I went to the Polka Dot Cadaver show at Sonar on Saturday. For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically Dog Fashion Disco but with different songs. (That’s the abridged explanation anyway). They were awesome. I really liked the new PDC songs and enjoyed the fact that they played some DFD songs as well.
But the question that kept going through my head was “Who the hell are all these people?”
For the first hour I was there, I felt like I was seeing this band in another city. I did not see a single person I knew except for the band members. It wasn’t that I just didn’t know anyone there, but I had never seen any of them in my life. And the place was packed – not like sardines or anything, but there were still a good amount of people there. It wasn’t like I got there at particularly early, either. I arrived at around 10:30.
I know a lot of people came in from out of town, but I can’t imagine that everyone did. This is why it sometimes irks me when people call Baltimore “Smalltimore”. It’s not that the name is totally untrue, but it’s that the people who usually call it that are people who hang out at the same two bars, yet wonder why they never meet anyone new. Yes, it’s small compared to a lot of other major cities. But the reason a lot of folks keep running into the same people all the time is because they just hang out in the same crowd. Even CMJ magazine did a review of Baltimore about 8 or 9 years ago saying that this town is big, but that it’s made up of a bunch of different rock scenes instead of one big one. I mean, there are a bunch of instances where I hung out at a different club or another part of town and I met a bunch of people who were into similar things as me and were around my age, but I had never seen them before in my life.
But I figured that based on the people I used to see at the DFD shows, I would know a lot more people. Oh well.
Anyway, I finally saw Michelle an hour later and then I spotted Chris. Later, I saw Todd Oliver (not PDC Todd but a different Todd) and his girlfriend. Then two people from the Fletcher’s scene were there.