Blues and the City
Turkey Day weekend. Ted and I cooked dinner -- Ted did dinner, more accurately, and I did dessert. It was all very good. Geni, Bill, and Tara came over for dinner, and we delivered dinner to Rebecca, who wasn't mobile.
Friday morning, we got up Really Early to go to the airport to go to Vancouver to see Jim Byrnes in concert. Or, well, playing at a pub, which is sort of like in concert, but anyway, that was what we were going up for. It'd been over a year since I'd seen Jim, and a girl's gotta get her fix somehow!
But first we missed the train. Shaun kindly brought us all the way to the airport, upon which we sat around for quite a while, since we'd gotten there very early, and eventually we discovered that we needed to have our bloody passports to be certain of getting into Canada. Since it's an open border and you can drive across it, we didn't think it was necessary to have a passport to fly across it. More fools we. The very kind airlines people let us switch to a later flight so we could go home and get our passports, and they didn't even charge us to change the flights.
So, sigh, we ended up getting on the damned train and going back to Mountain View -- although a plus of this was we also got to have turkey leftovers for lunch, since, well, the fridge was full of them. That was good. :) Eventually Geni gave us a ride BACK to the airport, and we got on the 2:44pm plane instead of the 9:40am train. Snf.
However, we did get to Vancouver safely, and between all that training and sitting around and planeing I got a lot of writing done on Legion and read a number of books. We got to our hotel, which was literally across the street from the The Yale, which was the pub Jim as playing at, at about 6:30, which was only about um six hours later than we'd intended. So, although Sandy, the woman on the Jim Byrnes mailing list who told me about both the hotel and about how busy the Yale gets, told us that we should go over to the Yale at about 7pm, we opted for dinner instead.
Sandy, btw, done good. Sadly, I didn't get to meet her, but the hotel was awesome, and she was absolutely right about the seating at the Yale. I owe her!
So, dinner: we dumped our stuff in the hotel, went back downstairs, and asked the guy behind the counter -- Paul -- where a good place to eat around there was. He said La Bogata, which was right around the corner, a little Spanish place that was his favorite place to eat in the area. He said that it often had a 15 minute wait, but to tell the proprietor we were from the hotel, because they tried to be nice to the guests. So we hied ourselves off around the corner, found the restaurant, where there was no line, and went on in.
And the proprietor, a grey-haired gentleman of about 5'5", appeared before us and said, "Are you from the hotel?"
Blink. Blink blink. "Why, yes," we said, "we are." What, I wondered, we have Out Of Towners written on our foreheads in flaming vermillion? I mean, come on: we're Alaskans in Vancouver. How out of place could we be? We were even wearing the right weight jackets -- which is to say, not winter-weight. :)
"Murphy?" he said, and the light clicked on: Paul had called ahead, which we thought was really incredibly nice of him. So we were seated, and ordered dinner -- bread and butter, a little cheese plate, sauteed mushrooms, pollo frito, and some incredibly heavenly pork and garlic thing, the name of which I forget, which was just about good enough to cry over. Followed by a dessert which was every bit as appallingly good: I had a cream-puff lemon cake which was about light enough to float off the plate, and Ted had flan. /Wow/, it was a good meal. If you happen to be in Vancouver, I *highly* recommend it. La Botega, 1277 Howe Street. So /very/ good.
Then staggered we back to the hotel, and despite knowing better, we fell down and took a nap for about an hour, which made us late to the Yale; we got there around, oh, 9:15, 9:20, and, just as Sandy had warned us, could find nowhere at all to sit. Instead, we staked out a section of standing-table area and stood around watching the techs set up for the band. Somewhere shortly before ten, Jim appeared, wearing all black, so he looked amusingly like a bodyless head floating around at the back of the stage. :)
The band started at about ten, maybe a little before, but I don't wear a watch, so I can't say for sure. And man, it was fantastic. *laugh* They played -- oh, man. A variety of stuff, some of which is on Jim's CDs, some of which wasn't. Definetely more stuff that /wasn't/ than they play at conventions -- I suspect they stick to the more familiar for an audience that might not know the blues, but are just Jim Byrnes fans, for conventions.
