Reply To: JoCo in NYC!
[Second part of long wordy post]
There are a lot of points about the venue I could comment on. There really were some important considerations about where to sit that ought to be wikified, I think. Your placement in the space made a big difference to your sightlines for filming, and probably for recording, so even though the acoustics seemed to be great everywhere, there were a lot of variables it would have been good to know about. Mitch & Bry and I were very VERY close to the stage, so I couldn’t see all the performers at once, at any time, which I found a bit difficult. On the other hand, it was great for being able to discern which one of P&S was singing what on the harmony backups, and for catching a lot of the great deadpan performances by the uke army members and Kristen. Good for hearing JoCo’s guitar, too.
That uke army — they were SO excellent. I was a little apprehensive, given Kristen’s warning. Were they going to do a set of songs I’d never heard? Were there going to be highly technical bits of ukulele practice or lore that I wouldn’t recognize? But they were just a great and very apt addition to a great set. I’d go to see them by themselves, they were so good.
At the merch table, Scarface was selling a couple of t-shirts (I noticed the brown Skullcrusher one, as well as P&S’s cartoon pirate shirt and their witty trilingual cheese shirt). I bought Smoking Monkey, and saw both individual and box sets of TAW on sale, plus several P&S CDs. Maybe someone who saw the table with less of a crowd around it could be more specific on what was on offer. I talked to Alliegee for a second as she headed downstairs with her friends — it was cool to recognize her from her blog.
The merch area was pretty small, so the meet & autograph space ended up being inside the performance space, near the greenroom hallway. That was the place where I (briefly) met Kristen and Ian, and got to say Hi to P&S and el JoCo.
One of the most fun conversations during that aftershow was the one I had with Jeff the lighting guy. The thing that had prompted Storm to make the long accurate throw of a suggestively named snack product to him was that during their set, Paul had made some joking comment about how much of a placeholder they must seem to a JoCo crowd, and Jeff had instantly cut the spotlights off both P and S, and cut on one over the empty central microphone. Which was hilarious. The rest of the lighting work was spectacular too — lots of rotating spots in different colors, and rotating patterns projected onto big disco balls in the rear corners, all without coming across as either amateur or too darn polished for rock ‘n’ roll. It was witty lighting.
So I told Jeff how much I’d enjoyed it, and asked him how he’d liked the show. He said “those guys are REALLY really good. I mean I was blown away — I listen to musicians play every night, and I’m amazed I’ve never heard of these guys. They’re pretty exceptional.” In fact, he said he was going to get some of their CDs. To me, that was significantly high praise, so I was happy to hear it. We live to proselytize, you know.
By some other coincidence, ran into CoolJammer on the subway, so there was more talk of the performance even in a random spot in the city. A great night, very good show, and I’m so glad I was in New York that weekend.