After an unforgettable night with skunk and cats, we enjoyed an uneventful drive into New York, which at least for me, is the cure for boredom. There's an energy there which is hard to describe, or deny, and greatly at odds with the management at the Yippie. The room was very interesting, but the mammals in charge were less than intellectually charged. I guess it is true that with the single exception of the progeezer, excessive pot use does turn you into a fucking idiot. On a personal note, it was intensely amusing to discover Andy does not dig hippies, and makes little effort to veil this. Regardless, we stashed the gear and spent the day walking around the city; ate a great meal at Katz's, and thousands of steps later wound up in some German restaurant in the village where much re-hydrating beer was imbibed. It must be said that some impossible-to-pronounce dishes were also enjoyed in tandem, and that they were infinitely more tasty than anything I ever ate in Germany. Back at the Yippie, the gig was broadcast over the web, and what I remember most about it is that the rasta dude running sound kept smiling, winking and giving thumbs up. We played a slightly boozed-up set courtesy of the German brews, and I was very frustrated by the people in attendance, themselves mighty yogurt droolers who seemed to have been used as target practice for a tranquilizer dart gun. Wound up paying 10 bucks for a copy of the broadcast on DVD, packed the gear into the van and made our way into Brooklyn where we were gonna spend the night. And what a fun night it was: We made it into the apartment, undid the haphazard gear tetris, stashed it upstairs and went back into town to meet up with some folks and have a few drinks at a local favorite watering hole. I can't recall the name of the the bar, but the old guy running the bar introduced himself as Phil. I do recall that after a couple of rounds of car bombs our blood alcohol finally caught up with that our hosts, at which point Phil started buying us rounds of Kamikazes, and I finally started to relax. Wound up giving him a wood knot CD for his generosity, which might could be argued to be a cheapo way to slither out of shelling out a man-sized tip, but the guy was a music fiend. Every time I walked from our table out back to the bar for a fresh round he talked to me about all his years in the city and the concerts he had seen, at venues now transformed into condos with a starbucks on the corner; the radio programs he once listened to, DJ's turned to ghosts in the static of memory, and ranted off bitterly about the current state of music on the air waves. In short, he vented his frustration at the tsunami of bullshit called corporate rock, and got an eye roll from an ear-budded, eavesdropping chick dressed the way Elvira the vampire queen might have done were she a flat-chested, yuppie little mall zombie. Her chewed, black fingernails were clutching a drink that looked like anti-freeze and smelled like a blueberry/raspberry/whatthefuckeverberry mix; an angry stench my nose screamed was completely immiscible with her choice of perfume and violently at odds with her eminence front. Without letting her harsh my buzz, went back to the business at hand, left when the bar closed, slept for a couple of hours and watched the sunrise over Brooklyn to the counterpoint of Tim's snoring and an alarm that kept bleating "you must leave the area immediately".
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