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TweeFest D.C. reviews

Half a tweefest is better than none...

From: Brian Gray (btg@bach.jhuapl.edu)

Yesterday was quite a blast...saw Pam's new combo, the Seashell Sea, whowere quite tasty. Saw Holiday twice, once dressed down, once dressed up.Shoestrings were gorgeous, All About Chad were huggable, and Syrup were,um, loud...they seemed to be exorcizing demons from their near death experience on the road down. Racecar played along to the sound of a PAgasping its last, but everyone seemed happy to hear us anyway. However,as we left, there was already 4 inches of snow on the ground. Now, as Iwake up this morning, there is more than a foot, and the winds are supposedto start whipping up any minute now. The predictions are for more than2 feet before it's done. Therefore, with heavy heart, I must announce:

Day 2 of the Tweefest is cancelled! Aaack!

People came all the way from California, Texas, Iowa, Michigan, New Hampshire, etc., and this is how we greet them? I only hope that Witch Hazel and Papas Fritas had the wisdom not to get onto those roads yesterday.

Snowfest 96

From: David Moon (LocalNetId00063@m-pulse.com)

i had to roll my lazy ass out of bed at noon on saturday to take thebus/metro down to go....... i had TONS of time to kill, seeing as how ididn't want to go all the way back home between shows....

i must've gone through the records and zines in that store a million times......yikes!..... pam's band- the seashell sea were quite lovely... and i wasreally impressed by holiday..... after these bands i had 4 hours tokill, during which i spent my time looking through the recordcollection....AGAIN....

then went off to indian for dinner, where i wastaunted by brian and crew, being a meager high school student....then asthe show drew near, this wacko guy came in with a video camera andwanted to tape the show, and brian told him no, but he had to make a bigdeal about it.... what with all the spare time i had, i was observingthis guy earlier in the day, and there was this old hippie guy checkingout some records.... and the camera guy kept preaching to him about god,and how he has had revelations, and how nobody, not even his family,could stop him, and how god created different languages so that peoplefrom different countries couldn't insult each other....... the hippieguy kept looking at me (you know, the look when somebody's telling youstuff you're not interested in.......) he was giving me the "is this guycrazy or what" look, and i enthusiastically glanced back.......i couldseriously ramble about this guy forever, but i'll try not to boreyou.....

so anyways, i started my adventures in the doorman businesswith rob and david (dunn), two really cool guys,... hell rob is thecoolest 38 year old i knwo.....we didn't have as many mishaps as ithought we would.... although here are some of 'em: this woman walkedthrough, and we were like, excuse me have you paid?... and she's like -ithink i'm on the guest list.. what's your name? stephanie... i don't seeyou..... oh, well my husband, brian gray, is in one of the bands...whoops..... then these two asian guys showed, and rob says somethinglike "that'll be five dollars.." oh, we're holiday.... whooops.... thenthis young looking girl walks right by me, and i tap her arm....."fivedollars please..." "oh, i play in this band syrup?..."..

whoops.........and then i had a solo escapade, where i was standing neara light switch, and i leaned up against a wall and turned the lights onin one of the rooms.... and brian had to come over and turn it off....whoops.....but other than that i think things turned out okay...

shoestrings came on and played a gorgeous quiet set..... then all aboutchad showed (i neglected to mention that they were another set of peoplewho we attempted to charge upon entrance....whooops....) all about chadwere kinda goofy, but good...... they played a cover of "i touchmyself"... i didn't recognize it till halfway through... but it waspretty funny.....

holiday - the second time- still impressed me....(note- i don't owntheir record, so it was all new to me)..........syrup were kinda loud,but i enjoyed most of their set..(vocals were kinda low though)."i'm notused to the living room atmosphere" seana described accurately........on their way to the fest, they apparently did a 360 on the road..... androb says that on the way to the simple machines fest a couple wintersago, they witnessed and accident in front of them, and it kinda shookthem.. so gee who knows... maybe dc is just bad luck forthem...........seana was taking off her jacket, and the rest of the bandstarted playing strip music.. i thought that was kinda funny......note:during both syrup and racecar, this guy arrived who was dancing around.... and i recognize this guy from the indie rock flea market and thechickfactor party ....um.. i guess that was kinda of irrelevent...

but anyways..... racecar, despite sound problems, were still reallygood!.......granted, they had to stop short and their sad song wasn't assad as it was supposed to be... but they were still probably highlightof the night..........(oh and i must note, that we were all obsessedwith the snow, making constant window and door checks on itsprogress)......

it took like an hour to get home, but that's okay......but then, the travellers are worse off, as they came from far, missed2nd day twee, and are probably stuck in dc right now........

tweefest 96

From: Stephen Wood (BMOEM112@sivm.si.edu)

Not much to add from what David Moon had to say... Saturday was truly gloriousbetween the in-store and the Go line up that night. Besides the swell lineup of bands it was great seeing old friends and meeting the many people thatI've only written to but had never met. I really missed the cancelled showssince there were many people I'd wanted to talk to but didn't have the time.These past two Tweefests have done so much to bring together this littlecommunity of ours - It was wonderful!

