We stayed at Joey Casio's house in Olympia, Washington last summer. He was one of the nicest most mellow-mannered folk we stayed with all tour.
The show was at a gay bar called Jakes. No one was there except for the other bands, a few of Joey's local buds, and a drunken frat dude who interrupted Eyes and Ears set and started screaming for them to play Nirvana covers. Myke Howard actually complied and the dude got on stage and sang to Territorial Pissing (if memory serves me correctly. Actually, god, listening to them now I forgot how great Eyes and Ears were.
(Reading back over this I realized this post is totally unrelated within itself...so sorry, stream of consciousness takeover in 5....4...3..2.1)
Listening to all the music makes me super reminiscent of the months I spent in Columbia, MO directly after graduating high school and even moreso of my friend Nathan who in 2001 started a keyboard beats punk band called Bin Laden Youth aka about seven years before Dash Snow ever "thought" of it...sorry Dash, you were beaten out by a 17 year old gay kid in Missouri. Nathan was the best kid ever. I lived with him when he was 15 and I was 18 in the top floor of an old house split into three separate apartments. The middle floor was vacant and in the basement there lived an ultra punk rock couple who had lived in the garage of my previous punk house. The girl was about 16 and got knocked up when she lived in the basement apartment. She started showing around the time a group of sorority girls rented out the house next door for their summer party pad. I remember when they first moved in they invited us to a party at their house. We rolled in seven deep with a pregnant pink haired teenager in a wifebeater, no bra, and a mini skirt, no panties and her mohawked ferret-faced 20-something year old boyfriend. Ahh, Samantha and Eric, I think those were their names. Wonder what happened to them. We stole half the beer from their refrigerator and smuggled it back to our house, comandeered their stereo and frightened everyone away from us until, 3 stolen bottles of Jack Daniels later we left for fear of getting our asses kicked. Needless to say, we weren't invited back.
I lived in the attic in this house and Nathan lived below me. He was a high school dropout with a wire-framed glasses and fire engine red rat tail. It was the perfect "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" response. Confuse the rednecks by adopting their hairdos. This was 2000, several years before the mullet took over Williamsburg. What this kid was doing eight years ago is beyond next level today. He was my best gay ever. We'd cuddle and I teased him for listening to Ani DiFranco. We talked about crushes and he pretended not to notice (or maybe didn't actually notice, I'm actually pretty sure he didn't notice because he was so crushed out on the third person involved in our conversation) when I puked on myself (just a little) mid-sentence on our porch. I started getting so drunk that I couldn't even make it down the stairs to the bathroom and started waking up and pissing in the leftover Fosters cans that were in my room still from it's previous incarnation as party pad. Before I took the attic there had been a party at the house every Friday for a month or two and since there was no living room, all partying took place in the attic or on the porch. Nathan wasn't my first gay, but he was my first best gay. I haven't spoken to him in years but this music makes me miss him.
Anyway, what a diversion. Not that this music is gay, it just makes me think of Nathan Stebbing and his Lisa Frank fantasyworld.
Also playing that show was Twin Crystals who had such a crazed and frenetic energy I all but gave up taking pictures, aside from these right as the singer threw his keyboard and ended up bleeding.
I now have a Bin Laden Youth song in my head, "Osama, where are, you're like the father I never had. Why don't you come out of hiding and make yourself a real dad" or something like that. I'll fall asleep with images of Nathan in his "Pen 15 Club" jean jacket and his denim cutoffs dancing around in my head.
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