We’d left the previous night after the show to Olympia where we were staying at Onyx from Polka Dot Dot Dot’s place (The Alamingo). Heather Barnes (foxcore) is staying there at the moment as well, it was awesome to see and hang with Heather for the weekend!
PIC - The Alamingo, Olympia
I partly wanted to get to Olympia early because it was the weekend of the “Arts Walk”, an annual weekend long party which is pretty sweet. In the morning we first caught the “Olympia Salvage” Powertool race. This was awesome, I just thought it would be a couple of lame entries and dumb, but there were heaps of modified powertools, all designed to race each other down a 10 or so metre wooden race track.
http://bp2.blogger.com/_pp_N3YJDZbo/R_veupyzLsI/AAAAAAAAAGk/5DboXt0g6Rk/s1600-h/PTR.jpgYou can find out more about Powertool racing at: http://www.powertoolracer.com
After the Powertool races, we went and watched the main event which was the 14th annual Procession of the Species http://www.procession.org/ , basically the whole town dresses up as some sort of animal/insect and then parades down the main street. There are actually more people in the parade then watching, its crazy, the parade lasts for around 30 minutes and it seems the whole town turns out to be involved. The best part is all the kids who have fallen asleep on the floats that are getting towed along, and the other kids who are so bored from the stop/start walking of the parade that they have the most emo looks on their faces.
We left on the short 1 hour drive to Seattle shortly after the parade, and Pizza slices at Old school Pizzaria. If you pass through Olympia, you have to go there. We spent probably 3/4 ‘s of our time in town there. Massive slices of pizza. On the drive to Seattle Rhys just wouldn’t shut up about Nirvana, it was odd….I wasn’t even remotely fanboyish, until we get to the city limits, then suddenly you really can’t help but get obsessed as well. Our first stop in Seattle was Linda’s Café on Pine Street. This was the last place that Kurt was seen alive, apparently a few hours before he died. Great prices, sweet food…def worth making a stop at Linda’s when visiting here, the staff are also happy to talk about the whole Kurt saga. Rhys starts hitting up all the locals asking whereabouts Kurts house was, we coulda just checked online, but it seemed a little more interesting this way. We discovered that most people didn’t know, and they were actually quite bummed about that.
We get to the venue (Comet Tavern), load in gear and then go hang out at Cha Cha Bimbos Cantina, this ultra-hip underground bar ala Goodluck, but scenepointsX1000 more. The place was decked out in the maddest décor.
PIC - Cha Cha Bimbo’s
We head back to the venue and Pwrfl Power has started. There are a decent amount of people in the venue but they are talking really loudly and its quite frustrating as he is quite quiet. PWRFL power is an incredible! Guitarist, He is classically trained, and it shows with his amazing fingerwork, but not playing lame cheese, but totally breaking down pop songs and piecing them back together. He’s a really entertaining performer but with the noisy crowd tonight, it just doesn’t work as well as it should. We were playing third tonight and a great crowd had gathered with the smallish venue filling up. Tonight was the best (non-house party) show of the tour so far, a great crowd and awesome reception…definitely helped us forget Portland. My girlfriend Sally had come down from Vancouver to hang with us for the weekend, and Heather had come up from Olympia as well. For the Olympia-Seattle drive we had 6 people + our entire backline & gear in our little car. (see picture below in Bishop) No idea how we managed that.
A local act The Elephants were playing after us and they were fantastic. Go check out their myspace page, I think they got a record coming out soon. Really hope we can hook up with these guys next time for some more shows. Bars in Seattle have to close at 2am, so we got kicked out, we had no accommodation sorted tonight, but luckily the bass player from The Quit who also played on the bill put us up at his place.