I'd like to thank Brian Gray for putting countless hours into makingall the events that didn't get buried under a foot plus of snow a realpleasure to attend, Pam B. for the fabulous (natch) cocktail party on Fridayand Maura S. for the tshirts, Rob and David for pulling door duty, allothers who worked to make the events happen and those who made the effort tomake it to D.C.!

more tweefest snow memories...

From: "Maura A. Smale" (mas5815@is2.NYU.EDU)

hi everyone,

not much to add to what's already been said i suppose. my friend peggy (now on the list! yay!) and i drove down friday night in the world's smallest rental car, tweeshirts fresh off the press, for what was a fantastic party at pam's...it was great to meet so many people from the list whom i hadn't met and see so many familiar listie faces again! pam had really cool coasters too! thanks so much to pam for hosting a great party and a great way to kick off the weekend!

saturday started off bright and fun...the instore was great with loads of people showing up to hear brilliant performances from the seashell sea and holiday. i restrained myself from buying anything at that point (with great difficulty, i might add) but had to break down later and buy the two holiday 7"s that were there 'cos i'd been looking for them for ages ("prostitues in town" is *finally* mine! yay!). dinnner and then...the show!!! a weird space but nice and fun and intimate in a den-ish sort of way...cool 70s wood panelling on the walls and everything! shoestrings started things off and were truly amazing...it was great to see them play live and hear their stuff that's not on the 7", and it retrospect i'm really glad that they were on the first night as it would've sucked for them to have come all the way out from michigan to be snowed out! holiday were, as always (since they're one of my favorite bands), wonderful wonderful wonderful, and they had this cool powder blue amp to boot! racecar went last (again!!! brian you are so selfless!!!) and were the perfect ending to a perfect day, despite p.a. failings. as always their great songs and jina's onstage antics kept me smiling 'til my face hurt!

so then the snow came, and everyone stayed indoors (i'd assume). peggy and i were at stephen's and his wife's apt. in arlington and we were visited that evening by alan and crew, who braved the snow for a little twee companionship. finally yesterday peggy and i had to dump the car and take amtrak back to nyc, and it was a *fun* (really!) 8 hour trip, the kind for which amtrak is duly famous!

now i'm home and sad and happy too, happy for the stuff that happened but missing the stuff that didn't. nyc is the same but whiter, and my apt. is twelve zillion degrees farenheit! the many many thanks that i have go to keith for the tweeshirt banana (see next message), peggy for being my traveling companion, pam for the par-tay, stephen and felicia for the shelter, food, coffee, weather channel, and good cheer, david d. and david m. and rob for doing the door, the nice nice people at go! for selling the t-shirts for me so i could roam around, all the bands who played and didn't play, all the tweepers who came (most of whom i wish i could have talked with more!) and finally EXTRA SPECIAL BIG BIG THANKS to brian, god of the tweefest, for all of his work in putting this together!!! you rule, dude!

maura out.

Re: Half a tweefest is better than none...

From: River (river@sas.upenn.edu)

Hi guys-

I'm finally home after being snowed in in remote Maryland for 3 days. This was with my parents, mind you, so you can imagine how my friend Tasha & I managed to shovel *the entire street* in order to get our car out onto the main road and then I-95 which was relatively clear from Baltimore to Philadelphia. Talk about Cabin Fever..

I had enticed Tasha to join me for the D.C. TweeFest and we did make it to the Saturday night show for All About Chad and Holiday. Very sad to have missed Shoestrings, but we got a bit muddied on the route through the District to Virginia. Luckily I found Rose at the show (good guess!) and she introduced me to Mario as well. The quickly-mounting snow had us worried, however, and my friends suggested we get out of Arlington while the getting was good. I dearly wished I could've talked more with Rose & Mario and met the rest of the pop kids who were sitting on the wall-to-wall rug in front of us, and figured Sunday night's show would offer that opportunity. I did search in vain for Stephen Wood who had so kindly given me a slight description of himself to work with. Next time!

Anyway, the brief evening was truly lovely - like a basement birthday party, I'd venture, with all your best friends around. I hope everyone who travelled there made it home safely and that we'll get the chance to meet again.

