Day 22: Baltimore, MD
Nau mai,
Yesterday we played a show in the sunny and handsome city of Baltimore, Maryland.
We awoke as we were cruising into Baltimore, leaving the bumpy old surface of Interstate 95 and snaking our way through the avenues of downtown until we pulled in behind Spoon’s bus on a narrow street lined with tall brick buildings.
I made myself a breakfast aboard the bus, two slices of sourdough bread toasted (in the Hamilton Beach) and smeared with avocado that had miraculously arrived at the perfect ripeness after sitting in the fridge for a week (and having the telltale slice in one side where someone last week aborted their attempt to open it after misjudging the firmness). I topped my tartine with salt and pepper and then gave a drizzle of olive oil from the small bottle Tristan had saved from his airplane dinner.
This is about the median view from a bus window parked outside a venue.
A clean bus allows you to use photographic techniques like reflective symmetry.
We had a hot date set for the middle of the day. Our friends from the band Ratboys invited us to a legendary music store and promised us that we would find success in the aquisition of musical equipment. Atomic music was everything they had promised and more. Aisles and aisles of guitars and amps, bins of audio equipment, boxes of old microphones, and piles of drums, everything stored with a chaotic energy that made you feel like you were on the brink of finding a bargain. There was no “ask before you try” policy; the vibe was to take a guitar from one of towering storage racks, find an amp that you liked, find somewhere to plug it in (sometimes this meant unplugging some of the display lights) and then hunting around for an instrument cable. The staff were incredibly chill and happy to poke around in the back room for a specific item you were after.
A few hours later we were back at the venue seeing for the first time the crazy interior of Baltimore’s Nevermore Hall. It felt like we were inside a cuboid artwork, different shapes jammed together to create a huge room full of nooks and overhangs. I couldn’t figure out how to capture it in a photograph. It felt a bit like being at the Universal Studios theme park and watching one of the live shows where propane explosions keep erupting and people keep getting thrown off the gantries.
I tried a higher framerate gif because the low framerate was a bit vomitty with this panning shot. The trade off is the low resolution clip. But hopefully you get the idea - very much a villain lair.
After soundcheck I went with Jon to look at the harbour. This innocent piece of relaxing recreation turned into a mission to capture Jon at his most handsome, which is when he is appreciating tall ships. There were five of these impressive vessels moored in Baltimore’s inner harbour and they were all competing to see who could hoist both the most flags and the biggest single flag. The event was called Sail250, we later found out, and it involved coordinated visits from tall sailing ships from all around the world to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of the nation.
We were lucky enough to get aboard the biggest of all of these ships, the might four masted barque BAP Union of the Peruvian Navy. The crew were out in their whites standing proudly at ease. The decks looked as if they had been freshly scrubbed, as had the brass been polished and the ropes neatly coiled.
We saw a squad of US Marine Corps cavalry mounted on their e-scooters en route to a replenishment stop.
This is the very stylish cake we were given for selling out the Nevermore Hall.
Some of the folks playing a non financially competitive board game on the footpath after the show.