With the Chesapeake's Air in Our Lungs

A report from the front lines of LET'S GO! Festival 🤘🏽🎸🍧⛴

Today, in a jarring case of Art ramifying Life, actual motherfucker Skybar showed up at our gig.

RECORD SCRATCH SOUND — RADIO DJ SAYS “r-r-REWIND” — YOUR VISION BECOMES PAINFULLY SCRAMBLED AS THE LAST 170 HOURS OF YOUR LIFE GET COMPRESSED AND CHOPPED INTO THREE SECONDS OF WOBBLY IMAGERY———>

So, remember last week? We did a Stoop Chat Back Yard Chat during which we responded to several of ChatGPT’s most pressing questions — the stuff that was keeping Chat up at night. One thing Chat breathlessly wondered while tearing its hair out was “what mascot we indend[ed] to deploy on our summer tour” (I’m paraphrasing). And we made up — on the spot, like latter day improv geniuses (I can’t think of even one good improv comedian, or I’d have used a name there) — we made up Skybar, a flying fox who would zip through the air above festival-goers’ heads, and periodically land on a barricade or something, and spray flavored rum onto people’s faces (up to them if they want to open their mouths).

Well, today we played the first show of our summer tour trail, at a lovely festival held on the Arundel Fair Grounds near Baltimore, MD, and Skybar showed up. Art ramified life, guys, as noted in paragraph 1. Now this was courtesy of several fans who I don’t want to name, in case they’re in Witness Protection, but who should absolutely out themselves in the comments if they’re not averse to recognition. They did a great thing for the festival, for everyone who attended, since Skybar — no surprise here — detonated a bomb of invisible psychic energy that was almost as good as the flavored rum I guess he couldn’t get a permit for today.

Here are a couple pics of Skybar helping us pull our shit together before the set — again, immensely helpful, probably couldn’t have done it without him; can only imagine what the show might have been like if he’d been able to get clearance from the appropriate governing body to fly around shooting rum out of his ass (the FAA? The FDA? The ATF??).

Anyway, as mentioned, the set went down A STORM — read about it in tomorrow’s international newspapers — and while my dearest wish was to roll straight into a whole evening of Let’s Go! Fest entertainment, starring the likes of 311 and Lit and Cold War Kids, instead I went to the airport! 😧 This was not on a whim: I had a flight to catch, and it was using one of the airport’s runways to take off.

Point is, it’s up to Keith to tell you the rest of the tale. Last I saw him, I was handing him the keys to my car so he and Carne could drive it back to New York tomorrow, and I had to hold one of his two frosés so that he could accept the key, put it in his pocket, and then hastily, with suspicion in his heart, reclaim his frosé. Over to Keith…

[At this point Chris threw the band’s satellite-connected typewriter onto a mud bank, where, later in the evening, Keith found it and continued this post (we had carefully chosen the mud bank as a dead drop)]

Gang, Chris was not joking about the frosé. The frosé was a defining — maybe fundamental — part of this festival for me. I met the guy who supplied the frosé for Let’s Go! and I was almost as star-struck as when, six hours later, I stood next to Nick Hexum, the singer of 311 and my nominee for the next Captain America (sorry, Hawkman).  Here he is just lounging, backstage:

But, yeah, I drank a shitload of frosé. I had a frosé with Chris (not my co-author), who runs Let’s Go! Festival. I had another frosé with the caprese sandwich that was lunch at Let’s Go! Festival. I had a frosé in the VIP section of Let’s Go! Festival with the guy who supplied the frosé. I had like four other frosés that I forgot to take a photo of for Slow Descent Into Radness because of all of the frosé I drank, earlier.

Anyway, it’s sad to say that Chris (co-author) missed a hell of a day’s hang. In two decades of playing festivals, I honestly can’t say that we’ve ever played an event with such a uniformly collegial staff — everywhere we went, people were telling us how much they loved our set and then handing us frosé. We met a guy who called himself Boardwalk Jesus and was wearing the best drug rug we’ve ever seen. We met a person wearing demon contact lenses who invited us to visit Annapolis’s most immersive and emotionally-scarring haunted house. We met a member of Silversun Pickups who, it turns out, owned the very 1960s Dodge Rambler that facilitates Chris and Michael Tapper’s escape at the end of the “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt” video:

We saw many spectacular things. We saw the car that I will buy once the check for the festival clears…

We saw whatever this unicorn thing is, which is what Carne will buy once the check from the festival clears…

And we saw 311, who really are honestly my favorite band in the world to see at a festival. Who’s your favorite band? I’ve definitely played a festival with them. 311 are better. Go see 311. They are so good live that they feel compelled to hug one another between songs, because they can’t fucking believe how good that last thing they did was.

They are right to do so.