Sleepy Kitty – 3rd ROAD BLOG from their “Summer Tour 2013”

The two-piece indie rock band, Sleepy Kitty, is currently on their 2013 summer tour that will be hitting many U.S. cities. While they’re on this tour, they will be writing an exclusive blog for us. You can check out their third and final entry, after the break.

Alex Tebeleff / Sleepy Kitty / Johnny Fantastic
The Dunes, Washington DC

We’ve been hearing about this place The Dunes from friends in the area for a while now. It sounds like just our kind of place: equal parts music venue and art space. It’s in a part of the city we haven’t been to yet, and we find ourselves winding through some of the old, narrow DC side streets where the buildings are stacked hard upon each other and curve with the curb.

Inside, it’s just like we hoped—second floor looking over the street, big wooden floors, a floor-level stage, and a good guy named Tony working the sound and explaining that normally there’s artwork on every wall, we just happened to catch them between shows. As we finish soundchecking, Johnny Fantastic shows up…with an overspilling armful of stuffed animals. Party alert!

As they soundcheck, we grab dinner next door, do a quick interview with a fellow named Bryce from the blog Brightest Young Things who asks a lot of good questions, and get ourselves upstairs. The crowd is gathering and includes a lot of familiar faces, including the guys from Imperial China (RIP, unfortunately) and some favorite St. Louis ex-pats. Alex Tepeleff gets rippin, and his confidence is just the thing for the room—everybody works their way forward and gets comfortable. His band, Paperhaus, we’re familiar with, but we’ve never seen his solo version, so this is a pleasure.

The stage is a wild nest of cables and instruments; Johnny Fantastic’s gear is impressively wired to itself. We find our spots, Tony gives the thumbs up, and pretty much the second we start playing, the crowd starts dancing. This is what we love! The crowd gets closer and dancier for “Seventeen,” and it feels like an honest party, Tuesday night be damned. There’s a foxy girl dancing near the drums, smiling with her eyes closed, and she’s a reminder that this is why I started playing the drums in the first place!

We change gears a little when Paige moves over to play keys on “What Are You Gonna Do When You Find Bigfoot?,” which is a lyrics-centered song that ends in a swamp as Paige makes bigfoot calls into the distance. I’m shaking my little cicada-like shakers, she’s running a stick across the ridged back of a wooden frog for the occasional ribbit, and she howls a plaintive “WO-ooh-WO-ooh-WO-ooh!” Normally she loops this sound after a couple passes, then adds her impression of a mourning dove over the top as it all fades out. Tonight, though, as I shake and she calls, the crowd calls back: “WO-ooh-WO-ooh-WO-ooh!”

We’ve never heard this before! Every time Paige calls, the crowd responds, and each time the new voices get caught up in the loop to make more bigfoots among us. Pretty soon it’s a cacophony and we end as a whole swamp together. It’s pretty much the best moment a band can have, when everyone’s helping make the song with you.

There’s more—at one point my tambourine and shakers get lifted and distributed among the dancers, which is great—and it ends all sweaty and happy, with various strangers and friends helping pull our gear from the stage. Meanwhile, Johnny Fantastic is distributing giant stuffed animals liberally across the stage. Their band is made up of members of Paperhaus and of Br’er, a band Paige and I saw play an excellent set with Tuneyards in St. Louis a few years ago. They get right to it with a series of epic story-songs in which the stuffed animals play prominent roles. They build to a climax, and then bring the whole crowd to the floor, sitting down, with Johnny the singer out among us gently bringing the story to a close.

Post-show, we start getting the goods on where to eat good vegetarian breakfast in the morning (Everlasting Life is the consensus), and who to talk to the next time we’re out. Alex offers his place—also known as Paperhaus—for us to crash, and we meet him over there to discover that it’s essentially a venue cloaked as an apartment on a handsome street. The foxy dancer from before turns out to be Alex’s roommate Jess, and she introduces us to the two sleek black cats of the house before we all turn lights out to get a few hours’ rest. DC, we’ll be back for you soon!

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