At Ray’s Golden Lion in Richland on this special night, I got the chance to hear my cell phone ring blast through a full PA system.

Since first hearing the Crystals Skulls’ “Airport Motels,” I have been using this song as the ringtone in my piece of crap Motorola v551 because of its energetic opening guitar riff. (If you’re interested, the song is featured in mathcaddy radio session #15.)

Crystal Skulls guitarist Ryan Philips, a fellow Tri-Citizen, is one heck of a player. If you’ve heard the album (unique, jazzy light rock with lounge singer vocals) you’ll certainly agree that Ryan has some skill. In person, at two feet away, it’s far more impressive.

The show had some interesting moments: I was distracted for a moment as the band started to play “Airport Motels” and I thought that my cell phone really was going off. And when the band invited anyone interested to come up on stage and dance with the band, a very crazy guy did just that. He was quite entertaining, especially with his Hammer pants. He had some quite serious funk in his groove.

Another item of interest from the show was the drummer. The band duplicated their album’s jazz-rock tight-but-relaxed kind of sound perfectly, mostly with his help. His rhythm was perfect and after about 10 minutes, my cousin Steve pointed out why: he was wearing headphones and listening to an iPod, which he cued up at the start of each song.

It seems he was playing the band’s album on his iPod in order to keep perfect rhythm. Talking with him after the show, he confirmed Steve’s guess.

Steve wrote quite a lot more about more the show here. (In a more timely fashion, of course.)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 31st, 2005 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Music, Shows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.