-- a bit higher than the stage-- that has tables and chairs in it. In the middle is the floor, where people can pack in or dance or whatever. The place is long, so if you continue back, there's a sort of passageway lined with more tables and chairs, and then a couch along the front of the sound booth, and then beyond the sound booth it opens up again into the bar area, with the bar along one wall, and then another tiny little stage just by the door with seating in front of it. For the Rasputina show they had that little stage set up with band merchandise. I think on quieter nights they have singer/songwriter folksy types there, and of course one must wonder if Ani diFranco was ever small enough to play on that stage.
One interesting thing is that there's no backstage, so for the band to get on stage, a bouncer has to open up a path through the floor. And for encores, there's nowhere for the band to go, so they just sit there and decide whether to keep playing. Which is usually amusing for everyone involved. Rasputina sat there, looked at one another, and then the singer said "Well, there's nowhere to go, so let's not mess around, shall we?" Last night, the blues band all gathered at one corner of the stage and the singer looked at his wrist where a watch should be (but wasn't) for a good minute, tapping his foot while we all howled.

It is a great venue for photography, and I wish I'd brought my camera both times now as I could've gotten some totally amazing shots, especially with that bannister rail along the balcony just at a good height to use it as a tripod. I am so dumb. Oh well.

The show last night was the Tinsley Ellis Blues Band. They've played Nietzche's pretty much annually for years now, I guess-- while tuning, the singer mentioned that they'd played there in 1989 to promote the release of one of their CDs which they were about to play a song off of, and by the way they'd done their laundry at the now-nonexistent laundromat across the street before the gig.
The interesting part is that while on Wednesday I was among the oldest people at the show, last night I was pretty much the youngest. Wednesday I wore black eyeliner and fishnets; last night I wore an ancient t-shirt and blue corduroys and no makeup.

The show was awesome. There were two shows, actually-- they took an intermission in the middle, and a local schoolteacher played honky-tonk blues on the piano by the bar before the first and in the intermission. She was really good, by the way, and I think she plays there once a week as the warm-up act. (Amusing bit of banter overheard from her act: "Shut up. You, right there, sitting by my right elbow, shut the fuck up or move." She didn't pause playing the piano for this.)

The band was a four-piece: guitar, bass, keyboards/organ, and drums. The keyboardist was a twentysomething curly readheaded cleanshaven college-boy-lookin kid called Todd who did not stop dancing the entire time. He made ridiculous faces and jumped up and down and during one solo climbed up onto his high stool to play, and generally had monkeytastic spasms and freaked out the entire time. Also, he was quite good. The drummer ("J. B.") seemed to be under the impression that he was in a metal band: he kept making the sorts of gestures one sees at Metallica concerts, and also he kept spraying spit everywhere. Also, he was quite good.
The bassist was a heavyset old biker dude who mostly stood there nodding, and his name was apparently "The Evil One." He was very good.
And the guitarist was Tinsely Ellis himself, fiftysomething and long-haired and balding and intense and very, very good. The second set featured a lot more of him simply noodling around on a guitar, doing strange things to it and getting good noises out of it. During the first set at one point he reached over and pulled a loose bit of bannister from the balcony to use it as a slide during his solo.

So, we had a couple of conclusions to share after last night's show.

1) The blues is fucking metal. (I think I need to make a t-shirt out of that. Except someone might take the adjectival form of the f-word to be a transitive verb instead, which rather changes the meaning, but would also be amusing.)

2) The blues dances itself. I never dance, but I noticed I was about two songs into the first set, and I just sorta didn't stop. Also: Dancing means your feet don't hurt from standing around. Nor your back. I am dying of cramps* today, but not backache! I feel better than I did when I got home from work!

3) Don't slow-dance to the blues. Just don't. Don't lay your head on your man's shoulder and close your eyes and sway. It's OK to dance to the fast blues, okay to grind your hips and twist with it, because the fast blues is horny and mean and gritty and good, and may actually not be down on women entirely. But the slow blues? Especially the slow blues that starts out with "It's three o'clock in the morning..."
The slow blues is not romantic. The couple in front of us were slow-dancing to this song, and the woman's serene closed-eyed face was turned to us when the singer let fly this couplet:

cigarettes and coffee
and a shot of whiskey on the side
can't cover up the bitter taste
of kissing your behind

The woman's flinch was quite amusing. So, the moral of the story, kids: everyone say it with me. "Don't slow-dance to the blues." It just ain't romantic.

TMI, I'm sure, but it's my journal: Went off birth control last month, and this is the first time in two years I've been surprised when my time of the month has arrived. I knew it'd be soon, but was totally astonished when it was this morning. And god damn. Birth control totally spoils you into forgetting just what a bitch that particular time of the month can be. I so don't want to get out of bed today and go to work, but I am going to be brave and do so. Because I am a good person and also strong and also broke.