Anyhow, it turns out there was a secret Dandy Warhols show at rontoms tonight. For free. In a room that holds, what, 150 people if they're all really, really good friends? And I was there. In the front row, so close that Courtney Taylor-Taylor could have spit on me. The Boyfriend gets these emails from rontoms telling him about the shows, and there was a *SURPRISE SECRET HEADLINER* and a hint. Marvelously, unbelievably, the-best-of 1990s with pedals galore and a bell-sleeved dress and a boy-bob haircut and a practiced sexy pout. It was a great time, and I'll get to tell my grandkids about it.
I know, I'm terribly behind. I'm working on it. Sasquatch, and PDX Pop Now!, and all sorts of little shows (and not-so-little ones) in between. There are posts galore in draft, half-finished, scribbled notes, snippets and partial sentences and fragments and bits, fermenting and bubbling, nearly ready to burst forth into cascades of schadenfreude and fascinated disdain. But today, I saw Jared Mees and the Grown Children, had a nice dinner entirely sourced from my garden and the farmer's market (except for some salt, pepper, butter, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar), then went to see the Dandies. Seriously...the Dandies. I'm still wowed by that.
More to come. As always.
Monday, August 24, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Surmounting the Insurmountable
I've got two whole music festivals to review. It's like 100 bands. No, I don't mean it's "like 100 bands." If I were exaggerating, I'd tell you it was 124941 bands or something. I really think that between Sasquatch and PDX Pop Now!, I've got 100 bands to cover. I'll see what I can do.
See, I'm crazy far behind because of all these shows to see (and review), but also because of other stuff that isn't music-related. I found out in June that my mom has lung cancer. I only went out to see her for five and a half days, but it's just incredible what that takes out of my summer.
In not totally unrelated news, it's amazing what a sick mom going through chemo turns out to be a great excuse for, from...uh...not blogging, to getting The Boyfriend to take me out to a Pixar movie (perfect call, by the way, and from now on, I demand that Pixar release a new movie whenever I'm sad), to getting The Boss to do some work for me and go easy on me when other stuff isn't done!
I ought to start with Sasquatch. Three stages (plus a comedy/dance stage) for three days solid. To start with, I gotta say, two days was plenty. I mean, I'm glad they got rid of the anomalous, incongruous mismatch that was Friday night, and it's hard to complain that they replaced it with a third full day of top-to-bottom three-stage awesomeness. But I'm complaining. And then, they seem to have sold 150% of the tickets this year than in any past year I've gone (2007, 2006, 2004). There wasn't a spot near the main stage from the moment we got there to the second we left. There wasn't a way to get close to the second or even third stage. Nothing felt obscure or underappreciated. There wasn't anything I would remember for the rest of my life as a one-time-only front-row chance-of-a-lifetime like Decemberists on the third stage in '04. It was uncomfortably crowded from moment one to the second we passed the gate back into the parking lot for the third time. The sun was brutal, like knives on my grey Portland-wintered skin. The good news is that it didn't dip into the bitter, windy 50's in the evenings, and I never left miserable and shivering, wishing I could stay for the next band.
Day 1: Blind Pilot, a Portland band, was nice enough, with some really PDX-y twang-folk, vibraphones, banjo, violin, and upright bass. I would never complain about having to see them. Gotta admit, though, I would never complain about having to miss them. Death Vessel was minor-key folk-rock with violin and female vocals, some serious twang and some 1970s rock. Doves (I hate that they're not The Doves, they're Doves) were average alt-rock. Passion Pit were marvelous, with bouncy falsetto synth-fun. It was full of the kind of vaguely cynical joy that would be the perfect soundtrack to a lost John Hughes film (rest in peace, Breakfast Club!). I thought of the Snuggle-Ups. At this point, I lost The Boyfriend, and there is very nearly NO cell phone reception in The Gorge. I was distracted for the next few sets, wondering what would happen if we never found each other again in the sea of millions that was the Sasquatch crowd. I saw M. Ward, who is just as good live as he is in the studio. In other words, I could have just listened to the CDs. Devotchka was interesting, with accordion and violin, gypsy-influenced indie and straight-out gypsy. I'd like to hear more. The Mount St. Helens' Vietnam Band did some minor-key stuff in their rock. Interesting. Arthur & Yu was (at best) OK. Low key. Animal Collective was not as weird as expected, with some (ugh) world beats, mostly just aimless and repetitive, with some computer-psych and projected visuals. Sun Kil Moon started with a Red House Painters song and then followed with a bunch more that might have been RHP. Just too slow, pretty, and quiet for a weekend like this (or a weekend like those I spend at home doing things, either...). Somewhere in here, I was working my way up the hill by the main stage, when The Boyfriend somehow spotted me in the crowd. Whew! Ra Ra Riot was surprisingly un-riotous. With a name like that, you'd expect pop-rock '80s revival like every other band out there right now, but instead, there was a cello and a violin. Quiet bits and interesting details, with maybe a nod to Vampire Weekend here and there. The Decemberists did Hazards of Love straight through, like an orchestral-rock opera. I've seen them twice before at Sasquatch (and a dozen times or so other places), and this was a disappointment. No banter, no breaks at all between songs even, and certainly no singalongs and giant cardboard whale jaws. Though I have to admit, there's a ton of impressive, crushing rock in The Hazards of Love. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are retro early-80s girl-rock, wild and shouty with lots of eye makeup. There seems to be an invisible bass player. Bon Iver was pretty, with some complex lyrics and two or three drummers at times, a wailing falsetto like a musical saw, but still, occasionally boring in the midst of all this overstimulation. It would have been a great fit on Barsuk five or six years ago in the Nada Surf/All Time Quarterback/Rocky Votolato heyday.
