Sunday, October 26th

At some point I woke up to see this posted on Facebook. Fuck yeah! It’s on! And what a great lineup!

It says 3pm, so I threw out my plans to go running. I needed all my energy to make it through this day. It was unclear how big that venue is, how secret the show really was, would this sell out? I wanted to make sure, so I went there early. There were only a few people around, so I decided to get a drink first. And that is the story how I ended up being a stupid foreigner and how I bought a Slurpee instead of a soda from 7Eleven. Hey, it said Coca Cola on the machine and asked me to place a cup! It’s not my fault! Well, it was okay.

First band is called Bunkshiba, they play Black Sabbath style hardrock. I liked it more than I should I think. Grim Deeds turned out to be awesone. Great dumb pop punk comedy songs. Guy with face makeup singing, two Lillingtons on guitar. Never heard of them before. I became an instant fan. Flamingo Nosebleed played a real energetic set, I think they were one of the winners of this day as well.

Bunkshiba

Grim Deeds

Flamingo Nosebleed

Enemy You were up next, they got the first real crowd reactions. By now there were a bunch of people there, but it didn’t look it would sell out, or even fill up. So we had a nice small show going on here. The Parasites were up next.

Enemy You

The Parasites

Up next was Danny Vapid. The flyer said he’d play Riverdales songs. Turns out, the had the Lillingtons as his backing band! After seeing him play acoustic two nights ago, this was a welcomed change. We got some old songs, some new, some classics. The set ended with everyone singing along to “I don’t wanna go to the party tonight” and everyone was happy.

Finally, the Lillingtons! Fuck, I got to see them play to like 80 people in this small underground club. Maybe the best thing about all this, was how casual the show was. Kody broke a string really early in the set, and it took some time to figure that out. (Maybe having more than one tuner would have been helpful), yet the show did not lose its momentum. With some banter they handled this very well. It was fun. Again we got the classics and the new song etc. I’m singing and its a blast. Then the shenanigans start. Pippa crawls through the guitar player and bass players legs. Later she starts building a pyramid on stage. The band gives the mic to people to sing. And after the encore the show ends very undramatic by just talking and everybody knows that its over and behold, it was very good.

Danny Vapid + The Lillingtons

Lillingtons

By that time it had gotten to be around 8pm I think. I went back to the restaurant I was at yesterday (that wasn’t very hard, it was literally across the street from todays venue) got my tummy filled and then decided to go to the other Red Scare show. What else was I supposed to do? Gman tavern was sold out at that point, but Tobias was nice enough to allow me in. Dankeschön. The guy from Cobra Skulls was already playing, and I didn’t feel like shoving people out of my way, so I just stood on a chair and took a photo from the back. Up next was the “Special Guest?” – who turned out to be Dave Hause. He went through a couple songs quickly and then Brendan Kelly closed the night. Now I’m not a big fan of the Lawrence Arms. Actually I barely know anything about them. I think that band just never appeared on my radar. Toby is probably going to give me a lot of shit for this, but I cannot name a single TLA song name or album title. But I was the only one in the room with this position. Cause many people sang along to the songs. And it was a fun show. Brendan and the audience really played each other well, lots
of funny stage banter and I felt highly entertained, even though I didn’t know any of the songs. This was a great end of the night, and the Red Scare weekend! Special bonus: There was a guy trolling my photos, by making extra weird faces whenever he saw me taking images. Well done, Sir! Well done!

Everyone was beyond tired at that point. If you had given me a pillow, I would have fallen asleep on stage right there, right then. Brendan even could keep playing, I would just sleep through it. But there was no pillow and I had to take the subway home. Unfortunately there was some work done or whatever and there were a couple delays which took me an extra 30 minutes to get home. I went to bed right away.

Cobra Skulls

Dave Hause

Brendan Kelly