Sisters

There Will Be Vodka

/ Deb / Leave a comment

I bought the tickets before she actually agreed, but I had hoped that I could talk my sister into attending a State Radio show with me, scheduled for this coming March.

Luckily, she said she was in — with the caveat that, since the show is on a Wednesday, she might take the next day off, since I will be “pushing” vodka tonics on her during the show.  (This, apparently in reference to the last time we went to the ShowBox – where, I should add, she was a willing participant. (Buttercup! Buttercup!)).

I am a big fan of Dispatch….. I dig Chad Stokes, and State Radio is his post-Dispatch band, so I am excited to see them.  They opened for John Butler Trio at the Paramount last Spring, and I ran into Chad in the lobby after their set.  But I was too chicken to go up to him – and would probably have said something dorky like “I like your music”, or even dorkier (or maybe not), “my 6 year old daughter loves your music”.   (“You Know I Would”).

So maybe I will run into Chad again, and this time actually say something.   And maybe after the show, I can talk my sister into going to the Dispatch reunion show with me in Berkeley in June.  Either way, a night out with her is a guaranteed good time, and yes, dear sister, there will be vodka.

"Oh, You Like the Banjo, Eh?"

/ Deb / 3 Comments

……asked John Butler of the Moore Theatre crowd, when we all cheered as a stagehand brought one to him.  “Well then, let’s have a little hoedown”.  Best line of the night; totally cracked me up.  My sisters and I have called his shows ‘hippie hoedowns’ for a long time.   It seems to be the only way to describe  their concert scene.

Recently I was popping off to some friends about how you shouldn’t go to a concert if you intend to sit down, and how it irritates me to see people sitting like deadbeats at a show.  I think my actual words were, “if you intend to sit down, you don’t deserve your ticket.  Go home and listen to a CD”.  This is mostly true, but of course I don’t really have that extreme a view on it.  I fully support sitting down when it’s a really shitty song or as a form of social protest, such as when DMB plays any of their new crap.

I just want everyone to have their Concert Moment.  That’s what I’m in it for — the one moment in the concert where you say to yourself- YES, this is why I am here.  I usually get that Moment, and if I don’t, I never go back to see the band again.

So at the John Butler Trio show, my sisters and I had the requisite group of ex-frat boys in front of us.  A small price to pay for otherwise awesome Row 6 seats, I must say.   And watching those dudes was almost as much fun as watching the band.  They danced, they sang, they did fist pumps and high fives for songs they liked.   They were having their Concert Moment, and I loved it.

My sisters loved watching them too, but more as spectacle.   Together, we have been known to wreak some havoc on fellow concert goers.  Two that come to mind are 1) the Gum Butt incident, and 2) the pelting of a couple who were making out during an entire Pearl Jam show.  Lucky for the frat boys, however, we all behaved ourselves this time.

And the hippie hoedown was a blast for all three of us, even with our differing views of the Perfect Concert.  While I love standing shoulder to shoulder with sweaty, dancing strangers, my youngest sister would really prefer not to.  She’d like to sit down, and once proclaimed that anyone standing and dancing should be banished to a “designated dancing section”.

Given that she’s entitled to her Concert Moment too, she might actually be on to something.

1979 Was a Great Year

/ Deb / 2 Comments

In honor of my youngest sister’s 31st birthday, and in an effort to forget how old that will soon make me, here are, in no particular order, my Top Five Favorite Musical Memories of her:

1.  “Sara Smile” by Hall & Oates. She hates this song. I mean really, really hates it. Which makes it all the more fun to sing it to her, or to call her and leave it on her answering machine. Or to play it at a wedding and dedicate it to her.

2.  “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, Def Leppard. My middle sister’s bachelorette party and a little place called the Grizzly Bar, she danced like nobody’s business, and I’ve got the pictures to prove it.

3.  “Best of What’s Around”, DMB.  A show at the Gorge in 2000, they opened with Don’t Drink the Water.  Towards the end of the song, I told her that I really hoped that they played Best of What’s Around.  Two seconds later, they launched into it.  I turned and punched her in the arm.  Hard.  And she’s never let me forget it.  Every time I hear the opening beats of that song, I think of throwing a right hook.