Sunday, we started with Viva Voce. This was ROCK. We really needed some straight up rock. There were times, though, when they shaded a bit 1970s, and it seemed like they were going to meet their other band, Blue Giant, in some in-between musical middle ground. Viva Voce has become a four-piece with that one girl from that Portland band, you know the one, and that one other guy from that other band or two. Oh, yeah, the added female was Corrina Repp! Now I remember. I don't remember where we know the drummer from, though. Point Juncture, WA has become more beat-driven, with less vibraphone, but Amanda's voice still sounds like a vibraphone. Nice shorty jumpsuit, Amanda! Hockey was one-trick-pony party music, all deliberate throwback with sweatbands and little running shorts with the contrasting trim, but damn, were they a shit-ton of fun. They consistently remind me of Har Mar Superstar, except for the fact that one would never, ever want to see Sean in vintage little-bitty running shorts. Ew. The Walkmen were surprisingly uninteresting for all the attention they've gottten over the past however many years. Kind of a Brit-wannabe guitar-and-warble thing, occasional forays into Irish punk-lite. John Vanderslice, as always, managed to get the audience to give him things (sunglasses this time). A good set from him, but he's just never going to live up ever again to the Crystal Ballroom show from MFNW last year. Calexico was weird Mexishit. I like them less every time I hear them. I did a walk-through of the Fences set, and thought only they had some Barsuk-like potential. St. Vincent gave us a bunch of weird twinkly and boom-y noises that sometimes came together into a song, a bit Bjork-like. The song that sounded like 1930s Disney cartoon-short songs laid over total rawk guitar was probably pretty representative. The Builders And The Butchers continue to do some mashup of party rock, angry rebel folk-rock, 1970s faux-medieval, and actual medieval songs about the plague. Despite that description, they're a hell of a fun time. The Submarines could best be described as pop music for Target commercials, though they weren't quite as bad as Chairlift is (okay, that was an Ipod commercial, but the first nine times I heard it, I was sure it was a Target commercial). The Murder City Devils were certainly a rock band. It was a reunion show. They gave us messy, howling punk-rawk that referenced The Stooges and The Pixies...and yet, I didn't really enjoy it all that much. TV On The Radio was like an alt-rock Earth, Wind & Fire. Does that sound like a compliment? It's a compliment. The Boyfriend had this to say (he loves them): "Like a Prince and Steely Dan collaboration produced by Wayne Coyne." Gotta love that. M83 surprised me with the Kate Bush-like banshee vocals over the very-1980s orchestral ambie-rock. I went into it remembering they did orchy-ambie, but not the Bushy-banshee. At this point, we were just worn out, and skipped Of Montreal to go back to the hotel to sleep (yes, at my insistence we went with the soft life, a cottage with a big bed and ankle-deep sheepskin rugs and a mineral-bath whirlpool tub, rather than a tent plopped down in the middle of a dusty gravel-and-grass parking lot elbow to elbow with a gazillion other showgoers all partying all night).
