The Furniture is kinda too great to have a name like the Furniture. It suggests something you take for granted, the background of the scene, but you just try to take them for granted when they're onstage. And sorry, but they were a better opener than Superchannel the night before. They even had the balls (or ovaries?) to do a Stooges cover with a bonafide Stooge in the room! They're kind of Pixies-meet-garage and Aramis Starfish is a very compelling frontperson, plus the guitarist offers a lot of interesting tones and it's fun to watch Lana thank LanaLou's for letting the band play. (She seems very differently pitched than Aramis, much more solid/ grounded/ serious).
The set by Casa Sueño was the same or close to the same as the first night, and the high points for me were the rockin'er numbers, like "Electric Chair." I want a lyric sheet for that one -- what does tugging on one's mortal knot entail? It can't possibly mean what it brings to mind for me...
I didn't take many photos of the night (Bob was there!) but I did get a couple I like of actor Tom Scholte with Watt.
Bruce Stayloose came by as well and sat at our table with Tom and Bob and Erik Iversen and Erika; I gifted him a Jerry Jerry and the Sons of Rhythm Orchestra LP (and received gifts in return), and heard stories of how he recovered a Watt album he'd made the mistake of selling because he recognized damage done to the cover (a buddy had spilled beer on it). Later, when it turned up much later at a garage sale, he knew it for his own.
It brings to mind, perhaps weirdly, a Kathy Acker quote: "We wear our mutilations as badges. Wearing badges is the only proof we have of human love." At least, I applied that quote when I recovered a Dead Kennedys EP I sold because it also had recognizable damage to the cover. Without the patch that got torn off when someone taped a coat-check tag to it, I would never have recognized the album when I stumbled across it at Audiopile.
He showed off his girl's first-press Double Nickels, too, which Watt vouched for as the true first. I had that once, but my current is more "umpteenth reprint."
Bruce got them both signed. Watt was pretty patient with signing stuff. It's interesting, because people (even me) were pretty restrained at the Baiza-Corsano gig. Not so much at LanaLou's.
Gerald wore a Tyranny and Mutation shirt, by the way. Shit, I want one too!
It was a great night, but I don't really want to give away too much of the material they played, so the only vid I'm posting for now is the same song I posted yesterday, "Diggin' That Hole", but now at a different angle.
I got some stories from Watt about What Makes a Man Start Fires?, too. He had pointed out the first night that it was the first album he wrote all the music for (tho' not all the lyrics). We continued that story the second night: I asked if it began with a piece of Pettibon art or if the band had come up with the title and commissioned the cover. Closer to the former than the later, but, he told me, he'd had an experience as a child of having accidentally started a fire. "I was playing with matches. I was seven." This was when he was growing up in Virginia.
Flash forward some years to adulthood. "It was a weird time in my life," he explained, adding that he'd been born with bad knees. He'd just had knee surgery and was laid up. He was going through a box of art by Pettibon and found the drawing you see, and it reminded him of having started a fire once himself.
So. Anyhow, I've always loved this album. This and The Punch Line (and the Post-Mersh CD that combines them) are probably my go-to Minutemen albums, so it's really cool to know a bit more about them. They're not their best-loved by the many (and we all know what their objective masterpiece is), but they're the ones I enjoy most, now.
I kinda bungled trying to tell him my own story of how I acquired (a long time ago) the first, textured-cover version of The Punch Line, which I swapped (I think for a Bruce Springsteen record!) with a couple of editors of the anarchist Open Road zine when I crashed at their place with friends after that Cramps/ Slow gig, but let's face it, no one really wants to know all the stories of how you acquired their albums, do they? Besides, I don't have that textured cover anymore.
Anyhow, that was a great two night stand (and Mike Baggetta explained on mic that it was in fact their first-ever two-night stand). You should see this band if you can! They'll be playing Seattle soon, I think for another two-night stand... and then recording in Oregon. Looking forward to that record.
Meantime I got two fIRHOSE albums I don't know so well, including fROMOHIO, which Tom says is his favourite. It's also the one fIREHOSE album I've never listened to before -- I think I even gave my CD of it to a friend. And now I have it signed by Watt and endorsed by a local actor/ filmmaker I admire. (Tom, you really really have to put your movie Crime up on Vimeo, so I can direct people to it!).
And I got a Tortoise record, my first ever on vinyl (I have a couple of their CDs around). Because John really impressed me too. I think Tortoise went over my head a bit the first time I listened to them, to be honest. Glad to have a second chance to re-investigate.
Happy travels, guys, and thanks for putting up with us!
