Great Northern Halloween at Falls Church Distillers

If you want to be noticed onstage, play guitar. You can do windmills, make love to your axe, and generally engage in all manner of attention-grabbing histrionics. But, if you want to wall yourself off against contact with people* during a pandemic, keyboards are your instrument. As I have done at every gig at FCD, I have barricaded myself into the corner with the keyboard as my rampart. This turned out to be a good idea, as it turned out to be a pretty big party. Normally a big, boisterous crowd is a good thing, and certainly to be expected on a Halloween Saturday night, but in COVID times, the sea of people standing too close to each other, not all wearing masks creeped me out.

But other than the superspreader aspect (at least Mark Meadows didn't show), the evening was a blast. We were once again joined by Ron Holloway, who was clearly slumming. Excellent singer Amy Wilson also joined us, giving us two backup singers, which was the perfect feel for our first set, which was all Jerry Garcia Band tunes. Second set we delved into the Dead catalog, with a few twists, including Traffic's Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. By strange coincidence, national level Dead tribute band Dark Star Orchestra had included Low Spark in their set the previous evening up at Frederick Fairgrounds. Great minds ...

I did get some time to hang out with my Deadhead cousins - who came all the way from North Carolina to see the show! My backstory with them is bizarrely worth of its own blog post. For the moment I will just mention that I met them for the first time ever randomly outside a Dead and Company show.

Oh, and we wound up on TV! Well, it was public access cable, but we go 30 minutes of our show on an Arlington Independent Media show called "Song Po". Link to be added when I can ...

*I have a lifelong tendency to wall myself off against people, but that's a different story.

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An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

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