Monday, February 2, 2009

Indie Music, Beer, & Lawyers: The Weekend that was my Birthday

Rock 'N' Roll at the Elbo Room, drunken debauchery in Lincoln Park, photo session on Division St, are just the main points to how I spent this weekend in Chicago for my birthday.

Friday night I played my first show with my newest band Ben Joyce and The Savage Young. The gig was at The Elbom Room on Lincoln Ave opening for the group aptly named A Band Called Catch. Going into Friday night I wasn't thinking about the gig too much, and really didn't expect much of it. I had played at the Elbom Room previously before, and it's the typical rocker/indie bar like The Subterrean or the Double Door. We were the opening act and only playing 40 min, so I wasn't expecting much money or many people there yet to watch us, but i was totally wrong.

Ben Joyce has quickly become my favorite person to play a show with. Ben brought about 30 people to the show and there were about 100 people in The Elbo Room by the time we started playing and it was so packed people were wall to wall after we were done i couldn't move around in the crowd and it was almost impossible trying to get our stuff off the stage. It was pandamonium, it was the kind of crowd you'd expect at CBGB's in 1977 or something. It was Rock 'N' Roll at its purest and most raw form, and the energy was amazing. I am so proud of our performance as a band, especially it being our first gig together. The highlight for me was the last song we played, which was a cover of The Police's classic "Next To You" which is probably my favorite song of The Police. We recorded our set, and listening to it the next day, I think my drums on "Next To You" is the best drum track I've ever recorded and listening to myself, which I usually hate to do because I'm more own biggest critical, I was blown away by my drumming. I don't mean to sound full of myself, I was blown away because I usually think I could have done way better, but It was maybe the first time I heard myself playing and thought that was damn good and better than I thought when we played the show the night before.

So the gig Friday night went unbelieveably well, and is something I'm really proud of, and we got paid way more than I thought we would, and is the best pay day I've had for a quite a while and reminded me that of yeah you can actually make a lot of money playing music.

Friday and Saturday Nights I went out with friends of mine in Lincoln Park. Friday night was the cause to get annihiliated was my band's performance which put me on cloud 9. We went to 3 different bars that I remember, and I dropped a total of three glasses throughout the night, and somehow I ended up crashing at my friend's by Clark and Fullerton in Lincoln Park, but my van ended up being parked two blocks from Wrigley Field, how this happen is still blurry, but it's all good now.

Saturday night we went out celebrating my birthday which was actually Sunday. I realized a few things after going out Saturday night. I am not a lawyer. One of my best friends is going to law school, and I've pondered the idea from time to time especially because I plan at somepoint in my life in getting involved in politics, so logically it would seem to make sense to go to law school. We went out to the bar and met up with some of my friend's friends from law school. I just don't really get along with law students. I don't want to make any assumptions or try to make stereotypes, but there is just something about lawyers that rubs me the wrong way. I was trying to be polite and talk to this guy who was a law student and he's making fun of me because i was wearing really tight jeans and blue/yellow shoes, while he's wearing a cardigan sweater and to me resmbled a guy who would be named Prescot and spend his summers sailing somewhere wishing one day to be able to suck Mitt Romney's cock. He's going on about how great John Roberts is and just sounding like the typical non-free thinking idiot. Or as John Malkevich would say "he's an idiot in a league of idiots."

It's just crazy how many people have a holier than thou mentality, and it drives me up the wall. Having a law degree doesn't mean anything. Having any degree doesn't mean anything. Getting an education is only useful if you use it. Just getting a degree and hopefully an education doesn't mean anything, it's all about how you use it. I wish more people understood that. I feel more of an urge now than ever to get involved in politics, maybe it's the Thomas Jefferson and Harvey Milk in me.

Me and a hipster friend of mine spent a good chunk of time Saturday night at bars discussing and observing members of what we call the non-thinking culture(religous people, die-hard capitalist consumers, nationalists, people driven only by money, elitists, bigots, conformists). This is the culture that makes up most of America, which is sad, but i think will hopefully change or eventually our species is doomed at some point in the future.

My hipster friend and I eventually got tired of hanging out with law students and we ended up at a Golden Nugget until 6 a.m. discussing politics and environmental concerns. After tiring of talking about green technology for hours, we decided to hit up an after hours bar, which was insane. It was literally an urban jungle in this place. I don't mean that in any kind of racial way at all, it was about all young white people in there. What I mean about urban jungle is, you get all these people who probably in every day life are and seem normal. You then put these people in an environment which allows them to drop their inhibitions, and they literally go wild. It is amazing what alcohol, multi-colored bright lights, and crappy dance music with too much bass will make people do. In a way though I think it's good for people to be more animalistic, but I think way too often people take it way too far in their wildness and still don't at the end of the day realize we are just animals who have the same needs as other animals. Morals aren't real and are a manmade delusion, the sooner people realize that the better off we are as for as social progression.

I also was involved in a photo shoot this weekend, which was a lot of fun and the first one I'd been involved with in a couple years. In and all it was a quite memerable weekend.

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