I have no idea what is even happening anymore but Henry and I are not acting our ages at all and it’s so much fun and exciting and also extremely exhausting and painful, LOL. We still haven’t recovered from Riot Fest (all day on Monday I was at the “Sat down to pee at a rest stop and couldn’t get back up” levels of post-festival pain and it’s only gotten moderately better from there) but then last night we had tickets to The Black Queen show at SideQuest which, Henry has to admit this was a great consolation, at least was in our own goddamn city for once. A nice, breezy 15 minute drive to Lawrenceville, woo! It’s been so long since I have been to this venue that it was something completely different then (Cattivo) so I was glad to be back after so many years. It was probably 2016 or 2017 since I was last there?? And I think I was by myself too.

Doors were supposed to open at 7PM but on the way there we drove past a sidewalk sign for the venue that said doors were at 8PM. We parked across from the venue and figured we would just walk up to Butler St. and get a drink to kill time but then, you know me, I started panicking so Henry called and whoever answered inside the venue said doors were at 7PM! So, we walked around for a few minutes and went back closer to 7PM where we almost immediately found out that doors were indeed at 8PM.

There were three women already lined up and I recognized one of them from the Cleveland show in May! Turns out they’ve all become friends from going to so many shows and even have become friends with the band. (I won’t call them groupies because I think that has such a bad connotation and these women did not seem to have any type of agenda, you know?) One of them was from NY and she had The Black Queen friendship bracelets that she was passing out!! I have never been given a freebie at a non-Kpop event so I was eating this up. Henry passed on one when she held out the bag to him, like he didn’t even consider that he could take one and give it to me!? THEY WERE ALL DIFFERENT.

I ended up talking to Cleveland Show girl for nearly the whole hour we waited outside – her name is Sam, she’s from DC, and she travels for these alone because her husband isn’t into it. I love that for her. It was fun getting to talk to someone who also travels for shows (though I don’t and have never followed a band around on their whole tour, if I could do so with BIGBANG, you know that I would!) and she was very cool when I told her that I also like Kpop—you never know, this particular music scene that The Black Queen is a part of attracts a lot of Tool and NIN fans and from my experience you can run into some music snobbery there but Sam was not like that at all. She was so funny, too! Just a very dry sense of humor which I like.

There was also a dicey situation where a big truck was coming down the street – mind you, SideQuest is on a residential road with street parking – and a car was coming up and refused to back down so there was a moment of time where we all stood watching and holding our breath while Sam freaked out about the truck potentially taking off the side of her car that was parked right across from us. Henry relished the chance to dive into Professional Driver Mode and assured Sam that there was enough room on the truck’s right side and it should be fine. Thankfully, it was, otherwise I’d have been embarrassed at Henry’s false declarations!

At one point, we were all sharing our dead pet memorial tattoos with each other, it shouldn’t have been as funny as it was but we were all cracking up at how morbid we were being and I just realized that it might have been the first time I showed someone my Bambi tattoo without getting the swollen throat of sorrow. <3

Then! Jim from Eide’s came out! He was the promotor for this show and came out to assess the line situation and thank everyone for coming out. It was really awesome of him. And then he goes, “Hey, I know you!” and said it was nice to see me :) YOU CAN’T SEE ME BUT I AM BIG SMILING RIGHT NOW.

Finally, after doors got pushed back another 5 minutes, we got to inside around 8:10ish. The time actually kind of went quickly though since people actually talked to us, like Sam’s friend Sarah who reminded me of, and this will mean nothing to anyone reading this, a combination of my retired work friend Debby and my other friend Evonne whom I have not talked to in over 5 years and perhaps this is my sign to reach out??

Inside wall of SideQuest. Also want to remember that the guy checking IDs was super nice and was wearing a TMNT shirt.  You HAVE to have a good personality if you’re wearing a TMNT shirt!! And his looked like it had been THROUGH it.

The bartenders were also super nice. SideQuest was pretty much what I remembered Cativo to be like, I think? I thought perhaps there was a downstairs, I really can picture myself walking down steps there but maybe I’m dreaming as usual.

I had some Sierra Nevada IPA, I don’t know.

Line-standing friends! The one on the left is the one who was passing out the bracelets, I really wish I could remember her name. And then Sam and Sarah. This was before the show started and Steve, the Black Queen guitarist but also super cool human, was setting up. I told Henry that after being at the barricade for TBQ in Cleveland, I was good with standing further back at this show. I had so many nerves at that Cleveland show, you have no idea, it was almost hard for me to enjoy myself (plus I accidentally ended up RIGHT in front of Greg for that whole show and I was slowly dying).

But then Sarah saw me and motioned me over to stand in the space next to her. Of course my forever desperation to make friends won over and I obediently filled the space she saved for me. I could Henry cracking up behind me and then he walked over to say, “OK I thought you weren’t going to stand in front this time!” UGH.

But then I got to take these cool pictures though! OK let’s keep this rolling before I lose steam. The first band was aLoner which is ANOTHER Danny Lohner project, co-founded with vocalist and artist Hannah Vandermolen. How does he find the time?! They JUST debuted live earlier this month so I feel privileged to have caught them so early on. For their live sets on this tour, they have Chris Pennie of TBQ on drums. It was ethereal. I loved it A LOT. It’s a slippery slope between TBQ and goth and I’m not hating on that even a LITTLE. I love that goth music has started to creep back into my life this year. Next we had DILDOX, bringing their electro industrial party to the stage (and also, off!). They were SO GOOD and dancey but in the good, goth way.

