The massive heat of the past couple of days has been reminding me of exactly one year ago, when it was just as hot (if not hotter), and Ang and I, plus our friends Anne and Victoria, drove to Washington DC to see one of the last 3 Sleater-Kinney shows. I originally posted this account of the trip elsewhere, but it seems worth reposting if only in honour of the amazing heat (42c/106f humidex in Montreal yesterday afternoon). It's really long, so I'm posting it in two parts. Here:
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So Tuesday morning, after too few hours of uneasy slumber, Angie and I wake to the alarm at 6am. We'd been stressed out the previous night trying to help get Greg ready to depart Montreal for indefinite travel and then dealing with a bunch of organizational stuff for the trip. We eat our breakfast and I have a cup of coffee and we take a taxi to the rental place with our huge bag of food, bag of pillows (thanks for the suggestion, Katie!), knapsacks, and sleeping bags. Anne arrives after us and we findout the car we were getting is not the inconspicuous sedan she'd booked, but an electric blue PT-Cruiser. Huh. Victo hasto run an errand for Anne, so she arrives last to find us sitting outside the rental spot in this absurd vehicle. Off we go-- first to drive around the city to run another errand, then slightly lost with the highways, and finally over the Champlain bridge.
Waiting in the huge lines for the border some woman in a minivan then hits our spotless PT-Cruiser at low speed trying to bud in line. She dents and scrapes the back but not too badly. As I'm getting her name and number and license plate info, she said, "I... I just couldn't believe that no one was in that centre lane." I said, "Guess they could tell there wasn't enough room, huh?" Border crossing is easy and then we're in America.
The driving isokay. I do it all myself because Anne hasbeen up all night the night before and she and Victo are sleeping comfortably in the back seats. Then Ang is also sleeping. There are a couple of moments when I am almost sleeping too, but rest stops and exciting US sodas and caustic snacks kept me alert. The farther south we get the hotter it becomes. I didn't realize it's this east-coast heatwave-- I just thought it was always like that down there. When we get out at the Kingston rest stop in NY, or the Walt Whitman rest stop (!) in New Jersey, the heat radiating off of the largely empty parking lot is like nothing else I've ever felt. Interesting set-up, I find myself thinking.
We arrive in DC just after 8pm. Mapquest gets us right to the club. By that point we've noticed that DC seemed kind of different than other places we've been-- the buildings aredifferent, for one, but there are also a lot of them boarded up, and the streets seem to go from looking really nice to really rough back to really nice in the same block or two. I've been warned by a couple of people that DC is a really heavy place and that I should watch my back, but what do you do with advice like that other than to feel a little more nervous than usual? We pull around the club and pass a bunch of enthusiastic fellows wearing fluorescent "SECURE PARKING" t-shirts trying to block the street and wave us into an old warehouse. "If they have to say 'secure' on their t-shirts," says Victo, "does that make you feel that secure?" The presence of "secure parking," however, convinces us that maybe we shouldn't park the shiny blue PT-cruiser on the street, so we see dudes in 9:30 Club t-shirts waving towards a parking lot (fenced in with barbed wire on top) and park there for $10. We ask the friendly lot guy ("You drove from CANADA? Welcome! Welcome!") about parking safely. He says, "In DC?" I say, "Yeah...?" He says, "Well, there isn't any place in DC where you can park safely on the street, so you'd probably want to park over night in a lot. If you can't, well, take your chances. There's a pretty good chance your car'll be left alone, but if not it might just be kids scratching it up or smashing the headlights or the windows." Huh.
We get inside and discover the 9:30 club has a kitchen with food, which we eat with the kind of gusto only possible when you've had nothing but peanut butter sandwiches and rest stop snacks for 14 hours. The Rogers Sisters go on and we watch-- they're better than when I saw them in Montreal, but I'm not that interested. Far more interesting is my looking around the crowd and realizing that as far as I can tell, there are no black people in the room. On our way in, we've seen almost entirely black people, and I recalled hearing that DC is black by a pretty large majority. Why, then, is the show crowd almost entirely white? What is it about this music that determines it wouldn't appeal to black people? I'd wondered that kind of thing before (like when I was at the Loud House with Teacher Mike and he saw a black dude in one of the bands and said, "Hey, cool, for once I'm not the only black guy in the room!") but it never seemed as predominant a consideration as in DC, where we've seen hardly any white people until we get to the venue, at which point we see only whites. I'm feeling distinctly uneasy about this, saying to Ang, "Do you get the feeling like we're a part of something much bigger than we understand, and that it's a bad thing? Don't you figure there's something really wrong with this?"
Gear-tech people are setting up SK's stuff and we've positioned ourselves early to the left, in front of Carrie's amps (Vox! Just like I play! Only not nearly as well!), and the techs are getting everything tuned and set. Then a guy in a 9:30 Club t-shirt who's previously been testing the mics comes on stage and says to the crowd, "How you all doing?" The crowd cheers. He says, "I suspect you're not going to be in such a good mood when I tell you what I have to say. The transformers for the club are completely overheated and overloaded and the fire marshal is here. By his order, the show tonight is cancelled. We need to evacuate the building immediately by the BACK, away from the transformers, because we need to shut down power to the whole block as soon as possible to avoid a possible explosion."
As Greg predicted when I told him this story, I kind of knew this was going to happen. You don't drive 12 hours into the worst heat you've ever experienced to have everything work out. That's not how things work. As we file outside without saying anything, I hear a fellow behind me complaining about how far he came for this. I say, "Man, I came from Montreal for this. 12 hours in a car." He says, "Montreal? That's nothing. I flew in from Calgary." I say, "Whoa, you win. Ouch."
We're dying of heat, we haven't found Angela, the person we were supposed to stay with, nor Mary Timony, who Anne needed to swap a snare stand with, so we get into the car, turn the air conditioning on, and sit a second in silence.
"That's it," said Victo. "Something really, really good had better happen. Things don't get this unlucky without something good happening. Something has to happen."
...continued in next post.
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