International

The last month has been a very exciting whirlwind of activity for me. Those who know me, know that I get very moody and bored when I'm not kept busy. Not to say I won't be moody and bored while busy but deep down, I'm much happier.
It started about a month ago when my friend David arrived at LAX. I picked him up around 10:30 at night. David and I met through the True To Tiffany yahoo group, which sounds very cheesy. But your opinions aside, David and I became good friends and last February he came over from Scotland, along with the group's moderator Julia from England, for a Tiffany show at The Factory. I told him the next time he came back, just to stay with us rather than renting a hotel room, so he took me up on the offer when he decided to come over for San Diego pride, where Tiffany (and Shitting Glitter) would be performing.
David stayed with us for 2 weeks, in the middle of the stay we all drove down to San Diego for the Pride festival. I even decided to take my own car, which doesn't usually leave the Hollywood (including West and North) area. Unfortunately, upon arriving in Downtown SD, I was informed by the desk clerk at Days Inn that my reservation was no good, because it had been made for the month prior and had already come and gone (my credit card bill proves it). Luckily Brandon and Amy were not far behind and found a Super 8 Motel nearby.
The Shitting Glitter show was on Saturday afternoon on one of the bigger stages, but not the main stage and, regretably, not the 21+ Stage which was the only stage where you could actually purchase alcoholic drinks and watch the show. Our outfits were fantastic, Red and Black color scheme, and I even looked a little butch in my football jersey and bandana. We had dressed Bun up as a priest for our opening number "Backdoor Jesus (2006)" Yes, it was a new, remixed version of the song from our album Post No Bills and I was very excited about playing it. However, halfway through the sound dropped out. The sound man didn't seem to notice or care. So finally after a few seconds of awkwardness and confused looks, we decided to just go to the next song. I don't think we fully recovered from this until maybe the last few songs. All in all, I have to say it was one of our worst shows for a long time. It wasn't awful, but it wasn't nearly as good as we could have been, and it was just no one's fault in particular. None of us seemed to be on it. It was sad since there was a decent crowd which included several friends who hadn't seen us for a long time if ever.
Afterwards I swallowed some happy pills and made it over to the main stage in time to see When In Rome perform "The Promise". It was pretty cool. I almost wish I had caught more of their set. Then, Flock of Seagulls was up. I love their 80's music, and even their 90's album "Light at the end of the World" but have been dissapointed by their live shows (I've seen them twice before). However, this show proved to be everything I could want from a FoS show - they sounded fantastic, played all my favorite songs, and during "Rainfall" it actually started raining!!! It was a very awesome moment.
Then Dylan needed to leave to go back to LA (he had to work the next morning) so I walked him back to our stage. I decided to go ahead and load up all our equipment into his car so we wouldn't have to deal with it later. That turned out to be a good decision as we were all wasted by the time Pride was over for the night! We ended up partying all over San Diego and ended up at Montage for afterhours.
The next day was the Tiffany show and, as she is one of the nicest people I've ever met, she invited all of us fans to have lunch with her at her hotel. Unfortunately we were already having lunch and had waited for over 45 minutes to get our table, so we ate our lunch and then met her at her hotel just to hang out for awhile.
Her show was one of my favorite "Dance" Tiffany shows ever. Of course, the "Rock" shows (circa "Color Of Silence") will never be beaten in my mind, but this one was a lot of fun and I was delighted that she did "Can't Stop a Heartbeat" which is one of my favorite b-sides from her early days.
So that was San Diego. A week later, David left and I had to start packing myself for Iceland. Shitting Glitter was headlining Iceland Pride! I was so stoked.
We drove up to San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon and caught our flight to Keflavik. Got into Reykajvik in the afternoon and after unloading our stuff in our apartment, walked down to Cafe Cozy for some food, drinks and music. Afterwards everyone but me took a nap. I went out with the video camera to get some footage around town. Also, I just wanted to walk around for awhile. Dylan always says it's best to go for a walk when you land in a foriegn country, to avoid jetlag. I mainly just missed Reykjavik and wanted to see it again.
We had a magnificent time in Iceland, I just find the country and it's people so interesting and special. I was really happy with how our shows went. I was so afraid that the Icelanders would find us too silly or too poppy or something, but we seemed to go over perfectly. The whole weekend was so much fun, having people stop us to talk to us, and being so well taken care of by Heimir and the Gay Pride Committee. The parade was a blast and even though we were so tired and hungover, I'm really glad we did it.
I can't write much more about it, because I already wrote the whole story for Frontiers Magazine and hopefully that will be ran in the next few weeks.
So we got back from Iceland last week, and then we had a show this weekend at the LA Gay & Lesbian center for their queer music festival, HoMosaic. The turnout was not as good as I would have wished, but I wasn't expecting too much more so it wasn't a let down. It was a good crowd, they were nice and cheered and even bought CD's. The show went well and we played our new song "Legalese" which we had only played live once before, at Mag's party, and this time I think we really hit it. We had rehearsed the day before so I knew we had it down. We also have quite a few other new songs we're working on, and I'm so excited to start playing them. I'm so bored of our old songs!!!
Now I'm a little sad since there's nothing too exciting to look forward to for a little while, but I need to use this downtime to finish some projects I've been working on, mainly video projects. OK that's enough for now!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Human League Albums: From Worst to First!

All the Thompson Twins albums (+ Babble) ranked!

Amy Crosby, 1970-2021