Showdown Kids at the Haymarket Lounge

The vastly talented Scott Metzger has put together a band (Showdown Kids) with his close friend Katie Jacoby and accomplice Simon Kafka, and we were pleased to see they were playing the Haymarket Lounge at City Winery, Boston on July 23rd.  This was their first gig outside of NYC!  I guess you gotta hit the big time sooner or later.

Met Sarah and Dave downtown again, right at 5:00.  We strolled on down to our new North End restaurant, Beerworks on Canal (it was Taco Tuesday!) on another non-busy, beautiful mid-Summer day.  We stretched out dinner a bit, but still ended up getting over to the Haymarket Lounge (the smaller performing space in City Winery) at about 6:30, an hour before the concert.

The thing was that this was general admission, we really prize good seats, we'd never been in that room before, and we didn't know how soon we needed to get there in order to procure them.  In any event, there were only two other tables occupied when we arrived and so we were seated in a fine place and ended up having a fine time nursing their few beers and talking for an hour before the set.  Dave's friend Nate showed up too.  This was a stealth concert for [almost] Dead fans, and the room ended up with a pretty good crowd of devotees.

But the thing was, we'd seen Scott with JRAD and with Wolf! and this wasn't going to be like that, this was gypsy jazz and all expectations were off the table.  The three of them sat in chairs close together, Katie with a slinky dress and a traditional fiddle, Scott with a big booming hollow-body guitar with a pickup, and Simon with a small walnut guitar.  The sound was just perfect and I loved that room, though with a larger crowd it might not have worked that well.

Ridiculously long fingers on Scott and Katie!  Scott was playing a huge guitar but it could have been twice as big with his elastic fingers.  And Katie made that fiddle's fret board look like a cribbage board.  She's going on tour with The Who for her next gig.

They opened with a surprise: Tumbling Tumbleweeds!  They did a few jazz standards and mixed it up a lot with a Phish song, some traditional folk songs, and a couple of originals.  These were all instrumentals; Scott picked up a mike and tried to address the "crowd" at one point.  But the mike wasn't on and he could speak in a regular voice and be heard well by all of us in that intimate room.

They seemed to be having a good time and to be pleased to have such a good reception in their first gig.  We all loved it and could have stayed there all night.  But they finished up by 9:00 (Scott said, "That's all the songs we know!"), and we got back up the hill and then home in good time.