Day Five: Tuesday 7 March

[My semi-contemporaneous notes end here. The last half of this diary is pieced together two months after the fact, using Andy Wagner of ISG's Tour Diary as a guide.]

   We get to the Spiral Lounge, just down the street from world-famous Katz' Deli (which closes before we get a chance to eat there after our set, dammit) and around the corner from a club with a fine mural, Nice Guy Eddie's. As Megan Blinder said, 'There are a lot worse places for your first New York gig' and I'm sure she's right; as we load in we are happy to be here, and are hoping for a larger-than-usual turnout since many of us have friends & family in the City. Alyson arrives with her friend Janice (who works for one of my favorite academic mags Lingua Franca), and then Don & Rob show up to load in around 7pm. We set up without much controversy, though the sounddude wants us to use some house gear that's already on the stage, since 'nobody's going to see you if you're the first act anyway'... but having dragged this gear 1500 miles already, we stick with it. My old highschool pal John Pszyk (now he works for Variety) comes to the show, as does a friend of a friend, Christian Shepard, whose band once covered the once-id.-and-now-PC-classic Fishbee Island years ago. Also in attendance are Michael's two older cop brothers, who videotape our show, and also we meet Allen Ruch, The Great Quail, our benefactor from The Libyrinth. All in all we have the biggest turnout of the night from 8-8.45pm. The PA is good here and we play a fine set which leans heavily on the booky songs from Kingdom, and also some of the artier songs because we heard they dig the artrock in NYC... Both Alyson and I blank out for a verse in a couple songs, which is unfortunate, but generally the attitude is good and we play well. The highlight, yet again, is the Zorn Medley starring Rev. Mason Wendell. We are glad to be on this bill.

   Blinder plays next and are fantastic as always. Megan breaks some strings and I am her monkeyboy. We love watching them play -- she's amazing, Mason and Koven are total badasses, and they sound great. ISG is rather stunned by them, too, it seems: math-rock rules! ISG play after them and are topnotch as well -- it's a good town in which to rock. Afterwards all the bands trade CDs and respect, and we all sell some stuff, too. A success by every means but this -- the Spiral's band payment policy is comical: you are paid $1 for everyone who says they are there to see you play. So ISG makes $2 while we make $11! (And we paid the sounddick $10 to make a tape of our show, so really, we made $1!!) It is to laugh, but it's probably the best show of the tour...

   We all hang out outside the club for a while and talk the Rock Talk... it's nice. Don & Rob go back to Koven's, and Alyson, Michael, Dave & I stop off at Mona's, a nearby Irish Pub frequented by ex-Gainesvillians, but we don't find any old friends there (we were especially hoping to run into Kristen Parker, ex-Fluffy Kitty and AllStar69, who turned out to be in Gainesville while we were in NY...), so after a drink we drive out to Coney Island, which is closed because it isn't the right season AND it's 2am... I get dropped off at my friend Pszyk's for the night, while the rest go to Alyson 's friend Janice's house. John and I haven't really talked much for years, so we stay up for about an hour and catch up in his lovely apartment in Brooklyn. Then I'm out, tired but happy.

[For a break from MY narrative, here is Dave (other PopCanon guitarist/singer)'s take on our NYC gig:

   On the second day in NYC, we are split from ISG (wow - I wonder if I'll make all of this rhyme ... better not to try). Mike, Ned and I reunite with Alyson and the three of us wander semi-aimlessly around SoHo for the afternoon until the bar opens. Nothing exciting happens as far as I remember, except that we parked at a meter that had to be re-filled every 45 minutes or something like that, so we couldn't wander far.

   Eventually we are let into the bar. Slowly our other band members arrive, followed shortly by the other bands and then a surprising number of fans, including the Great Quail, whom we have all been anxious to meet because he has dedicated a significant portion of his full-time-job modernist/postmodernist authors website, The Libyrinth, to singing the praises of PopCanon for writing songs about four of the five authors featured on his site (Pynchon, Joyce, Borges, Eco - we don't have a song yet about Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but we will one day). After that sentence, which was long enough to be a chapter of Ulysses, Michael's brothers arrive and insist on buying many of us drinks. This was good because the drink special for the band was $1 off all drinks. For you non-band readers, most bars give the band one of three deals on their drinks to compensate for the expected low pay: unlimited swill beer for free, a limited amount of decent beer for free (aka a limited tab), or half-price on anything. The $1 deal was particularly insulting since the price of the drinks was inflated even higher that in many other New York bars, so that a pint of Guinness still cost $4.50 after the discount. Later that night, I drank a Guinness at Mona's (a cozy bar in Alphabet City that is frequented by Gainesville expatriates in NYC) for $3.

   The show came and went, and we got paid $11 - just like in Philly. Now, this bar has a method of paying the bands that consists of this scenario: When a patron comes in, the door dick asks him/her which band he/she has come to see. The patron answers, and the door dick puts a mark by that band's name on a scrap of paper. If the patron doesn't answer, or didn't come to see any band in particular, the door dick either makes no mark, or puts a mark wherever he feels like. So eleven people who paid the $6 cover charge said they came to see PopCanon. Frankly, I was amazed that it was so many, especially considering several people that were there to see us DIDN'T pay the cover charge -- we had put them on the guest list in exchange for sleeping accommodations.

   As the Beastie Boys once said, "No sleep 'til Brooklyn." Don and Rob stay in Jersey again with Koven. Mike and I crash with Alyson at her friend's house in Brooklyn. Ned sleeps at another friend's house in Brooklyn.

END DAVE'S STORY]

On to Day Six...