Chilled out at Jestin’s until well into the afternoon Friday, reading, eating curry made by Michelle, and watching goofy YouTube videos. We became a bit obsessed with “Slap Chop Rap”:
Ah, Omaha. Music City of the Midwest. After some trouble finding the right street, we made it to the Barley Street Tavern (or “The Barley” as I later heard it referred to) about quarter after 7 pm. The doors were locked, including the front door with the sign taped to it that said “Open at 6.” I found a Cadillac emblem lying out in the back parking lot with a hilarious photo pinned to it of a guy in a black-and-white striped old-timey jail inmate Halloween costume looking really pissed and pouty standing by a pool table. Will considered making a belt buckle out of the Cadillac emblem.
The Barley Street Tavern is about a block off 42nd street in a part of Omaha called Benton or Benson or something like that. This part of 42nd street has about 82 music venues on it within a few blocks, but The Barley being a little bit off on a side street gives it kind of a cool outsidery vibe. We decided to kill some time walking up 42nd and maybe find something to eat, and that was where we ran into Nick from Little Black Stereo. He and Dan chatted for quite a while and he said he had some other show going on that night but would try and stop by ours for a bit (which he did), and also that we could stay at his place in Lincoln Saturday night.
The show at Barley Street opened with a solo acoustic set by Andrew John of Rock Paper Dynamite, as the full Rock paper Dynamite band were unable to make it for some reason.
On next was Moses Prey. Some blurb had compared them to the Stooges but I was hearing more MC5. Their shouts about “rocking our motherfucking socks off” and such seemed a little cheezy at first but they won the room over pretty quick by being really great. The three-part vocals were especially a treat. I dare say they actually did rock some socks off.
As you can see from the photos, The Barley is a pretty small place. It’s the very definition of intimate. If you want to stand up in front of the stage, this puts you right up in the band’s faces. This is kind of nice because even a small crowd gives the feeling that the place is packed. The crowd there tends to stay in the room where the stage is while bands are playing, then go off to the other room where the bar is between sets to grab beers. It’s a good sign that everybody doesn’t just hang around the bar when the bands are on. We’ve heard it’s where the real serious music fans hang out, and this detail seems to confirm that.
There are big signs taped up near the stage commanding “NO FUCKIN’ COVER MUSIC!” I get the impression this place has some kind of thing with BMI and ASCAP over the performing-rights fees that venues ordinarily pay. It’s a pretty standard fee that then covers a venue for any cover tunes that get played there, but I can see how that would be a rip-off for places that have primarily original bands. I don’t know how strictly the Barley enforces this policy — I’m not sure if I remember these signs being present when I played there as bassist for Samuel Locke-Ward about this time last year on the tour with The Teddy Boys, and I’m pretty sure we opened the set with “Ashes” (a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins tune) — but I guess Dan decided not to test them since “Rafters” (a Richard Buckner song we play) was out of our set. I hear that in Europe you turn in your set list to the venue and they get charged by the actual cover songs that get played, rather than a one-size-fits-all fee. I wonder if the venues pass that expense along to the bands or what.
I had to turn up my bass amp a bit louder then I had been lately since Barley Street has a vocals-only PA so my amp wasn’t miked or direct-boxed or anything. Turns out it sounds better loud, who knew? So I decided to experiment a little and didn’t play with a pick as much and used the compressor in a few more places. I’m starting to get the hang of being a bassist, as opposed to a guitarist-playing-bass. We played what may have been our tightest set yet, and I think this was a very good night to be so on.
During Moses Prey’s set, the bassist of Cat Island, whose name I have since forgotten, had asked me if he could use my bass amp, and also offered to let us crash at his place a few blocks away after the show. So I said OK to him borrowing the amp, but the guy was already noticeably stumbly-drunk. Later he restated his offer, and elaborated that they were going to be partying after the show at the even more nearby home of a guy that I figured was either another member of Cat Island or a friend, and we were welcome there and could probably crash there too if we’d rather. We were getting offers of places to stay left and right from the Cat Island folks; there was yet another from the singer.
I was preparing to get off the stage and leave my amp there for Cat Island’s bassist to use, when he asks to use a cable. I grabbed a spare one out of my bag and handed it to him. Cat Island had a bunch of friends standing around near the stage for their set, some of them right in the doorway between the bar area and the stage area. I decided to hang around the bar with the merch, but they sounded like fun. Two songs in though, the bassist reappears telling me he had just broken his bass and wanted to know if he could use mine. From the sound of things, he had either bumped into or yanked the end of the cable, pulling the jack out of the bass and pulling the wiring loose. I’d had this same thing happen to my bass once before when I was practicing with a shorter cable than usual. Since then, I’ve always used a cable with a right-angle plug on one end, but the one I had given him earlier was a straight one. So I went and got my bass out of the case and handed it to him. So now some drunk guy was playing my ’66 P-bass with a straight-plug cable after having just broken his own. Oh man. That set couldn’t get over fast enough.
Luckily the bass made it through the set uninjured, and the Cat Island bassist came back later and reiterated the offer of the party and the crash space. We didn’t really need a party, but it was nice of them to offer, and I figured Drunk Bassist was going to be going there so we’d probably better follow him around until we figured out where were were sleeping. Then while we were loading out they all took off without getting us directions to where they were going. To put it nicely, they probably were drunk and forgot about us. To put it another way, the fuckers ditched us.
Dan called Austin for some reason, to see if he had any ideas what we could do I guess, then we got the idea to call Nick and see if we might be able to take him up on his offer a bit early, since Lincoln was a fairly short drive. He was cool with it, so we called Austin back to let him know we had a plan, and ended up going over the blurb for our CD release postcards that we’ve been really over-compulsive about lately, while I pulled out my laptop in the van and found some wi-fi courtesy of an unsecured Netgear to figure out our way out of town. Arrived at Nick’s about 3 AM, watched a little bit of Wildest Police Chase Videos, and crashed out.
I’ll pick this up with Saturday’s events sometime tomorrow.