Now I think I'm ready for spring ;)

river.

tweefestdc...the saga continues

From: Peggy (Pegmrm@aol.com)

I'm maura's ever present tweefest dc sidekick peggy and a new member to thelist.i enjoyed meeting many of you in dc. Initially, i was worried i would bedeemed "musically challenged" by those i met, but enjoyed talking abouteverything from ivy to birdwatching to virus detection programs at pams. Iwas ecstatic to finally hear race car ( i had a failed attempt in Philly),and am always pleased to see holiday (feb 16 and counting at underacme foryou nyc fans!). I was crushed about sundays cancellation. i've been one ofmaura's nyc show (and drinking) buddies for the last fews years and have seenmany of what i've come to learn are deemed "twee" bands... hence the list(originally i was deceived to believe that maura had a sixth sense for thesethings).

Special thanks to stephan and felicia for putting up with incessant chatterabout the whether channel and pete & pete (i finally saw stu the bus driver!)and constant strategizing about amtrack versus avis... and special prize tothe alan party for braving the storm for a sunday night visit ( your poormom).

just a plug, the tweeshirts are just too cool not to have, even the lonelyone (any banana haters out there?), order now!

i look forward to all the new music recs and mail.

Peggy

the lost weekend, dc tweefest style

From: Pam Berry (pberry@washcp.com)

hi everyone, this one's rilly long, so delete it if you gotta...

pam here with some dc tweefest blizzard memories recounted in a sleepless haze, influenced by several days straight of staying up till at least 5am...it's wednesday and the last of the snowed-in refugees are leaving my house this morning after digging the rentacar out from under 2 feet of snow at 4am this morning. steve "this isn't so hard after all" thornton was about halfway into the dig out when keith "by the way this isn't our car" d'arcy arrived on the scene to lend a hand. a very selfish half of me hopes that the roads are still too bad and they'll have to turn back because it was so much fun having everyone around for so many days despite the fact that we had to miss the second day of music. that's sort of what happened with the blizzard, every day it was impossible to get out of the city because of the snow, so everyone put off leaving another day, and the holiday folks staying with megan and the ten people staying at my house (even though a lot of us crashed at megan's for several days) spent a good deal of every day and night together. it was not unlike a long slumber party, except there was never any night train or decks of cards with nekked guys on them at the slumber parties I used to go to.

friday night's cocktail bash was a great time, for me anyway. lotsa chatting and drinking was going on with people whose posts I'd read but I'd never met face to face or people I don't get to see often enough. four punchbowls of pink madonnas and half a keg went down for the count. I tried to do this martha stewart thing with a block of ice full of limes floating in the punchbowl that really turned out to be not very spectacular at all. on-and-on-and-on-on-and-on, the beats didn't stop till the break of dawn. or whatever. stephen wood's cake was out of sight! it was a blast overall.

the show saturday at go! was aces! those holiday guys were sweating bullets before the in-store, I saw them in the corner at the record store pooling their cash while we were setting up to play. then josh holiday came over, five o'clock shadow and broken ciggie hanging off his lip and he mumbled, "your set, make it bumpy, see, and mum's the word". not a very twee approach, but we figured why the hell not, they were kinda cute and from outta town. never let it be said that the seashell sea won't make a band we're playing with look good for beer money. okay, that's not how it happened, except for the bumpy set part, that really happened. suffice it to say the holiday set was absolutely sparkling, and if I thought it couldn't get any better I was so short-sighted, so proven wrong that evening, when their suit-wearing selves rocked everyone's worlds again. after the in-store we stopped back in dc to unload guitars and whatnot and transfer the keg over to dan and megan's house for an after-show gathering in their totally styling basement. at the time I had no idea it was supposed to snow but after we left I didn't see the inside of my own house again, mere blocks away, until last night.

we headed back to go! and as someone mentioned already, the space for the show was all about wall-to-wall carpet and wood paneling. I heard speculation that the place coulda been a dentist's office of yore except for the wacky carnival mirror on one wall. then megan told us that her family dentist had one of those in the office. shoestrings opened up the festivities with way too short of a set. mario sang, rose sang, (they were both trying to tell me that their voices were cracking, I'm telling you all that I heard was melodic and quite wonderful), there were keyboards and beautiful beautiful guitar involved, I never wanted it to end. this has nothing to do with the set that night (not much of this post does) but earlier in the day before we went to the in-store, the shoestrings were upstairs at my house practicing and you could hear it coming through the ceiling, and the beach boys were playing on the stereo in the living room but not very loud, and for the longest time I heard the heavenly mixing of the two without realizing the stereo was playing and thought, jesus, shoestrings are up there without a p.a. singing harmonies like there's 10 of them or something. keith heard it that way too, so I'm not crazy or anything. it was one of those mind-blowing misheard, synapses-misfiring kind of experiences. racecar were sports enough to play last again and did have some p.a. type problems, but it didn't impair their show at all! whatever they did on the last song was just right!

