Ultimate Rock Report - May 2012

How much rock and roll is too much rock and roll? One of life's great questions which will not be answered here, because all I can say for sure is not this much. Nope, this much rock and roll is just fine. The month of May was so rocktacular that someone should write a song about it.
First up, Les Fat Jones.

In the summer of 2004, brother Eli and I spent countless nights (probably nine or ten, which I am apparently unable to count to) shaking our tail-feathers to indie hits at Razzmatazz, a giant factory turned club in Barcelona. It was the era of Bloc Party and the Rapture, and dancing til dawn was always in the cards. Other than a few concerts recently, I hadn't been to the place in years, but the memory of the summer of clubbing kept the Razz flame burning, albeit softly, in my heart. It was therefore something of a personal victory that Les Fat Jones got to play a show there on Saturday 5th May. We had a new banner! Victor jumped! People came and were rocked. Our album is still available for free download, so grab a copy and learn the words for our next show. June holds our first out of town gig, so yay.

Then...
On Tuesday 8th May I embarked on the 2 Skinnee J's Pre-Apocolypse Now and Forever Tour. (We are absolutely nothing at all if not hyperbolic.)

The days leading up to my departure were hectic. Working in education (I use both the words "working" and "education" lightly) gives me lots of vacation time. However, it's at specific points during the year, and one month before the end of term is not one of those points. Nevertheless, my boss had reluctantly acquiesced to my pleas for time off and I wanted to leave everything in order during my absence. A mere ten minutes before I was due to leave, a teacher called to quit, effective immediately. (The level of professionalism in the foreign language teaching world matches that of the New York Jets, and the results are often the same too.) I scrambled to find a bunch of contacts so that my boss could deal with it and hopped in a taxi. I had a plane to catch. (See above re: professionalism)   
Two flights, a German layover and a Sherlock Holmes movie later (Robert Downy Jr. should have an award named after him for most charismatic actor in a shitty movie. see also: Iron Man 2), I touched down in Miami the next day just as the rest of 2SJ were arriving from New York.
Our last reunion was in 2010 and, as fun as it was, I pretty much figured it would be the final one. The format, semi-acoustic with a Q&A session, was one step removed from dinner theater, and it appeared we had effectively ridden our horses off into the sunset.
It is no doubt a sign of our advancing years that it took a cruise to pull us out of retirement. (Also, retirement from music means getting a job...) 311 invited us to play their second Caribbean boat bash, and in a move that is probably surprising to nobody, we accepted. ("Music? Sea and sun? Buffet? Uh, no thanks. I'm too tied to my nine-to-five." - no musician ever.)
Since playing together involved rehearsing for the first time in a couple of years, flying me in from Europe, and getting everybody to Florida and back, it was decided that we would add some dates up the east coast.  And thus, a tour was born: 4 days on a cruise with 3 shows, and six more from NC to NYC.
On the day of our arrival in Miami, we rehearsed as a full unit for the first and only time. Fortunately, I have muscle memory for those songs and after a couple of takes, it was like riding a slightly wobbly bike.

On the 10th, along with a couple thousand of 311's most devoted fans, we boarded the ship and set sail (or rather set giant fucking smoke stack) for the Bahamas. I'd never been on a cruise before. It's like a giant floating resort, half hotel, half mall, that does it's best never to remind you that you are at sea.
As we pulled away from the mainland, people gathered on the upper deck for the first 311 concert. Unfortunately, so did angry clouds that began chucking lightning down as the band took the stage and the show was topped after 30 minutes because:

 The next morning we got to the island, which was nothing more than a strip of beach and a restaurant. The ship sat offshore, launching little ferries of passengers to the beach. It was all very sci-fi, if science fiction involved reggae, weed and a lot of tattoos.

The Imperial Starship floated in orbit near the tiny sand planet...

Over the next three days, between grazing like sheep at the various all-you-can-eat restaurants (I typically had four meals: breakfast, lunch, pastrami and dinner) we played three shows. The outfits, designed and made by Joy Lewis,  were awesome and not as hot as they look. They did shrink over the course of the tour, which is sad. I had been planning on keeping the black one and starting my career as a superhero, but Uncomfortable Sausage Man doesn't seem particularly imposing.

Shut up, crime!

Video Keytard B.A. prepared video projections for the whole set which were so cool, they would have been distracting if they were not behind me. 
The whole experience on the boat was an opportunity to reconnect not only with each other, but also with some bands we had played with in the past. This culminated in a collective tribute to MCA during our final show. Although the Beastie Boys didn't invent rap, they certainly introduced it to a lot of white people, and it's probably a safe bet that this cruise wouldn't have existed without him, so he really deserved much more than our butchering of a classic.

We arrived back in Miami on Monday morning, and got on a plane to fly to Raleigh NC. The flight was uneventful except for the part where we were STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. At one point, thousands of feet up in the air, there was a flash, a loud bang, and the plane banked to the left and started descending rapidly, before recovering. I don't know how long the whole episode lasted, but my thought process was: underwear bomber? malfunction? lightning? everything seems to be ok. i guess we'll live. As we exited the plane, we overheard the crew talking, confirming that we were STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, something that had never happened to them before.
The shows up the coast were all great. The rooms were packed, the crowds were psyched and our spirits never lagged.
The opening bands were awesome. The first, Sound of Urchin, an old school new york band, augmented their lineup with a bunch of teenage guitarists from The House of Rock, whose energy and exuberance won the crowd over every night.
The second was Royal Teeth from New Orleans, a melodic band where everybody gets a drum. They played every show with talent and enthusiasm. I don't doubt that big things lie in their future. Plus the singer looks like Joel!

The backstage at the Norva Theater remains nicer than your house. (I know I've never seen your house, but does it have a piano, leather furniture, a pool table, ping pong and a jacuzzi? It does? I'll be right over.) The 9:30 club never disappoints. We saw our old friends the Almighty Senators in Baltimore. All great things. The super talented Ashly Covington, whose hands have probably sold you something at some point, took tons of pictures which you can see here.
The only sad moment was pulling into New York knowing I had only 24 hours before getting on a plane back to Barcelona. Which I did. And took a cab straight back to work. Still, endorphins trump jet-lag, and I'm going to be high off this for a while.