How our gig went. A new song.

Well, our gig went very well.

We showed up at the Penguin. No one seemed to be there. We tried the front door. Locked. I asked Horace, "Did you schedule the gig?" and Horace said, "No." Leo said, "We never schedule gigs, remember? We're post-schedule." "Right," I said.

We drove Horace's Buick around to the back and tried that door. It was open. We brought our instruments in, and the mics and the PA and all that, and started setting up. As we were doing that, three teenage girls walked up to the front of the building and knocked on the window.

"Who are you?" one of them said.

"We're the Gardens," I said. "We're about to play a show. Would you like to watch it?"

"Yeah," they said. We opened the door for them and they came in. There was a teenage boy who walked in too. I hadn't seen him.

"Um, I work here," the girl said.

"Are you closed?" I said.

"I thought so," she said.

"Nobody ever plays here," the boy said. "This is, like, a place to get ice cream. And hamburgers."

"We're going to play here," Leo said. He looked meaningfully at the four kids. They looked back.

"We're all celibate," Horace said.

"Weird," said one of the girls.

"Well, are we ready?" I asked my brothers. They said, "Yes," and I said, "Then let's rock," and we did. We played all the songs on I Will Tear Down My Barns, and the new one I wrote, which is called One Wild Night in America. Our audience was pretty into it by then. One of them shouted, "Yeah Gardens," when we finished that song.

Some of the lyrics in One Wild Night in America are sloppy. But I think the spirit is fitting for our quest of apocalypse-prefiguring. You can listen for yourself. It's on the new site in our web empire. Here it is.

New song and a show

Hi everyone.

We're getting excited about our first show of the New Year, which is tomorrow in Manitowoc, Wisconsin at the Penguin, which I understand is a fast food place/ice cream store. We're driving out there tonight.

I wrote a new song which we have not learned yet, but we will tomorrow before the show and we'll post a live version of it somewhere, maybe MySpace. It involves this combination organ-accordion which I have been learning to play.

Today is our birthday, so we'll all be eating applesauce cake tonight. But who will make it?

We spent the last couple of nights walking around empty parking lots. There is something about them. The white lights flooding down on abandoned nothingness. Is it metaphysical, or does it just remind me of Back to the Future? Probably the latter. I always think someone should be skateboarding around in them:

Wheels grinding the tiny asphalt dust below. Something
in the mind and the heart, but hidden in the wide space.
Skaters like gods and ghosts. There's mist below these
lights as well. Good for the ghosts to move in and past.