Monday we caught just the tail end of The Heartless Bastards as we waited in line to have our bags searched. Sorry, Boyfriend, I know how much you wanted to see them. Their sound really filled the whole bowl at the main stage. Deerhoof followed: I would have been utterly gaga for this stuff in 1996. As it is, I still really enjoyed the super-twee tiny Asian female vocalist barking and crooning multilingually over experimental, sometimes-prog, sometimes-metal booming. There were even occasional funk-leaning bits, before they were again subsumed by the noise. The Pica Beats, despite the program's description, utterly failed at being Seattle's Decemberists. They had a Barsuk-y thing going on, major key with lots of ooh-ing, kind of indie-twee (but not twee-twee). I couldn't hear the lyrics well enough to decide if they too, like the Decemberists', were written by a word-drunk English major. Horsefeathers was loveably consistent, sounding like they always do, but there was no saw this time. We found a tiny bit of shade and lounged in this unexpected refuge, and the gentle old-style front-porch folk was the perfect accompaniment. Here, I started to lose track of what was going on. I think it was The Elephants that was all bouncy with xylophone, nearly worthy of pogo-ing up and down in the dust, with some sort of Vampire-Weekend-like Paul Simon references. I liked it well enough, but my mom would love it! The School of Seven Bells was up next--shoegazery, gothy electro-n-guitar wail. Kind of Siouxie and the Banshees-ish, but her voice wasn't really strong enough to carry it. Gogol Bordello was aiming for gypsy-punk, but undershot and ended up with cartoon-pirate cheese and Lord Of The Dance synth awfulness and some Klezmer Metallica (that's even worse than it sounds). Blitzen Trapper has gotten remarkably consistent. I'm not sure I love them, but they're really good at what they do, mostly 1970s twang southern-rock stuff that's almost but not quite tongue-in-cheek. With the mustaches and bellies to match. Monotonix was loud, with nods to The Doors and Hendrix, but with crowd-surfing (and standing on a drum held up by the crowd, and other "X-Treme!!!" variants on this theme). Interesting to watch trumped interesting to listen to. I'm glad I saw the Silversun Pickups so I could finally lay to rest that internal debate. It turns out the vocalist is male. That makes the band already about 72% less interesting. No, I don't usually prefer female-led bands, it's just that otherwise, SSP just sounds like middle-years Smashing Pumpkins in a not-very-interesting way. Beach House got lazily compared to the Beach Boys in the Stranger reviews...shit, not even close, guys. Repetitive, slow-moving pop without the deliberate electro that would save something described as "repetitive and slow-moving". Girl Talk was a sometimes-interesting, sometimes-too-popcultury layering of a bunch of rap (not hip-hop, really, just rap) over a bunch of pop music samples and references from the past 40 years: Jackson 5, Men Without Hats (Pop Goes The World!), Red Hot Chili Peppers, MGMT, and an overwhelming bunch of pop tripe I don't recognize and don't wanna. Erykah Badu was so not my thing. I don't understand why she was on this bill. I wasn't the only one--the crowd at the mainstage was as sparse as it was all weekend, and plenty of the people who were there weren't paying attention. The actual old-skool fingers-on-a-record-on-a-turntable scratching was pretty cool. The rest of it was too-current-sounding soul-r&b-lite-black-oriented-pop-radio crap. Finally, Explosions In The Sky did a lot of stuff in 3, pretty and pounding, all instrumental. I wanna put it on a mixtape...or better yet, receive a song or two on a mixtape, so I don't need to buy any.
The end.
Followed by a long, leisurely drive back to Portland, skipping the gorge to drive over the mountains and skirt Mount Rainier. Very pretty, and it was interesting to get up into some real elevation and see thick layers of snow still on the ground, many feet deep. We had taken the gorge route the previous weekend when...oh, I didn't tell this story, did I? The boyfriend asked if I'd go to The Gorge Amphitheater the previous weekend to see The Dead (not The Grateful Dead, just what's left of them). After about seven seconds of trying to figure out how to say this tactfully, I just gave up and said, "culturally, I can't make that leap." Because I can't stand hippies, and I can't imagine hanging out with a crowd that has their own language and their competitive insideriness and their defensive hate for anyone who actually makes a pathetic (but nonetheless somehow upper-class, nouveau riche, and gauche?...maybe it's the deodorant, or maybe just the forty-nine-cent comb I can't live without) five figures a year working full-time for genuine justice and equality, because I make them look lazy and ineffective...and oh yeah, I hate The Grateful Dead and any variant thereof just utterly viscerally. The sound makes me just cringe. To me, death sounds like a reasonable alternative. After a day or two of mulling that over, rather than being (probably justifiably) resentful, The Boyfriend charmingly asked, "Well, do you want do go to Washington with me for the weekend anyway?" We stayed in a room in a B&B that was a converted late-mid-century church, I'm pretty sure our room was in the choir loft. Over the two weekends, we tried just about every breakfast joint in the county, explored the little natural foods store, toured a little homestead history center, and tried out a few wineries. And had some of the best food in, of all places, Yakima, WA. Three meals in Yakima, three absolute home runs.
