Day 91: Leonardo Takes a Break

I'm going to give everyone (all 12 of you) a break from reading my long, rambling stories by submitting this picture without much comment. Of course this effectively gives me a break from writing long, rambling stories and that's always nice. In case you're wondering (you are, admit it) I chose Leonardo because according to my tag cloud thingy on the side bar I've used him less in his own pictures than any of the other Turtles. Enjoy your rest Leonardo. You've earned it.

Day 90: The Turtles Enter An mc chris Costume Contest

I am unbelievably tired today. We went to an mc chris show last night, his last show at the current Emo's location, and didn't get home until around 2 this morning. Combine that with the late night from the Andrew Jackson Jihad show the night before and I'm not sure how I'm awake right now. But that's OK, because, as usual, mc chris made it worth while.

I won't go into a big long story about all of my dealings with mc chris like I did for AJJ. I've been listening to mc chris a lot longer than I have Andrew Jackson Jihad and I already did a fairly sizable post about him a month or so ago. Remember? Instead I'll just tell you about last night's show and then I'll pass out from exhaustion.

Most of the time when mc chris comes to Austin he does a screening of a favorite movie at Alamo Drafthouse. In the past these have mostly been midnight screenings and throughout the years we've seen Ghostbusters, Temple of Doom, Cloak and Dagger, Galaxy Quest and probably a few more I can't remember right now. This time around he did a showing of Starship Troopers a few hours before the show. Sadly we couldn't make it to the screening, but I'm sure it was an awesome good time like always.

Before I talk about the actual show, I should mention that my wife and I were in our Casey Jones and April O'neil costumes again. In the past it has never been unusual to see people in costume at an mc chris show, but this tour he is holding official costume contests at each stop. After the tour is over he's going to pick a grand prize winner for a four day four night stay in either Disney World or Disney Land. We're planning on going to Disney World in February so my wife can run the Princess Half-Marathon so that trip would have been amazing, but we weren't holding out hope. Nerds are damn good cosplayers and we just wanted to be a part of the costume contest because it's fun.

Unsurprisingly the show was sold out. mc chris usually plays the Emo's outdoor stage which is a significantly bigger area, but because they already closed that section of the venue he was forced to play inside. We got to the show a little late so that my wife could go to rehearsals beforehand. We barely missed Adam WarRock which is a shame because I was curious about his live show.

Shortly after we got to Emo's Random aka Mega Ran took the stage. I honestly had no idea who he was or what he was about other than I strongly suspected he raps about video games. One of the most entertaining parts was when he did a freestyle by stringing together one or two rhymes about whatever the audience was holding up. By the end he had rapped about hand lotion, a baseball cap and a 10% off coupon to Best Buy among other things. I was seriously impressed. He has a very old school hip hop flow and a huge amount of talent.

To be perfectly honest I don't really listen to nerd core rap. I know that sounds weird since I'm such a big fan of mc chris, but I just can't get into a lot of it. Most of the time I get the impression that the artists are trying too hard to be as obscure in their references as possible and you lose a feeling of anything real or personal coming out of the music. I got the opposite feeling from Mega Ran. His music is super nerdy, but it comes from a very personal place. Mega Ran gets my vote for bets opening act of this tour.

After his set we went outside to get some air. By this time we had gotten a few compliments on our costumes. My wife was more recognized, but she also got someone shouting "Kill Bill!" at her when we walked past. I was pleasantly surprised with the general reaction to my costume. On Halloween almost no one recognized me, even the people dressed as Ninja Turtles, but at an mc chris show surrounded by other nerds who grew up on those cartoons and movies I got quite a few high fives.

While we were standing outside I got a tap on the shoulder and turned around to a guy giving me a closed fist salute with Casey Jones' battle cry, "Goongala!" We struck up a conversation with him and his two friends and found out his name was Raphael. I forget his friends' names because I'm terrible with names, but it would have helped if they had also shared a name with a turtle. We talked about our love of the Turtles and about the Casey Jones fan film I blogged about several weeks ago. I had to admit shamefacedly that we had only seen the first season and a half or so of Venture Bros. and, following a stiff recommendation that we catch up, we went back inside to watch MC Lars.

