Saturday, Feb 28:
Max Graham was incredible! I have never enjoyed a DJ performance that much in my life! I like to think that a healthy amount of liquor wasn’t all to thank for my excessive enjoyment, but rather only partially. Before heading downtown, Brian, Kevin, and I watched the first part of Fear of a Black Hat and drank a bit. Damn funny movie! Then we headed downtown to meet some people who had set up a little meeting of people on the tranceaddict.com forums (it’s rather hard to find many people around here highly interested in going to an event like this), we ended up convening with Andrew and Phil.. it’s really wicked to finally know some cool people in the area who are into that scene. The venue itself was pretty cool, low key, fairly small, but definitely cleaner than the London Lounge, plus the staff seemed to actually get really into the music which is a major plus. Max Graham himself was very amazing. Every single track he played was awesome, none got boring or overlong.. all of them had an awesome melody and wicked housy beats (not your tired 4/4 trance bumps, the kind that make it so you can’t help but get funky). There’s lots of people, expecially straight males like myself, who don’t get into the whole dancing thing. Well, I don’t count myself as one of you. It’s great to just let go and move with the music for a long time.. who knows why, perhaps that deserves some insight. It’s a bit like the whole pretending to be a rock star thing, except it’s more communal (as long as you don’t start elbowing people in the face) and you aren’t pretending to be someone you’re not. Max was on for a bit under three and a half hours, and I think I stopped moving for a total of about 3 minutes the entire time. Whenever Brian went to the bar to grap a cup of water, he took an extra one for me that I’d share with Kevin, which was really awesome of him.. that way I could keep moving the whole time and not die. Near the end he played a completely amazing remix of With Or Without You (a thousand million times better than that LMC vs U2 - take me to the clouds above song that has charted in Europe). After the show Kevin asked Max what it was and he said “I have no idea, Sandra just gave me the record..” Crazy DJs and their tons of random vinyls from crazy places… Which brings me to the part about how Max Graham is a really cool super nice guy in person.. he was just talkin to fans in the club beforehand and afterwards everyone who stayed to the end was rewarded with a back pat and firm handshake from the man himself. Afterwards we grabbed a cab and headed back to Rez and finished watching Fear of a Black Hat. All in all it was an awesome awesome night, one of the best I’ve had in a good while. And no hangover even! But I’m really, really sore and stiff, which kinda makes up for that, but to all things there is a price.
This coming week is pretty filled up for me as I have tech rehearsal every day for an indeterminate, but probably fairly long, amount of time, and then of course performance on thursday and friday.