Wow, that was a load off my chest. Glad I could share that with you, and not have to keep it all inside anymore. More jubilant mexican food and uncontrollable hippie hate to come. Or at least more music on the docket.
See, I'm crazy far behind because of all these shows to see (and review), but also because of other stuff that isn't music-related. I found out in June that my mom has lung cancer. I only went out to see her for five and a half days, but it's just incredible what that takes out of my summer.
In not totally unrelated news, it's amazing what a sick mom going through chemo turns out to be a great excuse for, from...uh...not blogging, to getting The Boyfriend to take me out to a Pixar movie (perfect call, by the way, and from now on, I demand that Pixar release a new movie whenever I'm sad), to getting The Boss to do some work for me and go easy on me when other stuff isn't done!
I ought to start with Sasquatch. Three stages (plus a comedy/dance stage) for three days solid. To start with, I gotta say, two days was plenty. I mean, I'm glad they got rid of the anomalous, incongruous mismatch that was Friday night, and it's hard to complain that they replaced it with a third full day of top-to-bottom three-stage awesomeness. But I'm complaining. And then, they seem to have sold 150% of the tickets this year than in any past year I've gone (2007, 2006, 2004). There wasn't a spot near the main stage from the moment we got there to the second we left. There wasn't a way to get close to the second or even third stage. Nothing felt obscure or underappreciated. There wasn't anything I would remember for the rest of my life as a one-time-only front-row chance-of-a-lifetime like Decemberists on the third stage in '04. It was uncomfortably crowded from moment one to the second we passed the gate back into the parking lot for the third time. The sun was brutal, like knives on my grey Portland-wintered skin. The good news is that it didn't dip into the bitter, windy 50's in the evenings, and I never left miserable and shivering, wishing I could stay for the next band.
Day 1: Blind Pilot, a Portland band, was nice enough, with some really PDX-y twang-folk, vibraphones, banjo, violin, and upright bass. I would never complain about having to see them. Gotta admit, though, I would never complain about having to miss them. Death Vessel was minor-key folk-rock with violin and female vocals, some serious twang and some 1970s rock. Doves (I hate that they're not The Doves, they're Doves) were average alt-rock. Passion Pit were marvelous, with bouncy falsetto synth-fun. It was full of the kind of vaguely cynical joy that would be the perfect soundtrack to a lost John Hughes film (rest in peace, Breakfast Club!). I thought of the Snuggle-Ups. At this point, I lost The Boyfriend, and there is very nearly NO cell phone reception in The Gorge. I was distracted for the next few sets, wondering what would happen if we never found each other again in the sea of millions that was the Sasquatch crowd. I saw M. Ward, who is just as good live as he is in the studio. In other words, I could have just listened to the CDs. Devotchka was interesting, with accordion and violin, gypsy-influenced indie and straight-out gypsy. I'd like to hear more. The Mount St. Helens' Vietnam Band did some minor-key stuff in their rock. Interesting. Arthur & Yu was (at best) OK. Low key. Animal Collective was not as weird as expected, with some (ugh) world beats, mostly just aimless and repetitive, with some computer-psych and projected visuals. Sun Kil Moon started with a Red House Painters song and then followed with a bunch more that might have been RHP. Just too slow, pretty, and quiet for a weekend like this (or a weekend like those I spend at home doing things, either...). Somewhere in here, I was working my way up the hill by the main stage, when The Boyfriend somehow spotted me in the crowd. Whew! Ra Ra Riot was surprisingly un-riotous. With a name like that, you'd expect pop-rock '80s revival like every other band out there right now, but instead, there was a cello and a violin. Quiet bits and interesting details, with maybe a nod to Vampire Weekend here and there. The Decemberists did Hazards of Love straight through, like an orchestral-rock opera. I've seen them twice before at Sasquatch (and a dozen times or so other places), and this was a disappointment. No banter, no breaks at all between songs even, and certainly no singalongs and giant cardboard whale jaws. Though I have to admit, there's a ton of impressive, crushing rock in The Hazards of Love. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are retro early-80s girl-rock, wild and shouty with lots of eye makeup. There seems to be an invisible bass player. Bon Iver was pretty, with some complex lyrics and two or three drummers at times, a wailing falsetto like a musical saw, but still, occasionally boring in the midst of all this overstimulation. It would have been a great fit on Barsuk five or six years ago in the Nada Surf/All Time Quarterback/Rocky Votolato heyday.