I don't know why, but I had it in my head that I didn't like MC Lars. I don't know when I thought I'd heard his music, but for some reason I really didn't care about his show. Well, turns out I'm an idiot because it was actually pretty damn good. Mega Ran still wins for favorite opener, but MC Lars was close behind him. More even than his rapping I liked his concepts. He writes a lot of stuff in a style he calls "lit-hop." To give you an example of what that means he did a rap version of the story of Moby Dick, the story of Hamlet and two Edgar Allan Poe poems. In one of the poem/raps he used a line from the ICP song "Cemetery Girl" which, being an old school juggalo, I instantly recognized. Before I could lean over and tell my wife he said "Yeah, that's an ICP reference." I'm glad we got to see him perform because it was definitely entertaining.

After MC Lars was the main event. We waited inside and tried to get a half-way decent spot. The inside stage of Emo's is not very big so there isn't really a bad spot, but we wanted to be fairly close. We saw mc chris' roadie/merch guy, Sully, come out and start the music and the entire crowd went crazy. Little did they know we would have to wait through about three and a half minutes of an epic piece of music we all recognized, but I can't quite place. When he finally came out he started the show off with "I Want Candy," the song he wrote and recorded for his character MC Pee Pants on Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I think it's hilarious that he's been making music for 10 years, he's got 7 albums and a Honda commercial and everyone still loses their minds for a song we heard 20 seconds of on a cartoon years ago.

After the song he went into his normal semi-stand up bit. This time was about playing Dead Island and being an RPG completionist and item hoarder. It was hilarious as always and definitely hit close to home for me. At some point while discussing the eminent closing of Emo's, which has been his Austin home base for most of his shows, he started singing "Think of Me" from the Phantom of the Opera soundtrack. This somehow turned into an mc chris acapella Phantom of the Opera medley. Again, hilarious and close to home since I just finished reading the book and I listened to the soundtrack about a hundred times while reading it.

Most of his set was made up of newer stuff from the last few albums. There were a couple old classics like "The 'Tussin" and of course "Fett's Vette." The entire show was centered around ridiculous audience participation which is always part of the fun.

About 45 minutes into the set he called everyone in costume up on stage for the costume contest. There were probably around 20 people on stage and I was pretty happy when he didn't even bother asking us who we were as he had done with the other contestants and just announced us as "Casey Jones and April O'neil!" We got a much bigger response than I thought we would and we actually ended up getting third place, which doesn't really mean anything except that I can blog about how we got third place in the mc chris costume contest. The finalists were Lilu Dallas in the white strap outfit (complete with multi-pass) and Sailor Moon. Sailor Moon won which is fair because her costume was awesome, but it takes some guts to walk around in basically nothing but white strips of fabric. Well done, Lilu.

Before his last song he got serious for a little bit and talked about his dad who is battling cancer and who he's afraid he won't get to see again before the end. He thanked everyone for being such great fans and allowing him to leave his real-life behind for a little while every night and do the things he loves to do. It was pretty touching to see him so sincere and it's obvious he really meant it.

After the "last song" he tried to hide for his encore. The inside stage at Emo's doesn't have a backstage area; bands enter and leave through the crowd. So this means that after the song mc chris tried (unsuccessfully) to hide behind a speaker stack and then jumped back out about fifteen seconds later. His last song was "Popcorn Frog," a song about not being able to wait to get to your seat in a movie and licking up your popcorn with your tongue while you walk to the theater.

After his set mc chris always hangs out by his merch booth to meet the fans. We decided to go out and wait in line with everyone else just to say hi and shake his hand. When we got up to him he told us he liked our costumes and that Casey Jones was a favorite character of his. I didn't expect him to remember me since it had been so long and he meets a billion people every night so I just mentioned the guitar I made him a few years back and told him it had been a while. Whether he remembered us before I don't know, but he remembered us then for sure. He just smiled and said, "Man, you guys have been here for a lot of different parts of my life." That is definitely true because at last count we've been to 8 or 9 shows in the last 6 years or so. I told him as long as he keeps going we'll keep showing up. I dropped some money in his CF bucket and we left.

