Saturday, April 2, 2011

Sweater Set this Wednesday/A Blast from the Past

This Wednesday April 6th I'll be going to hear my good friends The Sweater Set play at the Strathmore Mansion at 7:30 pm. They'll be doing it April 27th too, and I plan on going to both - if you're reading this, and you're in DC, I highly recommend going. The Sweater Set is comprised of two of my very close friends, Maureen Andary and Sara Curtin. Both of them make beautiful music individually and together, and they are some of the best of what the DC music scene has to offer.

Before she was in The Sweater Set, Sara used to occasionally sing with The Midnight Special, the blues band comprised of myself, Andrew Klein, Zach Lupetin, and a rotating cast of drummers that defined my existence from about 2004-2007, when I was in college at the University of Michigan. We even did a few gigs with Sara as front woman, calling ourselves Sara Curtin and The Royal Family (because my last name is Prince, get it?), playing primarily blues standards and the like.

The best recorded example of this is this recording of "Ball and Chain" (by Big Mama Thorton, done here like Janis Joplin), from April 14th, 2007, recorded at the final Midnight Special show, at 701 Catherine St in Ann Arbor, our friend's basement

Sara Curtin The Midnight Special Ball and Chain 4.14.07 by Gary Prince

Sara Curtin - Vocals
Gary Prince - Lead Guitar
Andrew Klein, Tomek Miernowski - Rhythm Guitars
Zach Lupetin - Bass
Theo Katzman - Drums
Recorded by Dave Schall

Sara had no idea we were being recorded.

This is how I spent my early twenties, playing in our friend's unfinished basements, to crowds of our friends and peers, for zero money, for as long as we felt like playing, and doing whatever we felt like playing, usually at an obscene volume. Using broken equipment, getting the police called on us for being too damn loud, and doing it all two or three times a weekend were our M.O. I would trade those experiences for nothing.

I'm playing my Strat, and using the whammy bar a lot. If it sounds a little janky it's because the drive channel on my amp broke during our second song, and I wound up borrowing Theo's overdrive pedal and cranking the shit out of it to compensate.

Hope to see you Wednesday

3 comments:

  1. Dude... I am honored to be a part of that "rotating cast of drummers"... especially since I think I had the honor of "most broken equipment", not counting Andrew's guitar strings.

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  2. D Hoffman! You are the quintessential Midnight Special drummer. The once and future king of the kit held together by paper clips. Who posed for our album art wearing only a snare drum and a smile. Weird times those were...

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  3. That recording is pretty amazing.

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