Sometimes your evening just plays out like a game of MadLibs. When getting hit by a car doesn’t even qualify as one of the two or three most interesting parts of your night, you know you’ve had a bizarre one.
Started out normally enough. I was headed to the Roxy to interview Shannon Crawford about his new band Monster in the Machine before his gig, and Charles Stepczyk from Insomnia Radio was meeting me there to help with the interview. So I walked over to the Roxy, realized I was there too early, and wandered into the bar next door which happened to be the Rainbow (yes it was that Rainbow, but I didn’t know that until someone in the bar pointed it out to me).
Shannon meets up with us, we find a quiet corner of the artist ready room upstairs at the Roxy, and we do the interview. Went well, got some great candid answers from Shannon (including a line about Lindsay Lohan that makes the interview worth listening to all by itself), wrapped up and realized we had a good hour to kill before the performances started. And that’s where the fun started.
Charles and I walk over to a pizza joint, and on the way back to the Roxy some car is backing out of the alleyway as slow as it can go, and hits me. As I’m going through that moment of “am I really being run over by car in slow motion? Holy crap, I’m actually being run over by a car in slow motion!” so I take a few steps back and manage to not get run over, laughingly realizing that I’m maybe the only person who’s ever been hit by a car and only been hit on their wrist. At this point Charles decides to one-up me by sharing that while he was driving to the Roxy someone threw an encyclopedia-sized book at his car, presumably trying to make it go through his window. No word on whether the guy who tried to run me over in slow motion was the same guy who tried to force Charles to read a book.
We get into the Roxy and after MITM finishes their set we realize that Pete Yorn is standing there in the audience. I sort of know Pete from when we did the phone interview about a year ago, and also from when we chatted briefly backstage at Lollapalooza this summer, so I wasn’t gonna not say hello, but I also wasn’t to chat him up since he was clearly there as a fan of one of the bands, not to be mugged by folks. So I say my hello, walk away, get a drink, come back to the audience area, and midway through the next band’s set I realize I’ve been unintentionally standing next to Pete the whole time. So now I’m trying not to be a fanboy (of all the musicians I’ve ever interviewed, he might be my favorite of the bunch) by staring at him, and yet here I am standing next to Pete Yorn for an extended period of time, and that’s just weird.
Then I realize that there are some folks who won’t believe he was really there, so I decide to get a picture as proof. I wasn’t going to ask him to pose for one (see above fanboy reference), so in an all-time lame move I compromised by pulling out my iPhone and taking a picture of the back of his head while he wasn’t looking. Now this is a guy who I’ve had on my show before, I’ve chatted with him in person before, we’ve had our picture taken together before, I’ve introduced him to friends before, and here I am taking a picture of the back of the poor guy’s head and hoping he won’t notice. Because I’m just that much of an idiot.
Around this time some girl in the audience comes up to Charles and me, claiming to be the sister of the guy who’s currently on stage singing, but later in the conversation admits she’s not really his sister. I was tempted to inform her that she was standing back to back with Pete Yorn and she didn’t even know it, but hadn’t I already abused the poor guy enough without unleashing someone’s pretend sister on him?
Eventually Pete’s gone, the pretend sister is gone, the bands are done doing their thing, and it’s time for Charles and I to be gone. So Charles offers to give me a ride home, and on the way we stop for a red light and down the crosswalk comes a man on stilts wearing a creepy-looking cat mask. That’s not a metaphor or code for something. He was walking on stilts, he had a mask of a cat on his face, and it was creepy. This I managed to get a picture of, because at that point even I wasn’t sure it was really happening and I figured I’d want to be able to confirm it to myself later.
I don’t know if the utter strangeness of the evening will come across in print the way it did in real life, but I’ve gotta tell you, living in Los Angeles is fodder for one MadLibs moment after another. While I was standing next to Pete Yorn I received an email asking me if I wanted to write something for a book, at which point I had to suppress the urge to lean over and say “Hey Pete, can you believe they want me to be in a book?” because, as I said earlier, I’m just that much of an idiot. And this town suits me.
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