Halloween Swim Team

After a four hour trip to Pleasanton that was cut shorter than the travel time by way, I needed something to shake the gloom.

Brokeness seemingly our specialty, and we’d spent all but our last few dollars on a few meals out and a 12 pack of Pilsner Urquell, the very last few dollars taking us home on a bus from a few towns away where we’d gone exploring for a day after I sat in on band practice with Tight Bikes.

Like every day promises, Saint Ben’s cell phone is ringing constantly before we even get home, and it turns out to be a band from LA we’ve never met or heard of before that Armando, our amazing bike riding, pot smoking, story unravelling photographer friend had found at Aroma Roasters earlier.

They need a show tonight.

“They are called Halloween Swim Team” he tells me after he hangs up, I’m assembling dinner in the kitchen, and I know I am giving him the blankest look after he explains that they are “electronic” like “Kraftwerk”, which is amazing to me but not really enough for me to give a rat’s ass, but Saint Ben is like Santa Rosa’s very own Ambassador to Music, his passion, charity, and knowledge of the local music scene expansive if not never-ending.

Eventually it is decided that they should play either the cemetery or the town square downtown, which is eventually narrowed down to downtown, and we know perfectly well our guerilla impromptu concert could get us fined at the very least. We’re walking briskly towards the downtown gazebo where our little spontaneous music stunt is to happen apparently by generator, and I think about how we’d b crazy enough to spend a night in jail with an indie electro band from LA we’ve just met, and how much I’d not like a run in with the city’s finest today. It is funny that I was thinking this as Ben was finishing his last invitation phone calls probably with Jimmy, and we round the corner to find the lights of SRPD and our buddies are totally already talking to the cops. Fuck.

Eventually, after a lot more awkward and nervous waiting our friends all group together at one end of the park, apparently unfazed by the run in. I look around at our cohorts and find them all mostly to be of the colorful graphic tees and skinny jeans lot, one of them wearing a funny hat made funnier partly by the odd tassell and partly by how lanky he is, and it seems to suit him nicely.

A round of introductions and some pleading later Ben and Jimmy who arrived on his fixed gear moments earlier are going through their phone books trying to find anywhere for these guys to play. Eventually Jimmy says “Fuck it” and they all pile into a van and Jimmy takes off on bike, and we all unload into Jimmy’s studio apartment for an impromptu concert. It isn’t far from fitting a band inside a shoebox. It works, and the two keyboards one gadget guy trio launches into the best set we could have imagined to result in this crazy night. By the end of the 20 minute set the night feels close to an end and we all shake hands and part ways.

~ by dollesque on August 27, 2008.