The Junk Palace. It was one of the most interesting days, with one of the most uninteresting mornings. We woke up in our $40 room at Motel 6, ate breakfast and drove to Houston. Incredible. But when we finally got to the club, we knew we were in for something. No Tsu Oh is as backwards of a place as the name suggests, and it took a little while to get our bearings. The building itself is one hundred and ten years old, four stories high and used to be a department store back in the sixties. It had laid dormant for years until about 6 years ago when the owner cashed in his 401k plan, picked it up for about twenty grand and converted it into a club/coffee house. I use the term "converted" loosely, considering that most of the items from the department store are still hanging out in the place, with about fifty years of dust collected on them. They've been rearranged a bit to create makeshift rooms, much like a child would rearrange the food on his plate if he weren't hungry, so what you end up with is three stories of old shoeboxes, dresses, paintings, lamps, tubs, books, camera cases, projectors, roller skates, rocking horses, carpets, drapes, mattresses, shelves, toilets, beer bottles, cigarette butts, dog shit, cobwebs, dust and roaches. It's the sort of place that makes you feel like you've been asleep for years and woke up on the tail end of an acid trip.

There wasn't any parking when we pulled up, so I hopped out to inquire about what was available. The girl behind the counter of the coffee bar didn't have any idea and wasn't sure where we should load in either, so she decided to phone the owner, Jim. She handed the phone to me and I said,
"Hey, Jim. How's it going? This is Judah from The Velvet Teen. I'm curious as to what the deal is for tonight."
"Well, what time is the show starting? Are you charging a cover?"
"Uh, well I was hoping you'd know that actually. We're a touring band, so a small cover charge would be nice, so we can at least get gas money to the next place"
"Right ..."
"Right, so where should we load in?"
"How about on the small stage downstairs ... you can load up to the actual stage area later."

We ended up loading our equipment onto the second floor, which isn't really an entire floor of the building but a halfway point between the first floor and the stage area ... and only the first flight of stairs. Logan, having an incredible magnetic pull towards weirdos, immediately thereafter fell into a conversation with a strange fellow named Larry who looked to me a bit like Woody Allen if Woody Allen were a hairy beast. I also use the term "conversation" loosely, as Logan rarely managed a word in edge-wise. Logan relayed to me how Larry schizophrenically jumped from talking about Santa Rosa and who that Saint was, to Berkeley and the doctor who changed his life by telling him that it's fine to be gay if you aren't breaking any laws, to the Vietnam war and something about Nixon getting into China, to the protesting Amish in Philadelphia who had played an important role in The Civil War, to the movie Witness and how Brad Renfrow was in other good movies like Huckleberry Finn with Jonathan Taylor Thomas and went on to list all of Harrison Ford's movie roles including each of the Indiana Jones episodes, to how a kid in High School who had tackled him in football and broken his knee and how you have to watch out for younger guys because they get really sensitive about that stuff, to Julius Caesar who had a trick knee and was killed by Brutus and Cassius and how Augustus Caesar went to avenge his death and how homosexuality was allowed in Greece, but in a controlled environment, and Shakespeare who apparently had written a play about it all called uh ... um ... what was it? Oh yeah, Julius Caesar. I had been sitting on the sidelines this whole time, and when I finally realized what was going on by the painfully anesthetized look on Logan's face, I grabbed a nearby lamp in the form of Venus de Milo and gave Larry one swift knock over the head with it. I could tell I had only sedated him, as even in his unconscious he kept mumbling something about the hierarchial caste system that Napoloean failed to create before joining the dancing nuns of postmodern Pakistan in 1327.

Having subdued the beast, we went to grab a bite to eat and in the course of that, ended up misplacing Logan's camera. Shit. We searched everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found. Most likely someone had nabbed it. Here we were in the most bizarre looking place of the whole tour, but with no camera. Oh yeah, and with no camera. SHIT!! Thankfully we were able to buy him a new one a couple days later.

When the time came to set up for the show, we found that there was only one available microphone. This presented an obvious problem. It didn't seem like many people were going to show up, so we opted to do something a bit out of the ordinary and turn everything WAY down. The human voice, and any acoustic instrument for that matter, can sound really amazing when untainted by amplification. I was eager for the opportunity. We played an opium set for the small crowd waiting in the wings of the large room, and I had a spiritual experience the entire time. I love singing in big rooms, and it's rare that we get to blend our voices in such an organic way ... it's unfortunate that Logan and Josh couldn't hear me as well as I could hear them since I was standing in front, but we created quite an intense focus there in that giant hall.

The Hurricane Lamps played a good set for what they do, but what they do isn't really my bag. Plus one of the guys was kind of a nob. They were nice enough guys, and I'm always happy to play with anyone, but I hate going through things like the following: earlier in the day when we had just finished loading our stuff up a flight of stairs, this guy comes up to me holding a small case and says,
"Oh, it looks like there isn't enough room for both of our bands' equipment. Maybe you should move your stuff up to the next floor since you're playing first. I don't want to be in your way."
"Well, we just finished putting everything here, I think we'll move it the rest of the way later. Why don't you guys put your stuff up there?"
"Well, then we'd still be in your way."
"It's a big room."
"Right ... it's a big ... room."

Jesus.

I really dug the guys from Fivehead though. Especially John, the main singer/guitarist. Super-cool guy, and I dug his voice. They had some good songs too, swinging a bit towards the alt-country side, which I really dig if it's done right and really can't stand if it isn't. Just like any genre of music I suppose. They did it really well though, and I enjoyed their set. John also invited us to stay at his house the next night if we needed a place to crash.

After we had played, Jim came up and let us know that he enjoyed the set and invited us and the other bands to play his private party that he was throwing for the local bartenders and waitresses, promising a turnout of about seventy or eighty people who tip well. The catch was that it'd be at 3 in the morning, except that today was daylight savings so oh wait, it'd be 4 in the morning. Logan understandably wanted to get some shut-eye, but I wasn't tired yet and figured "What the hell," so Josh and I stayed up for the next couple hours, drinking and talking to the speakeasy bartender on duty named Richie who also did ballet performances in the club and was an extremely nice fellow. He was the one who gave us the rundown on the place, and we learned that the elevator in the building was the third oldest in the country, although it was no longer operable.

The time eventually came to play, and Josh and I played another opium set, and dragged out a piano song which we haven't really worked into rotation yet, but is a song I really love to play. Our friend Davis from Fivehead sat in on the drums for a couple songs too, which was fun, but proved to me yet again that we have the best drummer in the world. The crowd seemed to enjoy it, but didn't tip quite as well as I would have hoped. We ended the set twelve dollars richer than before, but it didn't matter. I had a great time.

Jim was kind enough to let us stay the night on the third floor of the building, which served as his house, complete with living room, kitchen, bathroom, and a separate room that his five year old daughter (who was away for the night) ordinarily inhabited. How cool would it be to grow up in a place like that? Stimulation of the senses is one of the main ingredients for growing a healthy kid, and this place constitutes a near overload. Jim's daughter is going to grow up to be damn creative, with a lust for life, I'll tell you that.

Judah