Tour Show 2: Cleveland

Okay, it's like 4:30 AM and the afterparty here in Cleveland is sort of partly wrapping up. Enormous gratitude to JT and Reggie for letting us crash at their fabulous pad where they run Jib Machine Records. They set up this terrific Jib Machine Holiday party here the week after New Year's... great crowd and great bands. They had us in VB, JT playing in Hot Ham & Cheese (who kick enormous quantities of ass, great new stuff, too), then fellow NYC-ers The Natch! (who rocked out; more with them tomorrow night in Chicago), then Johnny Mohawk and The Assassins (fabulous dirty old-school punk here in Cleveland). Everyone came back here to JMR to hang out and play records and more drums and stuff. We arm-wrestled over where everyone's sleeping and somehow Trish of The Natch! won the bed, I think I was distracted or something.

We've been here at the Symposium in Lakewood three times now, and this was by far our best show (we got a lot of comments to that effect, which is cool). One or two extra glitches that we didn't have at the gig in Boston, but still a pretty damn good show. Collin was thrashing all over the stage and threw in the extra-crazy spontaneous ending to Binge, which I was more prepared for tonight and did some stuff to go along with it. I got up and slammed the sticks so hard in the middle of MF that one of them shot out of my hand and hit the ceiling (I think). At the end, we got kind of desperate calls for more songs -- we almost never do encores (we're more in the "we'll tell you how many songs we're playing" camp), but this seemed really heartfelt so we threw in the old "Final Friend" at the end as a bonus. Pretty sweet.

In more in-the-car news (driving through snow-blanketed mountains of Pennsylvania today), Collin's got this simply genius playlist he put together on his iPod, that has me just expostulating "Niiice!" and "Brilliant!" over and over again all through the day when we're driving. We get to contrast and compare dozens of different guitar and drum sounds from all these great rock songs. Here's just one example that I hadn't heard in over 10 years and had me clapping with joy and playing it again: "Skydiver" from Schtum's 1995 album Grow. (This was a band from Northern Ireland helmed by Christian McNeill, whom I believe is now based in Boston). If you haven't heard it, listen to it now. THIS MEANS YOU! Seriously, I know you're reading this, I'm talking to you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjS8S3HxIJo

Tomorrow's a really big show in Chicago with Donkey Punch and more of The Natch! and like a half-dozen other bands. That's at the Mutiny on N. Western Avenue. Updates may be dicey, right after that we've got a drive to an early afternoon benefit show in St. Louis. Need to really jump off it tomorrow, ha!