Bro, why’d they kind of remind me of Borbo & Prism a little bit. God, I loved them. 10/10 would see again. Sarah and I chatted with the guitarist briefly and OK it was mostly Sarah with me just nodding and agreeing with everything and making me signature, “you were so good!” face.

Henry was still standing behind me for the first two bands but then I lost him during TBQ, because he went to the bathroom and then couldn’t get back to me but by that point I was too enthralled with watching Steve soundcheck for the whole band, who was missing.

It was after 10PM by now and this one total drunk Yinzer was getting PISSED. He kept screaming, “LET’S GO” in his grating Yinzer accent. His sister was with him and she was just as hammered (ask me again why I prefer Kpop concerts to this shit). He kept yelling, “GREG, YOU MOTHERFUCKER, YOU LITTLE BITCH, LET’S GO” like that’s going to make Greg, wherever he was, in some makeshift SideQuest greenroom, sit up and go, “Oh no, that entitled Steelers fan is getting impatient, let me hurry up.” If it were me, I’d be like, “Oh in that case, I think now is a great time to sit on the toilet and play some games on my phone.”

THEN!! Sarah turned around and in her best Ms.Rachel tone asked him to please lower his voice, that it was fine if he wanted to yell like that after each song ended, but that right then he was really hurting her head. “Yeah….I do have a very booming voice,” he said sadly, literally like a cartoon bully coming around, it was insane to watch her de-escalate this in a way that didn’t agitate him or make him want to instigate. So  then his sister started slurring questions to both of us about how many times we’ve seen TBQ (Sarah I’m pretty sure wins the Super Fan award) and/or Better Lovers. But then the brother got distracted again and started screaming things like, “AND HE’S UP THERE NOT DOING JACK SHIT!!!” about Steve, who was at one point OFF THE STAGE and standing behind the drunk guy, talking to someone, and the drunk guy kept yelling directly at him!! Sarah goes, “Um, you know he’s the guitarist, right?” and drunk guy whose eyes were mere glassy slits at this point, slurred, “No he ain’t!” “Yes, he is. That’s Steve, he’s the guitarist!” and then Steve turned around like, “Yes, it me” and drunk guy was suddenly Mr. Manners, shaking his hand and gushing. So ridiculous.

I was actually so embarrassed to be a local at this point. Like, please TBQ, this douche does not represent all of us. OK but finally the rest of the band came out, still without Greg though, and Steve was screaming, LET’S GO GREG!!!! I mean, when we were standing outside, one of the women did say that we were running on Greg’s time now. When you’re Greg Puciato, you can get away with making the crowd wait a little bit though, I’m just saying. The drunk guy called him an unsung hero and that was the only  time I will ever admit agreeing with a blitzed Yinzer who fell down flat on his back at one point during their set, by the way. I didn’t see it but I felt the sudden burst of wind as his body passed mine, and I don’t know if it was his hand or the person behind me reaching out to stop him, but something grazed my side. Henry got to see it and said he actually has no idea how he managed to fall the way that he did. Drunk people always find a way.

Um OK but THE BLACK QUEEN. I can’t believe I got to see them again so soon after my first time! Blessed that Pittsburgh made it onto their second leg because this show was even better than my first one. For starters, I was more relaxed now that those initial jitters were gone. I’m super sensitive about live music, maybe you understand or perhaps you think I’m sitting alone on some new area of the spectrum, but I get super emotional and sometimes I wish I could just be the type of person who goes to a concert and doesn’t care one way or the other but also I never ever ever want to grow out of this because even when it hurts, I love to go through the complete cycle of emotions at these shows.

But also, not just Greg but the whole band seemed so much more personable and chill! At the CLE show, no one talked. They came out, plowed through the Fever Daydream album, said thank you and left. there was no banter, no crowd engagement. Something definitely seemed off because I had seen videos from other shows and it was not like that at all. In fact, I want to say that they didn’t even post about the Cleveland show on their Instagram afterward, like what even….I want to know what was going on!

Meanwhile, drunk guy kept aggressively holding his arms over Sam’s head, trying to get Greg to slap his hands. Greg steady ignored him and that finally a few songs in, came over and punched both of his hands hard and I was dying.  But dude kept yelling shit like, “Yeah, Greg you bitch, let’s go!” and like….who does that??? Aside from drunk, attention-starved Yinzers?! I think this is the same guy I overheard talking earlier about how he went to see Dillinger Escape Plan at Mr. Small’s years ago and Greg jumped off the stage onto his head, so maybe there is some internalized beef there, who knows, but after the show, he had his picture taken with Greg. It was all very strange. Boys are all very strange.

Here are some clips from last night, audio is shit since I was practically on the stage:

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But yeah, as the caption says, HENRY BOUGHT HIMSELF A HAT! I was actually floored. Henry never buys merch for himself. Henry has not one single band tee. But now he has G-Dragon, BIGBANG, and The Black Queen hats!

Oh, can I just casually tell you one more thing? After the show, I was still standing at the stage and Greg came over to say hi to Sam and Sarah and to ask them what other shows they were going to on this tour. I was just like, “OK, I’m going to leave, I’m not about this life,” but then he came over to me too, took my hand and said, “Thanks for coming out, I appreciate you.”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

I don’t even think I said real words, just uttered some type of demure mush and then turned around to find Henry.

“I saw,” he said with a LAUGH HELLO THIS IS NO LAUGHING MATTER.

Anyway, there are no videos online from our show, but this one from the first leg of their tour last spring is so good so just watch it, thank you.

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