Red Road Trip Redux
By Rachel "Official Groupie" Romond

Well, we've gone and done it again. We took off and hauled it from Los Angeles to the Bay Area for another dose of Red Elvises. Well, I took off because Ealasaid was already there. From July 27 through July 29, Fearless Leader Ealasaid Haas and I took a break from our normal lives (hers: teaching, mine: slacking) to celebrate, uh, the coming of August. Or the 2 1/2 month anniversary of our college graduation. Yeah, that's it! 'Cause we CAN!

I left Los Angeles at the amazing hour of 11:30 am, beating the record for Eagle Rock's Earliest Red Elvises Related Departure (3ERD), previously held by myself and Ealasaid on the first Red Road Trip. I arrived at her parents' house, where I was to crash that weekend, and took a nap until Ealasaid got back from work. As we drove to the Cactus Club in San Jose, we joked about what horrors would befall us when we got there (see the June Red Pages for a more detailed description of my least favorite Red Elvises venue). Would I inhale more of the secondhand skunkweed of death? Would Ealasaid die of thirst as she waited for a drink at the bar? Would our shoes stick to the floor so strongly that our feet would fall out while we danced? Would we have to go home barefoot? Would the club staff never be able to free our shoes from the floor and just leave them there for posterity?

As it turned out, this run at the Cactus Club wasn't nearly as unpleasant as our previous one. The place wasn't as crowded as the last time, and even though the opening band was a scary wall-o-sound punk outfit, the crowd was mellower. Avi, Zhenya, Igor, and Oleg were well-rested and greeted us with smiles and hugs. The only person who wasn't relaxed was Phelan because he had driven the crew up from LA, and he shared our poor opinion of the Cactus Club.

Though the club gave the band an hour-too-early call time ... again ... I don't remember a sound check, or any mention of one. The show would have benefited from one. I mean it. Really. The Red Elvises sounded like the same wall-o-sound as the opening band, but with a bit more rhythm. As the set started, the band was out of tune but apparently couldn't tell. They kept on playing. Ealasaid and I exchanged the knowing glance of classically trained music snobs who play the instruments that no one else will go near. "Maybe the monitors are too loud to hear?" "Hell-LO, Mr. Sound Man, the music is too loud for the band to hear." Some audience members just dealt with it and kept bouncing. Ealasaid and I cringed. Halfway through one song, Igor just put down his guitar and posed and spazzed. This did a bit to alleviate the sound level, but it was still way above Painful. At one point, something amazing happened. Every single member of the band asked the sound guy to turn the monitors down. I've never heard of that before, because usually band members want to hear more of themselves. But the really amazing thing was that when the sound guy turned down the level on the stage, it still hurt to listen to the music in the audience. I kept thinking of the scene in the movie This is Spinal Tap when the guitarist shows off his amp that goes up to 11.

I don't remember much about the actual songs, just that they were loud and sounded like mud. Just because the sound guy was deaf didn't mean that we had to go deaf too. Apparently the band agreed, because one of the members of the entourage confided, "this night never existed." At the end of the night, we were left wondering why the Cactus Club is so well-known. We preferred driving an hour more to go to a place where you didn't feel uncomfortable just standing on the floor. And last time I checked, the music isn't supposed to hurt.

The second day of the trip more than made up for the first. First off, there was no six-hour car trip. Second, Ealasaid had to work so I slept in and then drove to San Francisco to see some sights and get some exercise. As an aside: Every local I asked had said that Golden Gate Park was a great place to rollerblade, but not a single one made any mention of how the bike and skate paths seem to just disappear and suddenly become very steep hills. Oh, my poor arse!

Our pal Jennifer, Ealasaid's longtime friend, met us at Ealasaid's, and we drove into San Francisco again. Thanks to a phone call to the venue's hotline, the Justice League was very easy to find. Parking, however, proved to be more of a challenge. We were lucky enough to find a meter space just a couple blocks from the club. At 7:30 on a Friday night in San Francisco, fortune was shining upon us. We had an excellent (and very reasonably priced) dinner at a great cafe across the street from the Justice League (on Divisadero Street, between Hayes and Grove). The cafe looks like a coffee shop, but serves delicious and satisfying food in addition to any $2.50 cup of coffee you could want. I had salmon and angel hair, a beer and a huge rice krispy treat, and I got out for less than the cover charge at the Justice League. I can't remember the name of the place, but it's on the corner across the street from Justice League and you should go there if you're ever in the Haight-Ashbury or Hayes Valley neighborhoods of San Francisco. Between the beer, the velvet couch, the 3 inch rice krispy cube, and the cable radio, it took a lot of convincing to get me to leave. Jen and Ealasaid thought we should check out the opening band.

As it turned out, there was no opening band. But it was all good. The Justice League has a nice sound system and they were playing some decent house music. It's a standard ballroom setup with a large four-foot high stage at one end of a dance floor and cocktail tables on a raised section along either side of the room. The dance floor is concrete, and there's a large bar taking up the back half of it, but the place has a dark, warm ambiance and there's plenty of space to mill around. According to some regulars, the Justice League is more of a hip-hop club, but the crowd was pretty mixed. There were swingers, punks, college kids and blue-haired thirty-somethings, in addition to the sizable contingent of Red Elvis friends and fans.

The show was awesome. In contrast to the idiot at the Cactus Club, Justice League's sound girl had her stuff together and seemed to actually know what she was doing. You didn't have to know the songs beforehand to understand the words, and though The Fearsome Three usually wear earplugs, they were optional this time. Again, the band was in high spirits, even Phelan. Zhenya showed off the product of an afternoon shopping trip: an almost-too-small T-shirt bearing a caricature of a cob of corn and the slogan "Me so corny!" This shirt would later prove to be very fitting.

