Bloody Fun

I've been meaning to post this for days, but I've been busy at work and too lazy at home...I went to The Skylark in West Seattle/Delridge on Halloween to check out some friends that were playing there that night, (the details of which are down below in my Halloween post). Basically, what they booked was a bunch of different bands to do short sets of covers from famous bands. The results, weren't very surprising; most of the sets were of the wedding band variety or steep descents into Karaoke-ville. They were entertaining, but there wasn't much effort from any of the musicians to put their own stamp on the songs. Only the girls from Danielli/H is for Hellgate/The Hungry Pines bothered to funk up some classic Nirvana songs and make them more contemporary and modern; they did a great job, (and obviously I'm biased since I'm very good friends with Danielli, but still, these girls rocked it out...).

But the biggest crowd pleasers were the dudes from "We Wrote The Book On Connectors" who went to town covering The Beastie Boys, complete with multiple costume changes, robots, backup dancers, props and a lot of general mayhem...the audience went nuts and people began crowd surfing, which may or may not have been partially pre-aranged, and towards the end of their last song, co-lead singer Travis Young decided to join in the fun and leapt from the stage and onto the crowd. Only problem, the crowd was insanely drunk and despite Young's diminutive stature, no one was apparently able to support him and he fell and landed on someone's glass or beer bottle, thereby inflicting a long and deep gash into his thigh. Young quickly leapt back up on stage, finished the song and began removing the pants to his costume to get a better look at his injury. I was standing with my friend Kerri behind the stage area and we were fortunate enough to be close enough to the stage to witness a foot long gush of blood shoot out of Young's leg after he took his pants off. Kerri and I simultaneously looked at each other in horror and said, "That's fucking bad...that dude needs to get to the ER immediately". Meanwhile the band is tearing down their equipment and props and someone hands Kerri some costumes to take downstairs to the musician's holding area and eventually Young gets off stage with his guitar and limps downstairs. No one in the band seems that alarmed at their bandmate's injury, so I made a point to tell the bass player, (or maybe it was another guitarist) that they need to get their buddy to the hospital as soon as possible but he just kinda shrugged and mumbled at me as he walked by. Fortunately, Kerri was downstairs when Young showed up and Young's girlfriend as well, and Kerri was able to play grown up and convince them to go to the ER and to apply some pressure to the wound to staunch the bleeding. It also helped that Young and his girlfriend realized that a huge gash in your leg and blood soaked clothes are not a good sign of long term physical being, so they quickly left for the hospital. I'm not exactly in the loop when it comes to long music news and gossip, so I didn't hear how it had all turned out, but I finally found out on Monday that they made it in time and he was ok, so that's good.

It was a fun and exciting evening, but I have to say that The Skylark needs to get their act together. The place was packed and it had to be over their occupancy limits; if there had been a fire or an earthquake or anything that would have caused a stamped to the exits, a lot of people would have been killed. And, they also didn't appear to have any security, just a woman at the door checking I.D. As a result, the crowd got way too rowdy and The Skylark is NOT the ideal location for crowd surfing; people were throwing stuff around and spraying each other with beer and at times, it seemed like it was verging on the edge of getting past the point of no return. The bar staff seemed overwhelmed and a little freaked out and no one seemed to be in charge. Hopefully, the management will have the sense to hire some security for big events like Halloween and New Years. I think they were just lucky this time that something really awful didn't happen.

The picture of Travis Young is from the We Wrote The Book on Connectors website: http://www.wewrotethebookonconnectors.com/bio.htm