My new roomie and I set off for Birmingham Alabama around 1 p.m. on Good Friday. The trip over wasn’t so bad and most definitely not as far as I am used to traveling for a good rock show. My buddy booked an AirBnB room for $35 in a very old house with about 3 floors. The host was quite nice but the place looked like something out of Silence of the Lambs. All we could do was giggle at the awkwardness until the Uber arrived. I’d never used Uber services before and neither had my roomie. We were both pleasantly surprised at the clean, nice vehicles and friendly drivers.
We made a stop at The Paramount barcade where we had some yummy “Hawaiian” hotdogs, “great balls of fire” cheese balls, and a couple beers. You know we had to battle each other on the arcade games. We have a history of battles within our hang out time that include Street Fighter, Ninja Turtles, Mortal Combat, and several other old school NES games. At the barcade, we chose Street Fighter 2, Terminator Salvation, and Skeeball.
Our next stop was the Zydeco. I won’t sugar coat what I think of this venue. COMPLETE SHIT. The ceiling was low and it was about 1,000 degrees on the inside. The views that I got were of the back of heads in front of me. This place was a complete joke. The “stage” wasn’t high enough for us to see any of the band members and the sound was awful. I’ll NEVER attend another show at this venue. I can’t believe they consider this a venue at all. It was run down and nasty, in my opinion.
Enough ranting for now…. The bands were actually quite good from what I could tell. The opener was an instrumental band called Infinity Shred that I enjoyed immensely. They were super melodic and deep. The next band up was Norma Jean. I’d seen them before in my home state; however, I didn’t recognize a single band member. That was a little disappointing but they played a good show. The Contortionist was my roomie’s pick for the night and he seemed to really enjoy them. Periphery killed it! I’d heard some of their songs on Octane and have to say that they didn’t disappoint. I took some Snapchat video that wasn’t worth posting.
Other than the shitty venue, my roomie and I had a great time. I slept pretty hard in the AirBnB bed. I hadn’t been getting quality sleep because I hurt my back and was experiencing a lot of pain for the last 2 weeks. It was nice to get a good night’s rest. We came back home early the next morning and I binged on 13 Reasons Why the rest of the Easter weekend. 🙂
The World of Rock 