Photo: Dat Politics & Goodiepal after the show at the Ménagerie de Verre.
HEY! BOBBY BIRDMAN! WHERE ARE YOU? Luke and I are on the bus from Brussels to Paris and we have no idea where you are. You aren't answering text messages I'm sending to your phone.. you aren't answering calls to your phone.. We don't have email.. Shim-sham.
I got my phone to check my email and found a new email from Rob. He was in Paris at a wireless hotspot and he had been walking around all day. He told us he had a room at a hostel and we should meet up with him. The email was from 3 hours earlier and he wasn't responding to my replies.. As soon as we arrived at the Paris bus station he got back at me and we made a plan to meet at the hostel. The metro was to stop running at 12:30 and it was already 11:45. Luckily everything worked out and we even convinced the guy in our hostel room to switch up with Rob so we could be together. Paris seemed overwhelming to me. We didn't get to see any of the major tourist attractions, but it was still beautiful. We ended up having sort of a frantic stay; we kept having to meet people, meet at the club for sound check and figure out the subway system.
We met up with Goodiepal and his new friend from Atlanta named Lindsey around 1 AM in the street somewhere in Paris. Pal was real upset and hadn't slept for two days straight. There was all kinds of deep crap with rides, planes and knives that he had been involved in. There seems to always been some sort of intense drama or crazy scenario around this man. Last time he was on crutches with two broken legs.... there was something to do with him jumping out of a window. This time his hand was bandaged up from acid spilling on it.. something to do with being on a boat and sailors laughing at him. Up and over all dramatic circumstance Goodiepal is always a joy to hang around. In the backstage room at our show in Paris he did this French rap bit that had everyone shitting their pants. Guy is funny and so good.
Before the show we did a session on the radio for France College Radio, which is sort of a syndicated college radio station for all of the colleges in France. Weird, right? Instead of each college having their own station there's just one based in Paris. I think the session went real well. We played 40 minutes of continuous music; taking turns and mashing up each other's songs.
The show at night was just like our NYC show on Halloween. Goodiepal took over the space and made it his own vibe. He started off with 10 minutes of "new age" music that was sounds of waves and him cranking his handmade music box while whistling along. So good. The whole time Luke, Rob and I were beside him on the ground in a triangle with our laptops in the middle. After the soft vibe he introduced us and we did a round-robin with Luke starting off wiht a 7 minute song-cycle, I did a 10 or 15 minutes of jams and Rob finished it up with a couple bangers. It felt a little cold because the audience was so far away on these bleachers, but their applause was deep and warm.
I was really excited to meet Dat Politics and happy we had the chance to hang out with them a little bit. I'm such a big fan of their music and their label Ski-pp.. I have a dream to do something/put something out with them sometime.
After the show we debated weather we should stay up all night and catch the metro to the shuttle to the airport at 5:30 AM, or if we should return to our amazingly nice host's house and sleep for a couple hours. We decided to try and stay awake. We started walking around and found an African restaurant that was closing, but decided to stay open for us. We ate some really incredible food and I started to get tired. We walked and walked and walked all the way to the apartment and ended up sleeping for two hours. We made the metro, shuttle and plane to Scotland.
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Here's a review of the show in Paris I just found:
http://www.etherreal.com/magazine/concerts/?file=goodiepal01