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Thursday |
| In 1996, I was living in Baltimore. I didn't get
out much, but I did see a gig poster in a small cafe--it read
Uz Jsme Doma across
the top of a lush graphic of several strange men on horseback with hockey
sticks. I knew
the
Czech expression from my childhood, plus I'd lived in Prague the previous
year. I went. The bar was so small the band was forced to change into
their yellow dresses without ceremony at the side of the stage. They played
hard, fast, and basically fucking tore it up. I was hooked. One year later, I was living in New York. I saw that they were coming around. I'd been waiting for the prices of digital cameras to come down, but I decided if I was going to do it I'd better just take the leap in time to photograph this band in concert, because I had some vague idea that I wanted to be an independent web journalist. I bought a Kodak DC210 for $800, took a lot of pictures, and posted this precursor to Picture of the Day. |
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| One year later, I was living in Seattle. I wrote a preview
with photo and got it published in
The Stranger. I
finally met the band. They'd liked a
small tribute page I'd made and asked me to do
their official site.
I was happy to do it for them. One year later, they were back in Seattle. I was still there. They stayed with me and Sarah, but it must have been disappointing because we didn't at the time have hot water in our apartment. Six months later, they were back again. (This was before 9/11, when it was no problem for international acts to travel.) We'd moved to a new apartment, but as bad luck would have it, we had no hot water again. Luckily, they stayed an extra day, by which time it was fixed. And so on, until today I find myself in Sono Studios on the outskirts of Prague, watching them record their latest album, Rybi Tuk. I wonder who put that Baltimore poster up? |
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