4.  “Are You Gonna Go My Way”, Lenny Kravitz.  A sister weekend at her apartment in Bellingham, and some cookies.  And that’s about all I can say.

5.  Theme song from Jurassic Park.  The summer that Jurassic Park came out, we had a blast together.  I was home from college, and we spent the summer doing crafty projects and being goofy.  We saw Jurassic Park and were genuinely scared in the middle of the afternoon, dissecting how we would handle it if a velociraptor appeared next to the car on the way home.  To this day, she does an awesome impersonation of a dilophosaur.

Happy Birthday, Janie.  I love you!

The Keg’s Around Back

/ Deb / Leave a comment

I’ve never had the experience of meeting someone and wondering where they had been all my life. But now I can say that I have had it with a band.

Holy crap, how did I not know about the Black Keys? I am completely hooked on them these days, thanks to my youngest, more musically hip, sister. I felt like a kid in a candy store when I realized that they have more albums than the one she initially gave me.

Gritty, grainy, stripped down – makes me feel like I should be watching them play in a party house with a beer-soaked floor, keg cup in hand. Which is a good thing…figuratively, anyway.

"Buttercup! Buttercup!"

/ Deb / 2 Comments

My sister dubbed it a “90’s Love Fest”, and that’s exactly what it was. Complete with Doc Martens and long shorts, worn with a long flannel, slyly shouldering a vintage “Drop in the Park” tee shirt.

I’ve been to lots of Pearl Jam shows over the years, but have never seen the grunge look out in such full effect as on this evening. Perhaps Brad’s first show in years, and the potential of a (surviving members of) Mother Love Bone reunion, were enough to bring them all out. At any rate, The Showbox was packed, and we were all ready for a little walk down Seattle’s musical memory lane.

And what a walk it was. I lost track of the number of different musical collaborations up on stage….various versions of back-in-the-day Seattle bands, culminating with a reunion of the surviving members of Mother Love Bone that blew my mind.

I never again saw the dude that I had seen in line with the “Drop in the Park” shirt, but it hit me at some point during the evening that he could not have been at that show, unless he was about 10 years old at the time.  A free Pearl Jam concert at Magnuson Park, three weeks into my law school career — I was at the show, instead of in the law library, which kind of speaks for itself.   I bought one of the shirts but never wore it and ended up giving it away…..(so who knows, maybe my old shirt was at The Showbox with me,  on someone else’s body?)

It was refreshing to see the ubiquitous Seattle drink-in-hand head-nod: that disinterested method of rocking out that I only see from vintage Seattle concert-goers. And no cell phones taking pictures; it could have been 1992 all over again. Except for the fact that I now have two kids (and an awesome husband who offered to stay home so I could have a night out with my sister).

The cab dropped us off at 2:30am, and I spent the next day paying for it. Totally worth it though; as my husband quipped, “that’s the life of a rock star, man”. Exactly.

Good Tunes, Like Sisters, Come in Groups of Three

/ Deb / Leave a comment

For anyone who has ever said that I am too structured, check out how I’m living on the edge these days:

Instead of listening to designated playlists, or “shuffle” on my ipod, lately I’ve been listening to songs in alphabetical order.

I love things in groups of three, and I love juxtaposition (both the word, and the actual effect). Imagine my delight when the following three songs played in this order:

1. Don’t Disturb This Groove (The Station);
2. Don’t Drink the Water (DMB); and
3. Don’t Stop Believing (Journey)

I laughed out loud at how different these three songs are, and how I love them all nearly equally, for very different reasons:

“Don’t Disturb This Groove” conjures visions of my middle sister, cruising her Honda with the sunroof open, the wind fluttering through her big hair. I don’t know if she ever actually listened to this song (as opposed to the Color Me Badd that I know for a fact was blared), but it’s all within the same genre….the 80’s/90’s slow groove….whatever happened to that?

“Don’t Drink the Water”…..both of my sisters, numerous DMB shows at The Gorge (“there’s plutonium in the water”?). Dave opened my favorite show ever, in Vegas, with this one. Good times all around.

“Don’t Stop Believing”…..again, my sisters, this time with a K-Tel tape and a boombox, and a family camping trip to Yellowstone, listening over and over until the batteries warbled it to a stop.

Three little tunes, different stages of my life, peacefully co-existing side by side in the digital age. Perfect.