w/Red Cross Sky

BBA has never played at The Bridge Street Taven before, but I had gone to check out the venue when we booked the gig. The joint turned out to be a neighborhood bar, but a really clean nice one with a very friendly and local-music enthusiastic staff. The patronage was diverse – regular mainers, dykes, bikers – a real mix. Due to a lack of gear storage space, the bill was kept down to two bands – us and Red Cross Sky, who booked the gig. As a result, we did something very unusual for us – we played two sets. basically we played the Seas of Blood cd in the first set, and what will be the new cd in the second. We also included two covers, which we originally learned for some special appearences at WCYY-FM events (Spinal Tap’s “Stonehenge” for Mark Curdo’s Spinal Tap Tribute show and “joyful joyful we adore thee” for the WCYY xmas show.)

The audience that night was not very large but respectable considering most of the state was without power from the ice storm the previous evening. For some strange reason they kept trying to dance, and every time they made it to the dancefloor we would change time signatures or tempo, totally fucking them up. A guy from a cover band kept asking us if we wrote all this music and commented repeatedly that he only hears bands like us in Portland, and he kept saying this while we we’re actually playing. He did, though, call his bandmates to hustle them down to see our second set.

The covers did not go over. It seems nobody knows them. Unlike everywhere else in america, I guess no one in Augusta has seen Spinal Tap a thousand times or has gone to church.

Red Cross Sky went on and did there usual thing. Reuben from Ocean (jenny’s boyfriend) was there and comment that RCS sounded like and uptempo Ogre, a popular portland stoner/doom band. That had not dawned on me before, but I can see his point. They are a trio, with guitar player John Koutney really laying out the old school solos.