Location: The Empty Bottle
Bands: Brilliant Pebbles with Unique Chique and The Pumps
Cost: FREE!
Things I missed to be there: Mudboy, Dr WTF MD, and Kill Comedy at The Village; GSD, La Armada Roja, Canadian Rifle and Intifada at Juevos Ranchos
Reason for going: I wanted something where I could slip in, have a drink, watch a band andeave after spending an evening at the family seder
I have a few friends who live and die by the website MyOpenBar. It's a compendium of bars and stores that have free shit on any given day of the week, and just like Craigslist, Flavorpill, and the -Ist family of websites, there's one in every big city. If you do your homework, you can eat, get hammered, see a show and get a facial for under ten bucks (you know, the kind of facial that you might find in the free section on Craigslist, as opposed to the kind guaranteed in casual encounters. Still, it's good to have a good cross section of backup standards if you're like me, and going home just makes you depressed. Wednesday means Soul Night at Danny's, The Freeform Shuffle at Spot 6, and In-One-Ear at the Heartland. Tuesday means quarter beer night amd live rockabilly at the Horseshoe. And Monday is Free night over at the Empty Bottle.
Free Night is always welcome. While they occasionally have a clunker of a show, it's fairly rare, and if the temperature is nice and the rest of the city is mellow, even a slow night will be pretty bumpin. Tonight I came to see Brilliant Pebbles, who have been making the rounds with the weirdo set. The band consists of a lot of people I've seen around before, but never in bands. There's Monikah, who used to have her long hair divided into a black hemisphere and a white hemisphere, that Asian guy who I would descrive as 'dressing ugly on purpose' if that wasn't a mean thing to say, and a guitarist who I couldn't recognize behind his costume (which looked more like a zombie version of the pope than I did when I dressed up as a zombie version of the pope for a costume party two years ago. Also, their drummer used to play with Lozenge (yay).
At first I thought the band was going to be another exercise in theater over substance as Monikah, leapt around the stage, howling and moaning in Polish and English, but by their third song they had gelled into this Proggy New Wave that was so epic it almost sounded like Opera (think Bertolt Brecht raping Giorgio Moroder). My girlfriend suggested that Monikah form an English-Polish-Russian-gibberish supergroup with Right-Eye Rita and Lena from Schizowave, though in actuality, I'd seen her join Aleks (from Aleks and the Drummer) as back-up singers for my favorite incarnation of Lovely Little Girls.
The other good thing about Free Mondays is that they're cheap enough that if you don't like what's going on, or your mind starts to wander, there's nothing holding you back from leaving. I missed Unique Chique, who play indie rock, and The Pumps, who tried to trick me into staying longer than I intended to, by having incredibly beautiful women in the band.
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