Longhorn in Paradise

Hagen heading off to work. He is tired of being home with Liska all the time and decided it was time to start a career.

So, how do I even begin to describe the events of Wednesday, May 23, 2007? A group of coworkers and I decided that we needed to branch out a little bit. Work, workout, eat, drink, sleep was getting us into a bit of a rut. Not an awful rut, but a rut nonetheless. We are all fairly big music fans, so we decided a couple weeks ago to start looking into what bands were passing through the D.C. area in the near future. We saw that Keane was coming through, but it was sold out...Deftones...same thing. John Mayer and Ben Folds are coming in July, but we didn't want to wait that long. There were many other bands that we had not heard of before, but we were retiscent to go to one of those shows and be disappointed. So, the search went on....

Last week, as I often do, I picked up a copy of the Onion. Until this gig in Washington, I had only read the Onion online, but in D.C. they have the actual print version in boxes around the city. I was looking through it on the flight back from D.C. and I noticed that they had a listing of live shows over the next week. Kind of like LA Weekly or Austin Chronicle or Houston Press would. One of the shows was on Wednesday at a venue called the 9:30 Club. The name of the venue was interesting/funny because our team has a "9:30 Club" in that we meet in the hotel bar at 9:30 to have a few drinks, work on the daily crossword and have Sudoku races between myself and another of my colleagues (note that she has two grad degrees from MIT and I have won more than I have lost). :-) Yes, we are a fairly nerdy group, but it is a good way to wind down the evening. Anywho, so, the show on Wednesday was a group called the John Butler Trio (JBT). It sounded fairly familiar, but I had not heard any of their songs. The description said "For listeners of Dave Matthews and Ben Harper looking to modernize their musical selections, Butler's instrumentally diverse pop should provoke the same fanatical following". Sounded good to me! I sent a note out to the team and all agreed we should check it out.

So, after a dinner of Mei Wah goodness (the chinese restaurant across from our hotel), we hopped in a cab and headed to the 9:30 Club on the other side of town. GREAT venue. It was definitely made for one purpose...live music. A warehouse feel with a balcony, great stage, bars around the entire perimeter. Very cool. The opening act was Kaki King. A one woman show...she played a mean guitar and also played the drums...both with a supporting cast of pre-recorded music. As my coworker Brian said "now all she needs is a couple friends". One of a few classic lines uttered that night.

About 10ish (we are still wondering why they call it the 9:30 club), JBT took the stage. They opened with a song called Daniela. Cool harmonica-filled open, heavy drums and guitar, fast paced lyrics to get the crowd bumpin. We knew at that point that we were in for a treat. Each successive song led to more mouth gaping stares...our entire group was awe struck. The drummer, all 7 feet of him, was ridiculous. Butler was a master on guitar and the bassist went from bass guitar to strumming a stand up bass to using a bow on the stand up. It was one of those moments, one of those life experiences that you knew would stay with you for a long time. To a person, each one of us talked about how lucky we felt to have witnessed this show. How we were quite certain that the days of playing small venues was nearly over for this talented trio. This would be something we bragged about 10 years from now when JBT was a household name. I am going to attach a link to my next post so you can see a snippet of what we saw. But, I can't imagine I could find anything on YouTube or elsewhere that would do them justice. I will try though.

OK. My mom has arrived for the memorial day weekend...so, I am cutting this short. Hope you enjoyed it. Have a fun and SAFE weekend!

Much love to all!

jak