Posted by On January 3rd, 2015 I proved once again why I should usually just say no to aftershows.
Having just completed a four-night run of Phish concerts (with a raging New Years Eve thrown in there taboot) I was a physically spent music fan when I walked out of the American Airlines Arena and into a warm Miami evening following the final Phish show. I was feeling great having taken in a simply fantastic concert, and with the Good Times, Bad Times encore still happily ringing in my ears I joined a crowd of friends and associates who were making their way to some bar called Railroad Blues.
Kung Fu was already onstage when we arrived, and the fact that they were on the bill explains why I even bothered going to the show at all. Kung Fu was fronted by Tim Palmieri, a really, really good guitar player from a band called Psychedelic Breakfast (now called The Breakfast) that I used to see once in a while back in my band-management days. Gosh, I remember watching Tim standing onstage at a bar in Utica called The Electric Company and absolutely knocking me over with a stunning chord/melody jazz version of O Tannenbaum, played as he casually waited for his soundcheck.
Dude was really, really good. So good that I thrust a copy of a Sisters Euclid cd into his hands after that holiday soundcheck, insisting that he give Kevin Breit a listen.
Anyway, Palmieri had recently surrounded himself with a pile of super-heavy players and started Kung Fu, a proggy show-off funk band that dished out more notes-per-minute than a calliope on speed. I had never seen the band before (and haven’t seen them since) and had been waiting quite a while to see Tim play again, so I resisted the urge to just go back to the bar fridge in my hotel room and instead happily tagged along to the aftershow.
But in the end I just didn’t care. I was on such a high from seeing such a great show by one of my favourite bands that crowding into a small, packed bar to watch a bunch of overzealous super-pickers race through songs I was wholly unfamiliar with just wasn’t on my radar, despite my best intentions. I did force myself to spend ten minutes or so (ie: half a song) in the tiny, super-packed performance space where I could appreciate the intensity of the bebop-rock, but the way the bar was set up just screamed “patio” so I shunned the musical pyrotechnics and spent most of the aftershow on the patio discussing the last four nights of Phish with all of the friends and associates that I had arrived with. Barring the ten-minute self-enforced semi-song exposure and the notes that hit me on my excursions inside to visit the bathroom Kung Fu was a non-entity to me.
By the time the very fun and funky headliners The Motet came on I was fully engaged in ignoring all entertainment except my own drunken mouth as it blabbed incoherently at a multitude of friends and strangers.
Which is why I almost never go to aftershows.
(Fun fact: The cover charge for this aftershow was more than I paid for any of the four Miami Phish concerts.)
Todd Man Out 