FREE BLOOD

FREE BLOOD AT FASHION WEEK!

At the Eleventh Hour we were asked to perform in the basement of the Tribeca Grand Hotel aka Batman’s Jungle Palace. This being Fashion Week, the joint was sure to be packed to the gills with designers, djs and celebs..or at least people who dressed like they were one of the above. The basement was carpeted (except for a wood-paneled dancefloor) and at any other (squaresville) hotel it would function as a conference room, but tonight it was the most exclusive club in Manhattan, where one could not walk from one end of the room to the other without getting caught between at least a dozen air kisses.

In lieu of a backstage, Free Blood was given a room to accommodate us and our entourage. This felt kind of like prom night, when one of your friends gets a nice hotel room, and you and nine friends sit around on the floor (there’s only two chairs and a bed) wondering how you’re going to get drunk, because the minibar is like $5 for a bottle of water…Eventually, we received our requested vodka and tequila, with a bottle of champagne thrown in for good measure. Yeah! Seniors!!

We hid out in the room, leisurely sipping our cocktails watching Project Runway (what? it was fashion week, people!) and Golden Girls (what? it’s like Sex In The City:The Retirement Years). Our room was right above the lobby bar so an added bonus was hearing Eric Duncan play “Heaven’s In The Backseat Of My Cadillac” through the floor. Finally, our presence was requested on stage. The basement was packed with folks shuffling around each other with drinks in the air, either dancing or trying to get to the side of the room Val Kilmer was hanging out on. XXXchange was rocking the tables and I was determined to at least be louder than him (see Norway). Of course we came on with our quietest, most experimental song, bringing the festivities to a conspicuous halt and sending all the Kilmer-watchers to the other side of the room. However those who stayed, got down with the ethereal what-the-fuckness of it all, and were rewarded with a proper dark disco pose-a-thon. At one point bottled water (in GLASS BOTTLES) was brought to the stage, and I knew we were in a seriously classy situation. From the stage we could see all manner of activity: interpretive dancing, texting, making out (mostly boys), feel-copping, voguing, Spencer Product giving us the devil horns, fashion luminaries who would not appreciate their names mentioned in this lowly blog, people yelling “Who is this?” in each other’s ears even though I said “If you’re just joining us, we are Free Blood.” between every song, etc….We closed out the set with an improvised version of “Swooning”, a doo-wop song that flirts with extreme scorched-earth noise. This was masterfully blended into the dj’s closing set.

We secreted ourselves back upstairs, dodging errant air kisses as the party slowly whittled itself down to the hardcore fashionistas and fashionasties. Meanwhile, we were in our semi-suite whittling down our bottles with a babbling gusto. Somehow we just could not finish them, despite our best efforts. Luckily, just as we were all retiring, I got a message from our long-departed sound engineer/wizard Jonathan K, who was requesting whatever leftover booze we could spare, for his own afterafterparty on the seventh floor. Relieved the dregs would not be wasted, the spirits were spirited up to the room where a proper hang session was just settling in for the long haul. Again, imagine prom night, nine of your friends crammed in a really fancy hotel room trying not to drink the minibar. We dropped off the dregs and retired for the night.

The morning after we slept in HARD, for we were due back in Brooklyn for another show at a hotel….The Market Hotel.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 12:31 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.