Davíd Garza is a total nut job. In a good way. Two and a half hours is a long set to play, but when you've got an audience sending up tray after tray of red wine, why the hell not play 37 songs?
I found out Davíd was playing the Green Room unannounced and best part: free! and so off it was. The Green Room had a smashing hummus plate -- smashing in that it was huge and had a veritable cornucopia of vegetables, but c'mon with the black olives. I mean, Lindsay olives on a hummus plate. Hi kids, ever heard of kalamata? What are these people thinking?
In any case, here's little Davíd (dah-VEED he insists) with his organ and a slew of guitars that a friend of his had apparently scored for the afternoon since they still had price tags on them. Actually -- I may have made that up. We were joking about it, and now I can't remember if it's actually true about the price tags. Either way, the walnut Gretsch was to die for, and obviously not his, and he had one of those organs from basements in the Seventies featuring stunning pre-recorded beats such as Bossa Nova and Samba. Like a little kid, he sat down at the organ and started flipping switches, finding new sounds and messing around like we weren't even there.
The crowd was small, maybe 40 people, probably because the show wasn't advertised. It was a last minute thing he set up because he was playing an in-store performance at a record store in Ballard, of all places. But he told us from the beginning that he was going to be driving all night so not to buy him tequila, but that if anyone wanted to buy him some red wine, that would be fantastic. Twelve bottles later, he was aboslutey slammered, telling wacko stories and playing songs about a cat named Neva who lived in a pecan farm and an ousted Father from California who got his hands on some little kiddies. He played the crowd pleasers, too -- "Discoball World" being my favorite, and "Slave" and "Kinder" -- the good stuff from This Euphoria. By the end he was getting experimental and highly random ("Art cloud! know what I'm talking about?") and I was getting cranky, but it was one of the more entertaining shows I've been to in a while.
Minus the violently irritating talkers -- no, in fact, YELLERS seated six inches away from me, one of them my favorite breed of small blond chick. I snarled audibly but decided not to start any fights. Yanking ponytails during anti-war songs would just seem so... unpatriotic.
Had much more to write about but these lunch breaks are getting shorter and shorter and I don't know who the hell my neighbors think they are, but they went and put passwords all over their wi-fi networks and I can't leech off their high speed internet connections and get online from home anymore. Do you believe these people?
The nerve. Free wireless internet is a Godgiven right.
Well, for me.
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