Even though you didn't have to know the words, many people did. A good number of Bay Area Redheads showed up, and the Red Elvises played to a sympathetic and energetic audience. The band absorbed the energy of the audience and bounced it right back. Zhenya, Igor, and Oleg all stood on the very edge of the stage between the monitor wedges and seemed to be having a little competition to see who could get the most girls screaming at his ankles. Oleg waggled his eyebrows, Igor shook his pelvis, and Zhenya shook his booty. Late in the second set, Zhenya dropped his pants and shook his underpants. Sadly, it only lasted one song. Avi took the cue and peeled down the trademark leather pants. Ah, but the effect was rather lost because he eventually had to sit back down behind the drums. Ever the coy one, Oleg let just a bit of boxer show. Not to be outdone, Zhenya eventually lost the pants altogether and played the rest of the show clad in shoes, socks, Me So Corny tee, underwear and guitar. So, boxers or briefs?

Requests were screamed out between every other song. There was even a rendition of the now-rare Suzanna. The Shake Your Pelvis Megamix (We Got the Groove, Techno Surfer, Everybody Disco) was another popular crowd-pumper. At the end, Igor jumped onto stage barefoot in the mirrorball suit for a high-kicking Closet Disco Dancer. Nearly everybody who wasn't a fan at the beginning of the show became one by the end. Big Fat Road Manager Mr. Fabulous was mobbed after the show and spent a long time selling CDs, T-shirts, bumper stickers, and souvenir condoms.

We even got a treat after the show. Outside the club, a small swing band was playing under the awning of an old movie theater next door. Their car was decorated like a spaceship, and very well done, too. It looked like the product of a merger between Industrial Light and Magic and Ford Motor Company. About twenty people braved the midnight mist to hang around and dance before the police came to break it up. These guys should have been the Red Elvises' opening act. They're called The Phenomenauts, and they're definitely worth looking up. A great end to a great day.

The Red Elvises' next show was at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, an hour from base camp. An hour in good traffic. Since the guys were playing at 12:30 in the afternoon and we would have to deal with traffic, parking, the trek from the parking lot to the festival and finding the stage, we got up at the evil hour of 8:30 am on a Saturday morning. Jennifer met Ealasaid and I and we left before 10 am, setting a new 3ERD record.

If one thing is as a premium at the Gilroy Garlic Festival, it is shade. When we arrived at the main amphitheater it was high noon and the only shade to be had was along the retaining walls at the sides and back of the bowl. So Ealasaid, Jen, her friend Yuri and I climbed the wall to the Oleg side of the stage and perched there for most of the first show. We had a great view of the front half of the amphitheater and of the few brave souls who came out from under the trees and umbrellas and hats to dance on the wide open section in front of the stage. At first the guys had to really coax people to come out and dance; for a while only one older couple was on the dance floor. But after a while more and more people emerged, and everyone was havin' a good ol' time. I ran off to take some pictures while there was still room in front of the stage for a clear shot. By the time I was done, the dance bug had hit my compadres up on the wall. Even though we had vowed not to give up our prime piece of real estate, we couldn't resist the urge. For every one person shaking it down in front, there were at least ten up in the stands grinning, bobbing their heads, tapping their feet and snapping their fingers. At the end of the show, Mr. Fabulous was the most popular person in the house.

Some words of advice: It is a good idea to kick back and indulge the senses every once in a while. It is not a good idea to do so until 4 am the night before you have to get up early and go somewhere. Between the length of the trip to Gilroy, the four hours of sleep we had had, the heat and dust at the Garlic Festival, and the $1.50 per liter of water that we bought once ours ran out, by 1 pm I was beginning to wish that certain Russians had not kept putting Heinekens in front of me the night before and that I had not taken them.

So The Fearsome Three set out to find a shady spot on the grass to eat and await the next appearance of the Red Elvises. The guys were to play next at a smaller gazebo stage, so we hung out there and listened to a funky zydeco band while we ate our garlic bread, garlic beef, garlic shrimp, and water, lots of water. The gazebo stage was a much more intimate setting. The stage was only a foot off the ground and dance area was smaller, but there was that much more interaction between the audience and the bands. The Red Elvises wore casual clothes to the Garlic Fest, and the lack of the leather pants and silk suits was far more suited to the smaller setting. Without all the shiny red and black and blue to draw your eye, the band members seemed sort of aloof and far away in the amphitheater, but they seemed alive and casual in the gazebo.

The atmosphere of the late-afternoon second show was more relaxed and seemed like less of a performance and more entertainment than the noon show. All ages of people were up in front dancing from the very start. Again, the crowd had all types: middle-aged couples, young couples, bikers, singles, foreign tourists, middle-schoolers hiding from parents, toddlers in the arms of their parents. Everyone was moving, whether they "knew" how to dance or not. Later on, the Garlic Princess and all the finalists showed up. The announcer introduced them, and they all got up on stage and danced. To Zhenya's obvious pleasure, the six pretty sixteen- to twenty-year-olds clustered around his microphone and sang backup for the last few songs of the show.

In the end, most everyone was happily tired. As the band packed up to head back to LA that night, they hung around to talk with friends and new fans. They signed CDs for those kids who hadn't already passed out from the excitement. As evening rolled in, smiling families wearily walked to their cars for the trip home. Another crowd of happy people, another day well done. Jennifer, Ealasaid, and I slowly made our way back to the parking lot, stopping here and there for food, ice cream, and last minute wine tasting. It was only Saturday, but our weekend had been full and fun. We couldn't wait for our next chance. Hopefully, they'll drive here next time!