there was so much snow on the ground when we got out of the show that it was slow going home, but rob galgano and roy sullivan were game to throw their hands up in the air, shake their bodies like they just don't care all night at megan and dan's with the rest of us. okay, really there was not any dancing at all, just plenty of imbibement and I don't know if I've laughed so hard ever. not this year anyway. somewhat early on in the weekend it became apparent that josh, andrew and matt from holiday were more than down with black label and andrew had not a thing against lucky strikes, so there was a general feeling that we'd all get along just fine. sadly, calvin the drummer got separated from the caravan on the way over and headed back to virginia instead. every last malt liquor substance and anything disgusting resembling it was foraged and shared between matt snow and andrew, and the room was thick with comedy jokes from testcard. matt jacobsen downright refused to perform any magic tricks, nor would he tell us how they were done but I know for sure that he knows. around 7:30 am we all crashed, lots of us on futons in the same basement.

we lost rob and sully to the suburbs the next day (hope you guys made it home okay, for all we know you're frozen in the snow a la shining two blocks away from us) and the rest of us just pretty much stayed snowed in the house for the next four days, with nought but cheap beer and cigs for nourishment, reading all the er, highbrow literature to be had (for the articles of course) and drinking all day and night. it was hell. megan has some astrology-and-sex-in-your-life books that tell it like it is, and everyone signed the birthday book that takes your very day of birth and tells you so much truth that it's downright spooky. I used to call bullshit on astrology till I read about myself in the birthday book and it was so accurate I just about dropped the thing mid-read. since they all signed the book on their days I expect a full report from megan directly on everyone's signs, it's pretty great stuff. you, too, can know what makes the elusive steve thornton tick. and what pickup lines will work the best. it's in the book.

the next night and even the next were just as much and more of the same, the only downside to it all being the sad fact that megan and I, unlike those snoring around us, had to get up monday and tuesday morning after two hours of sleep and stumble to work still drunk through two feet of snow. when andrew and josh and the shoestrings all blew town tuesday the separation anxiety set in pretty hard. we're due for another foot of snow on friday and it will be quiet and beautiful out again but it just won't be the same as last weekend. it was the best time ever!

cheers, pam

Tweefestdc

From: Megan Searing (msearing@washcp.com)

TWEEFESTDC! Yeah, yeah, you're probably all sick of hearing about it, especially this late and especially if you live in another corner of the world. But, really, it was a tremendous event (thanks again to Brian Gray and everyone who organized/played/or didn't get to, etc.) and I have to encourage anyone who's even thinking about the as-yet-amorphous Chicago pop thingy to definitely try to make it when it does take shape. I know the bands/venues/dates haven't even been decided upon, but it's worth it to go if only to meet people from this list! Gatherings of really nice, intelligent folks don't happen just every day, you know!

And even if you don't get snowbound and spend 4 or 5 blissed out days with a bunch of people you just met but feel like you've known for years it'd still be worth it! My brother Dan and I thoroughly enjoyed hosting the Holiday guys, and everyone else (Steve T., Matt(hew), Keith, Brian, Heidi Anne-Noel, Maria, Tina and all of the Shoestrings) who came over and stayed up all night again and again and yet again! The basement bar certainly got a workout that week. Many of the highlights have already been hit by others, but I should add here that in addition to my naughty book collection, I do have a small astrological library and anyone with astrol-indiepop questions should send 'em my way! Yes, of course I'm serious! Pam, born on "The Day of the Curveballer" can attest.

my sadness (tweefest)

From: Gary Miller (miller@physics.unc.edu)

Hi everybody,

I've just made it back to a computer. I've read everyone's posts regarding the Tweefest, and I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in. I'm not going to give a break-down of all of the bands (although I will chime in that I though Holiday was WONDERFUL) since that's been done several times before.

I drove into town early on Saturday morning. I was staying with my girlfriend at her parents' house, so we had lunch with them and then went to the afternoon dealy at Go Compact Discs.

Funny story: we accidentally went to the OLD Go location and walked into some dude's apartment. He shouted "Get out of my fucking apartment you son of a bitch." How's that for a beginning of a twee weekend?

But it was great to meet the few of you whom I met (Brian, Pam, Tina, Rob G., Roy, Steven Wood, maybe more)

Needless to say I was very disappointed that the Sunday activities were cancelled. We (Gumption) were very much looking forward to playing in front of all the nice pop folks.

But, I hung out with my girlfriend's parents, and we all went sledding and ate a lot of food. Then we finally made it out of DC and had to dash back to Chapel Hill so we could fly to New Orleans for a big deal down there. I'm happy to say that show went off without a hitch, so at least it wasn't two cancellations.

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