It was a bit of a game of chance, as Joe B's NYC show at BB King's was sold out, but it took us about 10 minutes in front of the venue to score single tickets from two different individuals. We set up shop at the ledge about a booth to the right of where the quartet took in Chuck Berry, so that led to some fond memories.
Joe B is a guitarist/sponge. You can tell that everything he's heard has been ingested and is literally waiting there for future use. Hearing that he has previously discreetly played a riff from "Edge of Darkness," a BBC series Eric Clapton provided music for, only heightens the impression. And leaves you wondering what riffs like that you're missing out on just because you don't know someone else's catalog to their deepest depths.
He tore the place down with slow blues ... with fast blues, just every kind of blues blues. A great time and obviously someone it would be easy to see over and over and over again.
Going to JB/BB's on Friday meant missing out on a couple of things I probably would have otherwise been doing that day -- 1. a Devils game (Didn't miss anything there. They played like crap and got shellacked) and 2. opening night of the WFMU Record Fair (a convention I had been waiting to go to since about February).
We did the latter on Saturday. And wow, it's pretty daunting to walk into that room. Even charting a course and following it, there's no way you can see everything. The overwhelming feeling dissipated when 'Ark made his trademark vinyl jokes. (Insert eye-rolling maneuver here).
But I fared pretty well, picking up some Hendrix and Fleetwood Mac bootlegs. The thing I was looking for the most -- Peter Green playing with Otis Spann in Chicago -- I wound up getting for free as part of a Hendrix deal. Best of all was a table that changed from 25 percent off to 40 percent off as we started scouring their collections (pictured here). Lots of cool additions to my collection were made there (including a Chuck Berry picture disc). And with a human shopping cart at my beck and call, we worked our way through the huge rooms in about four hours.
Oh, almost forgot! The buy of the day had to be a DVD of the Lindsey Buckingham Nokia show we were at not a week before. When we got home and watched it, we cracked up when we saw 1. us high-10ing at the left side of the stage and 2. the sound of the ol' three-dollar harmonica tooting away during a break in the encore. I swear we could tell when LB was looking over at us too, just from his eye angle.
Another successful weekend in the life of Park!
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