I went, I saw, I heard, I got the t-shirt.
I got out of work on Monday at 3 so we could hop on a train to Philly for the Meat Beat Manifesto show. The train ride was typical, when we left Market East Station we went directly to dinner at the Independence Brew Pub down the street. Dinner was great, we each had a glass of their IPA, which was good, a pretty standard IPA.
When we were finished with dinner I told Michael that I wanted to see Chinatown, since I’d never seen any chinatown (gosh I’m a country girl). So we walked down there and walked around for about 20 minutes. But it was hot, and we ended up going back to the brew pub to sit at the bar until the show.
While at the bar Michael started talking to a fellow who sat down near us with a laptop. He was really interesting to talk to, was in the city for some sort of educational conference. We talked about our work, and were we were from. Turns out that he owns a software development company in the area, working on educational software, he was mostly going to the conference to make connections to get more funding. Cool. When we told him about the concert we were going to see he asked if they were “like Tangerine Dream?” which got him telling us about a concert of theirs he went to in Manchester on Bonfire Night in 1976, nice!
We left the pub just before 7 to get to The Troc. There weren’t many people there when we got there, and the opening band wasn’t great. Here is a hint for kids starting a band: pretend guitars and basses don’t exist, I’ve heard EVERY SINGLE SOUND a guitar could ever make, and it’s BORING. At least they didn’t sing.
By the time Meat Beat Manifesto came out after 9 there were a lot of people there. We sat upstairs (21+ there), had a couple beers and enjoyed the show. And what a show it was! See Michael’s post about the show for the stage setup and his impressions. I’d never been to a MBM show before, they had a couple screens up for sort of video show to go along with the music. It was excellent! I got all geeked out when they did the songs with old b-movie scifi clips and samples (some of which I recongnised, prince of space! The brain that wouldn’t die!). And it was loud, sounded amazing, was all-around really fun. I’m so glad we went! After the show I told Michael that I wanted to go again %) Yesterday when we were coming home from work I even said “Well Balitmore isn’t *that* far away, probably wouldn’t be a much later night if we went to their wednesday show…” hehe.
We caught the last train to Lansdale (11:55) and got home around 1:30. I was exhausted, and crashed in bed immediately. Had to wake up at 6am for work, I’m such a wimp about lack of sleep, was attached to high caffeine drinks all morning %) But it was so worth it.