Dragons 1976 Torun 2-22-08

The drive from Warsaw was about 3 or 4 hours. A two lane road most of the way, the style in Poland is to do a lot of passing of other cars - slower ones tend to even hug the shoulder to make it easier for others - especially drivers that still drive the older eastern european stock cars that are very small. When we arrived in Torun, we immediately went to the hotel and had some time to relax. A few hours later we went to where we played in the Old City - very old - and surrounded by the old castle walls as well. It was all very clean and by asking some people I learned that Torun is a university town - the source for its scrubbed appearance. The venue for the night was called - - and was originally served as a home to the duke form that area. A beautiful building - with nice high ceilings and ornate wall paper and chandeliers. ONe pretty amazing painting of a fellow killing a multi-headed creature with heads of snakes and body of a dog - I believe it was cerberus. The special part was the position in which he was holding one head and preparing to cut it off....the room we played in was a nice size, the height of the ceiling and amount of wood on the walls created a long echo, but one with a pleasing effect, as opposed to the sound made in concrete rooms. I think we played our best concert of the tour this night, in terms of music. The sound of the space allowed us to take our time with the music - I played a bit more sparsely to give more room to the echo, and Ajemian had a great shotgun solo - shotgun for the sound he was making by striking his strings and it bouncing off the walls. We played first, a long set with encore. the Light Trio played second, and I sat in with them for one song - Straight Up and Down, by Dolphy. While waiting to return to the stage after my set I laid down on the floor in a large room that acted as our green room - the sound of the building so good that I could clearly hear every note they played.