< previous | next >

After a few hours of sleep and a much-anticipated walk to a dearly missed Wawa, we pile back into the van and head to NYC. Traffic is awful, of course, but not in the places we expect it. We still somehow manage to get in ahead of virtually all the other bands for the later show and wrestle a perfect parking spot that will need only an hour or two of monitoring to keep it from getting a ticket.

The Knitting Factory is in lower Manhattan, just off Broadway, which means parking is always horrible, and for this particular event, it is even more so. The CMJ Conference brings musicians and industry people from all over the world every year and packs them into the last place on earth that needs more people in it. There are two conferences every year in our line of work -- CMJ in the fall and South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in the spring, and CMJ is the older and stuffier of the two.

Our booking agent has reserved all three floors of the Knitting Factory tonight and hopes to change that.

I'd have to say she succeeds, with quite a bit of help from a cadre of artists in collusion to ensure it's not just another night. The club is at capacity if not sold out, and by the time Israel's Monotonix take the stage at the end of the night, there's barely room to breathe, even in the large main hall. Monotonix play on the floor in the middle of the crowd and occasionally pick up their entire setup and move to different corners of the room. Then mayhem breaks out. Some of our guys hoist up DMBQ's drummer Shinki and an entire drum kit on their shoulders and carry it into the middle of the crowd. Other strong backs and drummers follow suit, and soon every drummer that played the show in the main hall that night (including our own Steven) is playing drums in unison (or something approaching unison) on the top of the crowd. It's truly an unforgettable sight, and the show ends with all the musicians jumping off the stage into the arms of the crowd.

Definitely an improvement over the normal CMJ. We pack our junk up and head to Daniel's place in Brooklyn to sleep for the last show of tour.

About the Author

Phillip Price is the keyboard player for Wilkes-Barre-based band An Albatross.

Archives

• August 2009
• July 2009
• October 2008
• September 2008