A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Douchebag or: The Myth of Fingerprints

Ok,

So as you can probably tell by now, I procrastinate pretty hardcore.

I've kept a bunch of blog drafts and never get around to finishing them, but goddammit I'm gonna show some Hal Jordan style willpower and demolish the DC universe as I finally get around to finishing and posting these damn things.

So I'm gonna just keep going where I left off.
I'm going to try and remember this all as well as I can.
I started this post in March.
Its not March anymore.

So when I was in high school I once heard Amanda Palmer say that there's this thing that like touching except you don't touch.

But I'll get to all that later.

So its been just over a month since record release and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only Amboy still reeling from it all. But then again, I was up until 7 AM rocking the heaviest power hour ever with The Bears of Blue River.

Its 5:30 PM and we're all slowly making our way toward Asbury Lanes; fully loaded with tee-pees, make-up, smoke machines, T-Shirts and most importantly our first legit full-length album "Everything Between The Moon & The Sun". And I honestly can't thank the ladies at the Lanes enough for keeping what I feel is Asbury Park's best venue up and running and really giving us free reign on this show. I mean what other place would let us drag in a giant fake horse in from the rain and use it as a stage piece?

Its about 7:30 and the gang is all here. The four boys and our running crew for the night Rob, Colin, Matt, and Sam. Lawrence is in the back running the projective magic machine and we have our first full sound-check for the night. Now if I could be a complete bastard steal these guys away from their respective projects, I would flat out because once we got things rolling and I heard the full live sound I'd been dreaming of for two years now.

And it was pretty well close to perfect.

(this is me finishing the post)

Its somewhere around half past 8 and Bears of Blue River are on. People are slowly piling in from all the wet outside and the night's picking up steam. My only real regret here is that there weren't more people around at this point to see how great these guys are, because they missed out on something pretty fierce.

Its somewhere around 9 and The Riverwinds are on and Colin is shredding life. I'm running ragged. Shaking hands, giving hugs, maybe selling CDs.

I'm drinking gin in a Mr Sparkle T-shirt.

Its around 10 now and we're running a bit late. Backstage Lawrence is prepping us all in Indian warpaint for some reason. Chris is opting for the Adam Ant look. I've chosen to come out in white-face. Or at least half of it is whiteface. The rest is sweat.

I'm so god-damned scared.

Out on the stage I hear Bryan start to announce us in Japanese. I thought he was kidding when he said he'd do it. He wasn't. I swallow down hard and we all rush the stage. With the opening notes of The Right Track, I'm off like a racehorse. Thundercats are go. At this point I'm pretty much running on Mountain Dew-fueled adrenaline. I'm not gonna lie and say that a big chunk of the middle isn't a blur, but trust me when I say I don't think I've ever been happier. Every track was just spot on and just fun to play. It was great to have these guys really fleshing out these songs so that the crowd could finally hear them the way we always meant them to. We closed out the set with This Very Thin Line and at some point Brent and Bryan find their way on stage to grind a bowling ball against the neck of my bass, adding a little bit extra to my normal Sonic Youth closing shenanigans.

We segue into a bit of Talking Heads' Road to Nowhere, something we liked to do a lot last year that we ended up retiring. I called people up to come dance on stage and in two seconds it was packed to capacity.

I'm pretty sure we almost broke the stage that night. But it was a pretty special kind of awesome to be able to bring it back and make it that epic.

From there it gets pretty blurry but you get the point. It was an awesome show and I managed not to let Bears of Blue River drink me under the table. I'm so grateful to everyone that helped us and to everyone that showed up to support us. We're gonna need a lot more of that love in the future as we try to get out on the road and be somebody so help us out, spread the word. Whore us a bit, we don't mind.

Now its almost 3am and I wanna pass out watching Charlie Murphy. So back to my opening statement:

Apparently there's this thing that's like touching
Except you don't touch
And I think that night we all got a little closer to it.

Manny
The Amboys