Olympia

This blog is a bit out of sequence (Olympia happened before Vancouver), and I'm going to struggle to do justice to the Olympia experience. It was the most bizarre and interesting place so far. Olympia has a great music scene, but it is very much more DIY style than anywhere else. All the music venues pretty much closed down because of constant legal stuff - their excuses are about fire regulations or something. So all the good gigs are house shows in basements and stuff. So that's where we played. In Portland we found that everyone seems to have a huge basement with musical gear in it, so we thought maybe it'd be like that and it'd be cool. but we got to this basement venue in Olympia and it was tiny and bare concrete with rubbish everywhere and hardly any space. There was a dodgy PA system that we couldn't get to work. Everything including vocals were through little guitar amps. We thought it'd be the most terrible gig that you could imagine.

But as the place started to fill with local people who were all really nice and friendly and very much into music, the vibe was awesome and nice and stuff. The people were so into the music, they danced and sang along - it turned out to be by far the best gig yet. The place was packed and there was no border between stage and audience. The Hepburns were awesome with a great audience, and their 90 second songs turned into 4 minute songs, with the crowd of people making up new harmonies etc. Local band L.A.K.E. were awesome. Genious songs and beautiful coherent sound, interesting instruments, sensitive playing.
The people in Olympia were nice.
I have no photos unfortunately. A guy videoed the gig and said he'd put some bits on youtube, so i'll search for that later on, eh.