Foxy Sunday

I made it to a few shows over the weekend. On Thursday I caught Agent Orange at the Lion’s Lair, a small craphole of a bar on Colfax, more or less on a whim. Musically there were no big surprises to be found – just Agent Orange running through all of the old classics. I was, however, surprised that a pretty good crowd showed up on a weeknight. And most of them were wearing backwards baseball caps, hmmmmm…agent orange must be popular with the current breed of “extreme” skaters. I got knocked down a few times by some wayward moshers, but overall had a pretty good time. For some reason the main p.a. speakers pointed to the audience weren’t on so the vocals were hard to hear. The warmup band was a lousy local act, Self Service, who I saw stink up the same joint a few weeks ago (warming up for another oldie punk act, the UK Subs). This time a creepy girl kept jumping up on stage to sing along, dance, and spray the crowd with beer. You could tell this probably the high point of her week….kind of sad, really!

On Friday I caught the Dwarves on an email freebie from the promoter I had received earlier that day. The email read that it was “only good for the first 10 people who bring them in …so get there early!” well, I showed up at 9:30, 90 minutes after the doors opened – the girl at the ticket window pulled out a small stack of printouts, counted them, and wrote a big “6” on mine. I guess the punks didn’t sign up for the mailing list, hahaha… The show was okay, nothing to write home about, but worth the drive over. The Dwarves seem to get a lot of press about what a dangerous band they are, likely due to their notorious past, but what they deliver nowadays is pretty tame (then again, this was an all ages show so maybe it was toned down). A pretty rowdy, drunk, and dirty crowd – I felt kind of out of place, but it wasn’t the first time I’ve felt that way. Several years ago, after leaving a Zeke/Dwarves show in seattle, my friend Scott described the crowd as looking very “methadone anonymous.” I think that term may still work.

As I pulled out of the garage and got about a block from the house this morning I saw 2 foxes running around and playing in the fresh snow. I’ve seen foxes at night in our neighborhood before, but they usually scatter as soon as they see a pair of headlights. I drove slowly past both of them, stopping to get a good look, and they didn’t pay me any mind as they ran about doing their fox bidness. Cool!