Sunday, we started with Viva Voce. This was ROCK. We really needed some straight up rock. There were times, though, when they shaded a bit 1970s, and it seemed like they were going to meet their other band, Blue Giant, in some in-between musical middle ground. Viva Voce has become a four-piece with that one girl from that Portland band, you know the one, and that one other guy from that other band or two. Oh, yeah, the added female was Corrina Repp! Now I remember. I don't remember where we know the drummer from, though. Point Juncture, WA has become more beat-driven, with less vibraphone, but Amanda's voice still sounds like a vibraphone. Nice shorty jumpsuit, Amanda! Hockey was one-trick-pony party music, all deliberate throwback with sweatbands and little running shorts with the contrasting trim, but damn, were they a shit-ton of fun. They consistently remind me of Har Mar Superstar, except for the fact that one would never, ever want to see Sean in vintage little-bitty running shorts. Ew. The Walkmen were surprisingly uninteresting for all the attention they've gottten over the past however many years. Kind of a Brit-wannabe guitar-and-warble thing, occasional forays into Irish punk-lite. John Vanderslice, as always, managed to get the audience to give him things (sunglasses this time). A good set from him, but he's just never going to live up ever again to the Crystal Ballroom show from MFNW last year. Calexico was weird Mexishit. I like them less every time I hear them. I did a walk-through of the Fences set, and thought only they had some Barsuk-like potential. St. Vincent gave us a bunch of weird twinkly and boom-y noises that sometimes came together into a song, a bit Bjork-like. The song that sounded like 1930s Disney cartoon-short songs laid over total rawk guitar was probably pretty representative. The Builders And The Butchers continue to do some mashup of party rock, angry rebel folk-rock, 1970s faux-medieval, and actual medieval songs about the plague. Despite that description, they're a hell of a fun time. The Submarines could best be described as pop music for Target commercials, though they weren't quite as bad as Chairlift is (okay, that was an Ipod commercial, but the first nine times I heard it, I was sure it was a Target commercial). The Murder City Devils were certainly a rock band. It was a reunion show. They gave us messy, howling punk-rawk that referenced The Stooges and The Pixies...and yet, I didn't really enjoy it all that much. TV On The Radio was like an alt-rock Earth, Wind & Fire. Does that sound like a compliment? It's a compliment. The Boyfriend had this to say (he loves them): "Like a Prince and Steely Dan collaboration produced by Wayne Coyne." Gotta love that. M83 surprised me with the Kate Bush-like banshee vocals over the very-1980s orchestral ambie-rock. I went into it remembering they did orchy-ambie, but not the Bushy-banshee. At this point, we were just worn out, and skipped Of Montreal to go back to the hotel to sleep (yes, at my insistence we went with the soft life, a cottage with a big bed and ankle-deep sheepskin rugs and a mineral-bath whirlpool tub, rather than a tent plopped down in the middle of a dusty gravel-and-grass parking lot elbow to elbow with a gazillion other showgoers all partying all night).
