Transplants to Seattle, at least normal transplants, (people who like conversation with humans and not conversation with mountain trails or, I’ll say it, bored baristas pointing at tip jars) get miserable quick. My wife and I moved to the Capitol Hill neighborhood in 2006, and we stayed there for a long, lonely year. It was at the end of this year that I finally wandered into the Comet Tavern, to buy advance tickets to see a friend Henrik Bjornsson and his band Singapore Sling, and to suddenly discover Seattle had a pulse.
The Comet I walked into in 2007 looked like a converted shed, and it smelled worse . . . like an earthy kind of cheese. The staff, who had the weary look of people accustomed to Faulknerian levels of disappointment, informed me I didn’t need tickets for a Comet show. I stuck around. Drank a beer. Read a book. Left because I had to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t have to go bad enough to use the one at the Comet.
Within two years, my band The Foghorns had made our big debut in Seattle, then played almost monthly gigs, almost exclusively at the Comet. We developed our new sounds, wrote songs about life around booze with the ultimate critics–the locals– judging us extremely vocally. I remember having a stiff show, and hearing, at the beginning of three songs “Hey waiter!!” Positive quotes are slightly less memorable. You’d get the weird quiet, or you’d get people singing along . . . even on new songs. (A key point: I’ve played more than two dozen gigs at the Comet in various bands, and I’ve never seen an ACTUAL CRITIC, that is, someone who writes about music for publication, at the Comet. Another key point: I’ve been fortunate enough to be featured as a pick in publications– but NEVER for a Comet show.)
For The Foghorns, we got our degrees from The Comet, playing constantly https://www.locksmithslocator.com/, moving from early weekday gigs to Thursdays to, finally, weekends. The experiences–nothing ever quite going right, but every gig reminding you WHY you place music. Through gigs at the Comet, we formed a fraternity of bands I admire: Jeremy Burk (now performing as Yucca Mountain), Lonesome Shack, Skeletons with Flesh on Them (now Roaming Herds of Buffalo), Casey Ruff, Corespondents, Friends and Family, Tango Alpha Tango . . . the list goes on. Continue reading →
The Foghorns – The Big F
Marc Laurick – tourbillons
Levi Fuller & the Library – Social Music EP