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Friday, April 19
Notsuoh, Houston TX We left early - well, 11 o'clock - for the leisurely three-hour drive to Houston, our Easternmost stop. The entire downtown of Houston was a disaster - they're installing a monorail down Main Street, as well as doing some other sort of major sewer work, so it was impossible to get around, as if the normal mess of one-way streets and sudden curves wasn't bad enough. Who planned this place? They've got room, they should use it. Being on tour certainly makes one appreciate urban planning. Finally we pulled up into six inches of dusty mud, dodging police barriers and bulldozer ruts, on the block where the club was ostensibly located. Between two trendy bars was a four-story building with a 5-foot donut made of chicken wire in the front window and the words "E-Z Credit" blazing in red neon on its face, 20 feet high. The address matched, so it seemed to be our stop. Inside was the biggest mess of old furniture, magazines, shoes, rugs, signs, dust, and gutter punks I'd ever seen, that is, until we were directed to load our gear up a creaky unlit wooden staircase to the second floor, where a bigger mess was crammed into a smaller space, and then when we peeked into the third floor, the "stage area", where a space had been cleared in the middle of a football field-sized area crammed with even more debris. Apparently the place was a department store until the 30's, and had lain dormant until the current owner bought it four years ago, with all the inventory intact. One wall was composed entirely of faded, cracked women's shoes in pink boxes. Since a ballet class was rehearsing there, we found a dark corner on the second floor (actually, it was not problem finding corners that were also dark, the building was almost nothing but) and retreated to the safety of the Hobbit Café to have a desultory supper of enormous Middle Earth-themed sandwiches, outside in the warm night, attended to by Texas mosquitoes the size of, well, mosquitoes. With a touch of dread, we returned to the urban disaster that is Notsuoh (Houston spelled backwards) and attempted to assess the situation. The other band, Predominantly March, a nice bunch of young fellows from Austin, had showed up and shared our confusion as to when to play. In fact, there was even a question of where we should play. Although they had just dragged their P.A. up the two flights of stairs, we all decided to play downstairs in the main area, figuring that it'd be better to play to a few handfuls of people for free than to play to ourselves at 3 bucks a head. We cleared the "stage", which actually was a stage, albeit one that was supported by four clawfoot bathtubs and so loaded with old schoolboy desks that we hadn't noticed it, and discussed our options. Playing it safe by San Francisco standards, assuming that by midnight, everyone would start straggling home and we'd be left playing to rats and ghosts, we decided to play first. We faced a wall festooned with numerous larger-than-life charcoal renderings of a crack-smoking session and blasted out our loudest tunes, as people walked back and forth to the small coffeeshop located in the back and generally ignored our ruckus. After a few tunes, we registered a minor victory when one of the punks sprawled across the jumble of overstuffed chairs in front of us actually got up and turned his chair in our direction to see better. By the time we were finished, it was almost midnight, and there were actually more people in the place than when we started. Hm. We wiped our stuff off the stage and started to load out, and encountered a sidewalk full of funseekers. The street was hopping, to our surprise. We elbowed our way down the block and a ten-dollar margarita with a friend who had actually flown down from Dallas to see us. She also hooked us up with a great hotel room. Thanks Tammy! Meanwhile, P-March had decided to play upstairs after all, so they picked up their equipment for the third time that evening and trundled back to the arena of squalor upstairs. By the time we came back, at almost one, they'd created a nice little atmosphere with dimmed lights and, to our surprise, were preparing to play to a crowd of 50 polite kids, parents and street people. It was beautiful, really - everyone had a La-Z-Boy or couch to sit on, and it was an almost reverent little mood. The boys sounded great, a little thin to our musical-snob ears (get some tube amps, fellas! Turn up that bass! And don't all wear stretched-high white socks and shorts on the same night!) but they actually had some sophisticated ideas and really were getting across to the crowd. We had clearly miscalculated. I should have learned our lesson in Austin, when our ten o'clock slot (prime time for SF) turned out to be early even for the earlybirds. Texas folk like to party late, plain and simple, even the kids. I was so bummed, I would have loved to play to this crowd - we never have all-ages shows, so we never really get to get onstage before an underage audience - and the whole place had started to make a lot more sense. It's really a do-it-yourself art house, and it's actually one of the hippest places in town - just not before the witching hour. It gets even hipper later, it's in actuality the center of afterhours nightlife. We left, with not a few regrets, and the band was nice enough to thank us from the stage, even mentioning our website, which is usually a faux pas to announce over the mic. Ah, kids. I think they'll go places. |
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