yeehaw junction. where nothing is. and everything is.

Well, I just went to Tampa and Came The Freak On. Whew!

The executive summary: Giants still walk the fucking earth.

Bound, Jarvic 7 and Baby Robots were mesmerizing. Dumbwaiters and Home rocked the house, hard. (Is it possible for human hands to move so fast, so blur-inducingly, for so long as the 'waiters did in their final song? And whatever happened to the plowing-new-fields-of-subtlety version of Home that I last saw opening for Yo La Tengo in '96? Did my knees used to ache like this after pogoing?) The Errant Strike (whose name I misheard as "Eric's Tripe," thinking it was some sort of self-disparaging Sonic Youth parody) rustled sonic curtains you could get lost in for days. The Unrequited Loves continued Mike O'Neill's tradition of serving up heartache, cold, in that slightly-darker-than-early-R.E.M. fashion he's turned into an art form.

The rest of the bands offered various flavors of amazingness, including -- most relevantly to this blog's purposes, perhaps -- Leels' use of the clarinet talents of that notable non-Caulfield-esque Pee Shy exile, Jenny J. Morrison.

Jenny didn't divebomb w/ the woodwind quite as much as she was wont to do with the 'Shy, and there wasn't an accordion in sight, but she brought so much of her old vibe to the task (constantly interrupting her playing to sing, laugh, add to the general atmosphere of artistic merriment) that it was like '98 never vanished. (Hey, anyone know if anything's gonna happen with that Lewinsky thing?) If nothing else, her performance was a wonderful argument for suburban momhood as a method of keeping the artistic instincts sharpened.

Nor did Jenny play anything she's written, so it wasn't an occasion for comparing notes on what she and Cindy have been up to during their musical schism. Then again, the Caulfield Sisters show no signs of venturing south of the Mason-Dixon line anytime soon (or, hell, even the Rudy-Hillary line), so it would have been a one-sided comparison anyway.

In any case, this wasn't the nostalgia trip I thought it might turn out to be, despite the Brigadoon-like convergence of the old Ybor scene that turned the New World Brewery, just for one night, into a reassembled version of the Blue Chair or Stone Lounge circa 1994 -- complete with Jenny hosting "After the Polka" on Saturday afternoon(!!!!). Nobody's been trapped in amber for the past decade. These folks have all kept growing; Home, if anything, seemed sharper and more energetic than I remember them being. (A highlight, for me, was hearing "Underwater" and "Forgiveness," two songs that had been on auto-repeat in my brain since '97 but which I had not, until last night, heard live. "Reprint Day" was great, as always, despite the avalanche of sound that buried the vocals beyond recovery.)

I arrived just in time to hear the Unrequited Loves start up a little after 7 (bonus points to Stefanie Kalem for disconnecting their power supply while writhing on the floor with her camera). The next seven hours just flew. The evening was a much-needed sonic power-vac'ing of mental cobwebs, and (or so I thought after my sixth Bass) a highpoint of this so far lame-ass 21st century. Well worth a 416-mile round trip and 2.5 hours sleeping in my car on the way back at the Fort Drum Service Plaza on Florida's Turnpike. Though that persistent ringing in my ear is a bit worrisome.

I also grabbed me a bunch of Dumbwaiters, Bound, Baby Robots, Unrequited Loves and other assorted musical artifacts for further exploration. So I'm happily rocking along to "The Blowup" as I blog away.

Now, for tonight's agenda: Go Eagles!


P.S. OK, one nagging thought: How is it possible that Baby Robots played for years 30 minutes from my house and yet I was so embarrassingly unfamiliar with them? Have I been snoozing that much?