Reviews by...
Scotto
We finished the round & made the train no sweat. I started to get that feeling like "oh, shit what did I sign up for here" when my buddy found some Giants fans to harass on the train. I had on an iggles ball cap which also seemed to alienate. "Total stranger interaction" seemed to be the emerging theme for this trip. We traversed the city from Penn Station, no problem, but walking one block in the wrong direction cost us about a mile so we had no time to eat anything but distilled grains.
Rush, rush, rush to get there on time and at NBC Studio, waiting, waiting, waiting. To kill the time, my buddy played with the teen pages in charge and a security guard named Fidel Castro Jr. who was successful for keeping most people in line against the wall. Except for some Dean Moriarty-type dude passing mints to 50+ neighbors on line that he'd 20 minutes earlier asked,"ou here to see cracker?", "you heard of crakcer", "here to see cracker", "whos the lead singer". Strangely only about half of the survey respondents replied in the affirmative.
One problem with the NBC studio set-up is there is nothing & nowhere to eat, drink, or smoke. And once you're in you're not goin' anywhere. That place was a crawl with these 50 strangers and Dean. After two loops through a maze of rooms, dozens of teen pages, and sequential waiting areas, we were finally seated in the studio. There were alot less than the 150 people in the audience as requested. But NBC met the balance with more people working that studio than there were panhandlers working the street!
Carson's opening interview segment was probably a boor for anyone who wasn't into sports. Some guy whose background is stand-up comedy made it to the continuous-loop highlight program called Sports Center. We disagreed with all this guys' answer's to Carson's quiz "sport or not a sport". Bowling and billiards are not a sport but figure skating and golf are? This guy ain't Cracker material. We managed to make it all the way through this endurance feat to finally see Cracker's two songs, shine and teen angst. The band was on, everybody was loose and laying it down, but oh what a tease! You'll be hearing alot of "wooohooos" from me and Dean Moriarty.
After the show, we filed out past the band's dressing room and Johhny was talking out front. My buddy repeatedly and good naturedly quizzedJonny about the band's party plans afterwards. You could see the gears spinning while he was grinning but reason finally took hold and he correctly judged us as trouble. So after the pages finally herded us to and squeezed us onto the last elevator, we tried to finally get some beer in NBC's Rainbow room. But for not, denied again, my buddy had on white tennis shoes. But black tennis shoes are ok and he cries discrimination, this was one of the top near moments of our meeting the nbc decision makers.
Luckily on our trek to the show we saw and remebered BB Kings place and found it on the way home, they were about done the first set of the WC Handy Alls Stars concert with Luke Robillard, Charley Mustlewhite, John Hammond, we ate first and were successful at using our receipt as our pass to get in to see the second set. This slow white blues show really satisfied after the cracker appetizer.
We eventually maxed out the evening's opportunities, but its true when they say, "sweetheart it takes time".
Scotto