Bands come and bands go. There are some bands that do both. Genesis is one of these acts that brake up until the members are done and get back together. The Dresden Dolls share this quality, but unlike Genesis, they don’t suck. Right now, the Dolls are taking a few years off and Amanda Palmer is going about a solo career.
This brings me to Ms. Palmer’s current side project with Jason Webley, Evelyn Evelyn…or should I say Sideshow Project?
Anyway, Amanda and Jason have put together an album based on a fictional pair of conjoined twins that go by the name, Evelyn Evelyn. The CD is a bunch of cheerful songs mixed with some spoken word tracks that tell the sad, yet hilarious story of the twin girls that plays like A Series Of Unfortunate Events. The project has a feeling that it all started with drunken night of bouncing ideas around. However, when Amanda and Jason commit to an idea, they commit. They had been touring in character throughout the country for the past few months. Which is pretty fucking funny when you think of how Jason is dressing in drag in order to pull this off.
Well, Lindsay nearly lost her shit when she discovered that they were coming to Washington D.C. at the 9:30 club. It’s been almost ten years since yours truly had been to D.C., so what the hell. I’ll be honest with you though, long car trips make me edgy. Watch any horror movie, you can be a flat tire away from becoming a Mermaid Boy Statue.
Instead of those kids from A House Of A Thousand Corpses, we played it smart. We leave early in the morning, getting there in plenty of time to kick around The International Spy Museum. If you ever find your way over to our nation’s capital, you should check it out. The Cold War has never been cuter.
Ok, the show.
It was amazing. It was ballsy. It was funny. Their opening act was Skip. He makes music with instruments that he made himself. However, as he admits…
“It’s just some shit I duck taped together!”
Very cool sound to say the least.
After a few songs, Skip introduced the main attraction themselves, Evelyn Evelyn. So in comes Amanda and Jason fused together underneath this depression era dress. Two heads, two arms, and one piano. What is interesting here is the way they stayed in character for the entire concert. They came across like two frightened children that spend their lives being pulled up onstage to be tortured by the public. The crowd’s applause seemed to terrify them more than anything. The fans loved it, but I wonder if they loved it a little too much. Every time Skip took Amanda’s character’s candy bar away, they go, “AWWWWWWWWW!”
Guys, it’s only a show. Just relax.
The funniest part of the show was the section where Evelyn Evelyn took questions from the audience. They actually answered speaking one word each until it became an answer. It’s an old game that works well here. Well, twin’s show came to an end and after a little break, Jason Webley took the stage for three songs and handed things over to Amanda Palmer. Excellent little show, ok, it was actually a long show. It was around three hours for the whole thing. We did get more than our money’s worth, but holy shit were we tired. Lindsay and I actually finished watching the last twenty minutes sitting on a sofa in the back of the 9:30 Club.
Amanda and Jason are wonderful with their fans. They even did a meet up after the concert, but we couldn’t hang around cause frankly, we were a pair of zombies. We were tired and hungry. It was past midnight and we had a three and a half hour trip ahead of us. The journey did have it’s share of pitfalls. There was a big ass traffic jam that threw us an hour off schedule and I got us lost for a few minutes looking for gas on some off road. Maybe I’m not much smarter than those horror movie teens.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
New book is coming soon!
Ah...soon I will be holding a copy of The Red Knight in my hands. After all these years of planning and plotting the character's story lines, I've finally done it. I would have loved to do the series as a comic, but i can do it as a pulp.
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