30 April 2007
Record Bar, Kansas City (eventually)
The mosquitoes were busy last night. It's like I've got nipples on my back.
The cancellation of the Fray show tonight put lots of wheels in motion to find us an alternative gig. I should point out that none of these wheels were mine - it was all the work of agents and tour managers and radio stations. Well done everyone.
We ended up muscling our way onto Sara's gig at a nice little place in Westport called the Record Bar.
We didn't want to overcomplicate things for everybody, so we tried to use Sara's setup as much as we could. This wasn't too tricky for me, but Dave was borrowing Josh's Cajon, which is a traditional Spanish percussion instrument that looks like a box. When you sit on it and beat it with your hands, it sounds uncannily like you're sitting on a box, beating it with your hands.
It was one of those occasions which ends up being fun because of all its shortcomings. News of our emergency gig had got out to a handful of Aqualung Appreciators, and everyone else there was very obliging. The juxtaposition between the sitting-on-a-box gig and the anticipated giant-arena gig did lend the whole thing a slight tinge of absurdity, which did, I'm afraid, lead to some foolishness. We are a little prone to foolishness. It wasn't as stupid as the two-man show we did at the Boston Arts Theatre in December 2005, but it got pretty close.
While we were killing time on the bus that afternoon, we idly started working out how to play 'Muzzle of Bees' by Wilco, so we chucked that into the set too. It was going tremendously well, until we all simultaneously forgot what happened next. And so it joins the pantheon of Unprepared Cover Versions That Went Disastrously Wrong ('I want you (She's so heavy)' The Beatles - The Nerve Centre, Derry, April 2003. 'Goodbye Yellow Brick Road' Elton John - Showbox, Seattle, April 2005). This one we'll probably persist with, though.
I can't believe it's May.
