Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Dragons 1976 Chicago & Lexington

Happy New Year to all!

It's the beginning of 2007 and Dragons 1976 are on the road for a short week-long tour. I flew to Chicago from Florida where I was visiting my family and got together with Tim & Jason for our first date since last summer when we were on the road for three weeks. Our first date was at the Heaven Gallery on Milwaukee Ave. Jason has been maintaining his Protest series there for a while now. Back in the old day Heaven was more known for the dance parties, it's matured since then and playing there is a good time - a nice sounding front room, good location for people to get to, and Dave Dobie, who I met in my first days in Chicago, is always friendly. We asked the GK Duo to play the first set - that's Mattthew Golombisky and Quin Kirchner, two fellows who came to Chicago after I moved out west I think. A good duo - bass, drums and pedal electronics.
We played a set of mainly our new music - all recorded last July after the tour - this tour we really get to learn that material. I was happy with the turnout - Josh Abrams and Dave Rempis swung by after playing a benefit at Subterranean. Haven't seen Josh in a long time.
So, New Years Eve came and went - on the 2nd we got into the Daisy family bikeshop van and headed down to Lexington where our good man Ross had a show set up for us at the Icehouse. We first went by Gumbo Ya-Yas for a good bite to eat - Ross always provides. We played two sets at the Icehouse, started pretty soon after 8 as a good crowd turned out and were done with our second set before 10:30. We played all the new music along with older tunes. Walter Tunis, a writer in Lexington really enjoyed the new material - he's been giving us nods in the press there for a few years now. Really a nice situation to go to. The Icehouse lived up to it's name temperature wise - the downside of having a huge performance space is the heating bills - Brian had a turbo-jet style heater going for a bit, but I remember looking over at Tim at one point in the second set and seeing his breath in the cool air.

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