Monday we caught just the tail end of The Heartless Bastards as we waited in line to have our bags searched. Sorry, Boyfriend, I know how much you wanted to see them. Their sound really filled the whole bowl at the main stage. Deerhoof followed: I would have been utterly gaga for this stuff in 1996. As it is, I still really enjoyed the super-twee tiny Asian female vocalist barking and crooning multilingually over experimental, sometimes-prog, sometimes-metal booming. There were even occasional funk-leaning bits, before they were again subsumed by the noise. The Pica Beats, despite the program's description, utterly failed at being Seattle's Decemberists. They had a Barsuk-y thing going on, major key with lots of ooh-ing, kind of indie-twee (but not twee-twee). I couldn't hear the lyrics well enough to decide if they too, like the Decemberists', were written by a word-drunk English major. Horsefeathers was loveably consistent, sounding like they always do, but there was no saw this time. We found a tiny bit of shade and lounged in this unexpected refuge, and the gentle old-style front-porch folk was the perfect accompaniment. Here, I started to lose track of what was going on. I think it was The Elephants that was all bouncy with xylophone, nearly worthy of pogo-ing up and down in the dust, with some sort of Vampire-Weekend-like Paul Simon references. I liked it well enough, but my mom would love it! The School of Seven Bells was up next--shoegazery, gothy electro-n-guitar wail. Kind of Siouxie and the Banshees-ish, but her voice wasn't really strong enough to carry it. Gogol Bordello was aiming for gypsy-punk, but undershot and ended up with cartoon-pirate cheese and Lord Of The Dance synth awfulness and some Klezmer Metallica (that's even worse than it sounds). Blitzen Trapper has gotten remarkably consistent. I'm not sure I love them, but they're really good at what they do, mostly 1970s twang southern-rock stuff that's almost but not quite tongue-in-cheek. With the mustaches and bellies to match. Monotonix was loud, with nods to The Doors and Hendrix, but with crowd-surfing (and standing on a drum held up by the crowd, and other "X-Treme!!!" variants on this theme). Interesting to watch trumped interesting to listen to. I'm glad I saw the Silversun Pickups so I could finally lay to rest that internal debate. It turns out the vocalist is male. That makes the band already about 72% less interesting. No, I don't usually prefer female-led bands, it's just that otherwise, SSP just sounds like middle-years Smashing Pumpkins in a not-very-interesting way. Beach House got lazily compared to the Beach Boys in the Stranger reviews...shit, not even close, guys. Repetitive, slow-moving pop without the deliberate electro that would save something described as "repetitive and slow-moving". Girl Talk was a sometimes-interesting, sometimes-too-popcultury layering of a bunch of rap (not hip-hop, really, just rap) over a bunch of pop music samples and references from the past 40 years: Jackson 5, Men Without Hats (Pop Goes The World!), Red Hot Chili Peppers, MGMT, and an overwhelming bunch of pop tripe I don't recognize and don't wanna. Erykah Badu was so not my thing. I don't understand why she was on this bill. I wasn't the only one--the crowd at the mainstage was as sparse as it was all weekend, and plenty of the people who were there weren't paying attention. The actual old-skool fingers-on-a-record-on-a-turntable scratching was pretty cool. The rest of it was too-current-sounding soul-r&b-lite-black-oriented-pop-radio crap. Finally, Explosions In The Sky did a lot of stuff in 3, pretty and pounding, all instrumental. I wanna put it on a mixtape...or better yet, receive a song or two on a mixtape, so I don't need to buy any.
The end.
Followed by a long, leisurely drive back to Portland, skipping the gorge to drive over the mountains and skirt Mount Rainier. Very pretty, and it was interesting to get up into some real elevation and see thick layers of snow still on the ground, many feet deep. We had taken the gorge route the previous weekend when...oh, I didn't tell this story, did I? The boyfriend asked if I'd go to The Gorge Amphitheater the previous weekend to see The Dead (not The Grateful Dead, just what's left of them). After about seven seconds of trying to figure out how to say this tactfully, I just gave up and said, "culturally, I can't make that leap." Because I can't stand hippies, and I can't imagine hanging out with a crowd that has their own language and their competitive insideriness and their defensive hate for anyone who actually makes a pathetic (but nonetheless somehow upper-class, nouveau riche, and gauche?...maybe it's the deodorant, or maybe just the forty-nine-cent comb I can't live without) five figures a year working full-time for genuine justice and equality, because I make them look lazy and ineffective...and oh yeah, I hate The Grateful Dead and any variant thereof just utterly viscerally. The sound makes me just cringe. To me, death sounds like a reasonable alternative. After a day or two of mulling that over, rather than being (probably justifiably) resentful, The Boyfriend charmingly asked, "Well, do you want do go to Washington with me for the weekend anyway?" We stayed in a room in a B&B that was a converted late-mid-century church, I'm pretty sure our room was in the choir loft. Over the two weekends, we tried just about every breakfast joint in the county, explored the little natural foods store, toured a little homestead history center, and tried out a few wineries. And had some of the best food in, of all places, Yakima, WA. Three meals in Yakima, three absolute home runs.
Wow, that was a load off my chest. Glad I could share that with you, and not have to keep it all inside anymore. More jubilant mexican food and uncontrollable hippie hate to come. Or at least more music on the docket.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)