What did they play? Don't ask me that; I can hardly remember. I spent the whole evening /dancing/, not writing down song lists. They played Little Red Rooster, and Junior Burn The House Down, and Daddy's Home To Stay, which I stood out, because it's slow, but I stayed up on the floor to watch the band and the dancers, and during one line Jim caught my eye and sang it straight to me. Raar.
Oh, and: I believe he recognized me, but not that he knew who I was. I was out of context; if he'd seen me at a convention, I think he'd have known who I was, but showing up randomly in Vancouver? Nah. :) And I didn't get a chance to talk to him (wasn't expecting one -- hoping, but not expecting!), since, well, he was working, you know. :)
Let's see. They ended the first set with Otto's Mood, I know that, because I like the piece a lot. Oh, and they played Fire On The Bayou, which makes me endlessly happy, because I *love* that piece. That and Junior Burn The House Down are /great/ dancing songs. There's a riff in Junior that positively demands head-banging -- and that's the *best* thing about having hair! Head-banging is SOOOO satisfying with hair!
After the first set -- which was about 45 minutes; all the sets were -- I went back to where we'd been standing, and some people left, and so we snatched their seats, and ended up with nearly the best seats in the house. There's a raised-up area with seating, on the same side of the bar as the stage, and that's where we were. There was only one table and three people sitting in front of us, so we had a great view. And Ted, since he was sitting down now, had himself a Long Island Ice Tea, instead of just Guinness. I had myself a bottle of water. Several, actually. :)
Second set the dance floor was *crammed*. I mean, it was packed the first set, but the second set it took effort to get a deep enough breath to breathe, because of the crush of bodies and because of the sheer heat being generated. During that set, a tall blonde in a /very/ short skirt danced her way right up onto the stage towards the end of one of the songs. Jim was polite, but shot the rest of the dancers this kind of incredulous look: what the *fuck* is this broad doing on my stage? I had to wonder myself.
The dancers: a guy in his sixties, anyway, having the time of his life. I liked him a lot. Not a great dancer, but Dave Barry said it best: Nobody cares if you dance well. Just get up and dance. And people were dancing with him and everyone was having fun. :)
A blonde girl, about my age, with stunningly gorgeous very thick blonde hair, a black suit and a red shirt under it. She looked like a young Mariel Hemingway, only prettier. I took a moment to bellow in her ear and tell her that she had beautiful hair; it seemed inappropriate to tell her she also smelled good, but she did. My goodness.
A very very drunk short blonde woman hanging on to a tall thin guy with longish hair and a patient expression. A less attractive blonde with the Mariel-lookalike; I think that I may have seen the third blonde at a convention at some point, but I also might be hallucinating.
A tall Indian girl who sang Junior at the top of her lungs along with me: /she/ was cool. I liked her. :)
A woman in her fifties who was jamming out all over the place, having a great time. The male dancers apparently didn't make as much of an impression on me, although they were on the floor in record numbers, for a straight bar. (I tell you, it's been way too long since I've danced at a straight bar; it seemed /weird/. *laugh*)
Third set, Jeff Healy came onstage. Now, I didn't know who he was, but now that I do, I want everything the man has recorded. He's blind, and has a /gorgeously/ sexy deep baritone voice, and he and Jim sang a song that Jeff said, "was very special to both of us -- 'My Walking Stick'." I'd never heard it before, but it's this great song about, yes, a walking stick. And it's a very light and fun, easy-going song, and it was the first time I'd ever heard Jim joke in any fashion about losing his legs. So that was very interesting to me. And then they played a bunch of other stuff, and at the end Jeff stood up and said, "And now, if someone will hand me /my/ walking stick, we're just gonna help each other off the stage."
And so they did. :) No encore, sadly, but /wow/ it was a great night of blues!