Before we headed back to the car we decided to go down 6th Street and see if there was any place open to grab something to eat so we wouldn't have to settle for Whataburger again. Luckily Hoek's Death Metal Pizza was still open and we got a couple of slices. Walking around the mostly dead downtown we got some pretty enthusiastic responses to our costumes. While we were ordering pizza we were approached by a very excited tattoo artist who I guess was a big fan of Casey Jones and was also a little drunk. We walked back to the car and the perfect ridiculousness of the situation hit me. I turned to my wife and said, "We're walking through the city dressed as two characters from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at night eating pizza. How awesome is that?" It was a pretty spectacular end to the night.

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I'm sorry this post turned into such a long story, but a lot happened in a short amount of time and I wanted to remember as much as I could. As usual I'll leave you with a couple of songs. Enjoy.

Day 89: Andrew Jackson Jihad Turtles

So, Andrew Jackson Jihad.

I've mentioned them on this blog, and if you follow me on Twitter you've maybe seen me tweet at them. AJJ is made up of Sean Bonnette on guitar and vocals and Ben Gallaty on stand up bass and backing vocals. They are unique in their musicality and no one in music today can turn a phrase quite like Sean Bonnette. Their songs are usually very catching with a thin layer of comedy on top of generally more serious content. Don't misunderstand, they aren't all depressing downers. Some of them are serious feel-good songs, but some of them are about being pissed off and hating everyone else and their stupid shit. That's one of the things I love about their song writing. They write songs like human emotions; sometimes you're on top of the world, sometimes you want to burn it down.

One of my favorite examples is the contrast between their songs "People" and "People II: The Reckoning" from the album People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World. "People II" comes first and is a pretty angry song about how nothing is real and everyone is terrible deep down inside, but the record ends on a very upbeat note with "People" which is about how even though people are pretty shitty we're all still awesome because we're all in this life together and we should recognize that. Since hearing these songs and understanding their meanings I often think of my moods in terms of which song I'm feeling at the moment. Yesterday, getting ready for the show I was definitely more "People" than "People II: The Reckoning." It makes sense to me, I just don't generally say it out loud because most people wouldn't get the reference.

You know what? I think we should make this a thing. Everyone listen to those songs and then start using that phrase to describe your mood. It'll catch on in no time. Trust me.

Now that my unnecessary review of a band I obviously love is over with let's start at the beginning, shall we?

My wife and I used to live in Phoenix, AZ; her family still does. A couple years ago her brother, Alex, started talking to us about a local band, Andrew Jackson Jihad. He's usually got good taste in music, but not everything resonates with us like it does with him so we remembered the name because it's a pretty ridiculous name, but I kind of pushed them to the back of my mind. Then, while we were visiting during Christmas he told us he thought we would really like them and he burned us a few of their albums to listen to on our drive. It can sometimes be an awkward situation when someone forces new music on you that they're really into. There's a certain expectation to like it or you could be inadvertently insulting the other person's taste in music. Once we actually started listening to it, though, it was like a light bulb clicked on. Why hadn't we listened to them before?

Fast forward 7 months or so and Alex decides to fly home with us after a family vacation to Pennsylvania so he could spend some time in Austin. It just so happened that AJJ was playing a show while he was in town. My wife and I were excited to see them for the first time. The crowd was impressive and they did not disappoint. We talked with them for a few minutes after the show and they were both very nice guys. We bought a 7" called Pug Life which one of them (Sean probably) drew square frame glasses on the dog's face and a cigar in his mouth

Fast forward again to a couple of months ago when I posted my "Leonardo: Principito" drawing on here. The picture was heavily inspired by their song "Principito" that I had stuck in my head all day. When I posted the link to Twitter I tagged AJJ in it like I always do when my post relates to someone that I follow just in case that person sees it and gets a kick out of it. A little while later I saw that AJJ retweeted it and then a friend texted me to tell me that they were following me on Twitter. That's a whole lot of really nerdy social networking speak that basically amounts to the fact that they obviously liked my post and it made me feel awesome.

So, now that we're all caught up to the present I can talk about the show last night. **Spoiler Alert** It was awesome.

