More CMJ - TGIF

Things were a lot clearer on Friday morning after pretty much skipping out on the night before (although I did end up staying up to watch Borat on the Daily Show which was hilarious). After lunch with a friend here in Park Slope, I jumped on the train to head back up to Lincoln Center.

Ariel was saving me a seat in the 4th row of Alice Tully Hall at the panel called Membership Privileges: Artist Exposure Through Web Communities - certainly an appropriate topic for us. While it was aimed mostly at artists who don't necessarily have any prowess in interwebland, it was definitely eye-opening to realize how much can happen for an artist when they can interact directly with their fans. And there are so many ways to do that now - the sky really is the limit. An artist can just choose their own adventure, give away an MP3, make a mini-golf date with their street teamers while on the road and voila, you've got yourself an active national fanbase. JamBase is certainly headed in this general direction. By choosing their favorite bands, fans will naturally be promoting these bands - mostly without the band even knowing! Anyway... good panel. Nice to see the creative potential with the internets!

The moon was looking very cool as we headed downtown to start the party time. First stop was Sin-E for the Planetary Group party. It was so dark inside the only thing to do was drink alcohol. Oooooh and it was FREE alcohol, too! Yeah! Strange things were afoot inside and I'm not quite sure exactly what was going on but we were treated to a song by an odd man. Then this Japanese band played - they were not good. THEN, the Robbers On High Street played and I liked that a lot! They had great musicianship and a great onstage energy. This is the rock'n'roll I was lookin for the night before. Got it now. Here are a few pics from Sin-E:


Next... We went around the corner for another drink and realized that we were at the KEXP party. I love KEXP! Triple-A radio rules! The night was starting to get fuzzy already as we walked to Delancey street. Next thing I know, I'm at the too-cool-to-have-a-functioning-toilet FADER party. It's quite ironic that this is where I found out that Billy Nershi is leaving String Cheese Incident. While my personal life will not be affected by such an announcement, this is what we call "pretty huge" in jamland. Even more ironic, I ran into fellow "jammers" Mike Greenhaus and Benjy Eisen and scooped 'em on the story. Of course all this meant is that Benjy and I had to follow Mike blocks and blocks so he could post the news. Great pontification along the way, though.

We jumped on the L train en route for Williamsburg. We picked up another Relix traveler, somewhat randomly, along the way. We were headed to Warsaw to see The Secret Machines. The Machines have Warsaw all weekend for their "In the Round" spectacular. This is the closing weekend of their month-long nationwide tour. It's really quite amazing what they accomplished this month. The stage itself is incredible to see - a steel cage with speakers and lights popping out. The thing looks like it's going to launch through the roof. The band rocked last night and they definitely seemed excited to be on home turf with a great crowd taboot. And the pierogies were DEEEEEEEEEEEEELICIOUS! Yum!






That's all for now...