We got to the show a little while after doors opened. We went around to the back where AJJ had their merch set up and made introductions. I know I just said that they retweeted my blog and followed me on Twitter afterwards, but I refuse to believe anyone but some of my friends and family read it so I had a little "holy shit" moment when Sean mentioned it by name. This is not my lively-hood and I would hardly call it art, but it's a little creative outlet for me and it's fun so it's cool to hear that people enjoy it.

We talked to the guys for a little bit about living in AZ and driving across Texas. My wife gave them some delicious pumpkin cookies she made (remember what I said in previous posts about bringing gifts to people?) They enjoyed a few while we browsed their wares. I ended up buying a shirt and People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World on vinyl because Knife Man was sold out. My wife got a bright pink koozie with the words "Skull fuck your thirst!" on the front with a picture of a penis in the mouth of a skull and the words "Andrew Fucking Jackson Jihad" on the back with a bunch of motocross riders doing tricks. It's the most awesome koozie we own.

After we bought our stuff we went inside to watch Into It. Over It which was actually just one guy, Evan Weiss. I was really impressed with his set. He reminded me a lot of acoustic Starting Line which is a big compliment from me because I love their acoustic EP. In all seriousness if I had been more talented or maybe more serious when I was in a band in Phoenix Into It. Over It is what my music would have aspired to sound like. We talked to him for a little while after his set and I bought his newest release, Proper, on vinyl.

We went back in for AJJ's set. It was amazing despite some minor technical sound issues in the beginning. They played a wide range of stuff and ended with "Principito" which is one of my favorites. I don't have much more to say about the actual show other than I loved it and my voice is pretty scratchy from singing along for the whole set. My wife says the next show we go to we should bring kazoos. That may not be a bad idea.

After their set we went back outside and talked to the band some more and made some new friends. While we were talking to Ben we met a guy named John. I may have misheard, but I believe John knew the band because he played some shows with them in New Mexico. He told us he just moved to Austin about 10 months ago. Normally I'm wary of strangers trying to talk to me at shows because 9 out of 10 times they're either too drunk or too high to string a sentence together, but John was actually pretty awesome and he was extremely articulate. I wish I could communicate an idea half as well as he did, but even when I write I tend to ramble and by the time I stop writing I've often landed way off the original point I was trying to make. We talked to him for a good part of the rest of the night about music, living in Austin and our mutual love of the Alamo Drafthouse. He also said some very nice things about us as a couple which is always nice to hear. John was a cool guy and hopefully we'll see him around again sometime.

At one point Ben asked me, "So, wait, are you the turtle guy?" I just laughed and said, yeah I guess I am the turtle guy. "Oh, OK. I knew the turtle guy was coming, and that he was really excited for the show, I just didn't make the connection that you were him." Then I had to explain to Evan (Into It. Over It) what he meant by turtle guy and Ben told me that Sean is a fan of the blog. I told him that's weird to me and he just said, "Maybe it's not weird, maybe it's perfect." I didn't talk to Sean about the blog so I'll choose to take that with a grain of salt and believe that he was a fan of my Principito post and that he maybe occasionally looks at other posts when he sees them on Twitter. Whatever the truth is that's pretty cool that it made an impression.

We missed the last band, which kind of sucks because I think we would have liked them, but we got started talking to AJJ, Evan and John and just kind of kept talking. They were good conversations so I won't beat myself up too much about it.

So, that was our awesome night at the Andrew Jackson Jihad show that I turned into a long and probably very boring story. I hope you enjoyed it. As I usually do when writing a post about a band I'll leave you with some music, but I'll also leave you with something extra.

I'm not much for quoting other people. I don't keep mantras and clever lines in my head to remind me of things or to impress other people, but I do have two Andrew Jackson Jihad lyrics that come into my head unannounced all the time that remind me to relax and not take everything so seriously. The first is from a song called "Evil."

I Will always appreciate bad days like this,
Because they grant me a point of reference in regards to my happiness.

Number two is the chorus from the song "Rejoice."

Rejoice despite the fact this world will hurt you.
And rejoice despite the fact this world will kill you.
And rejoice despite the fact this world will tear you to shreds.
Rejoice because you're trying your best.

Now rejoice and enjoy a couple more songs.