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Snapshots: Black Dog Block Party 2007 Rained Out!
Sunday promised to be an incredible day, with the first real block party in Lowertown for many years. The Black Dog Cafe & Wine Bar was to be the host to several bands that are breaking out from the local music scene, including Brother Ali and Black Blondie. The mother of all tempests was busy gathering as a cold front moved in, and the event, in which I was helping with stage and sound setup, was ultimately rained out. All photos taken with a Motorola Razr V3xx cameraphone.
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Rained out! The end of the day, 6:30PM, just before the stage was taken down. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that "The storm gained steam when a cold front that moved into the area combined with the hot, sticky weather of the past couple of days. It resulted in dark, foreboding midafternoon skies and temperatures that dropped from 93 degrees to 70 in two hours, according to readings at the National Weather Service's Chanhassen office. Across the metro, numerous trees were knocked down, several homes were hit by lightning, and there were reports of golf ball-size hail in Eagan and St. Paul." The Saint Paul Pioneer Press reported that "Meanwhile, downed branches and lightning strikes knocked out power to nearly 13,000 homes throughout the metro by 5 p.m. Xcel Energy said that number was down to 8,714 just before 7 p.m."
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At 8:19 AM, while waiting for the various portatoilets, beer trucks, and staging/PA to arrive, a deer suddenly bolted around the corner from the Farmers Market area towards me. It had been hit by a car, most likely on the highway, and its jaw was injured. It raced past me, cutting into a car park where it wiped out on the hoods of two cars before getting up, running through the Tilsner garden, wiping out again, and disappearing. The inset photo shows a somewhat fuzzy picture of the fleeing deer behind a pedestrian.
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The hood of a car the deer wiped out on. I was wondering how the owner would react, returning later to see their shiny white car covered in mysterious blood, but the rain took care of that later. As this is hunting season, and deer are plentiful, it seems likely that Animal Control would shoot the wounded deer rather than subdue it and take it to the vet.
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The fugly poster for the event, clearly not designed by a thousand monkeys with Adobe Photoshop, but possibly by one or two using Microsoft Paint.
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Mikey (center), the stage manager, pauses to check the canvas roof during the stage setup period. Local volunteers Sam and Jessie are on either side of him. At this point in the day, the temperatures were in the 90s and there was not a cloud in the sky. How quickly things changed was spectacular.
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Members of the stage and sound crew, together with local volunteers, lift part of the staging during the setup phase.
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Local Tilsner Artists' Cooperative residents Lisa and Texas Teena take a break on the Black Dog patio to look at some flowers Teena bought at the Saint Paul Farmers Market, which runs across the street from the cafe every Saturday and Sunday in the summer months.
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Lisa's jewelery.
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DJ Del6 loads a mike stand with a mike during the on-stage setup period.
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The first band plays to a crowd in the rain. It was not the rain but the lightning and the metal stage that halted the performances. TV news reported that there were close to 800 lightening strikes in Hennipen County (Minneapolis area) in just one hour, and the number in Ramsey County (Saint Paul area) was no doubt comparable. But ultimately, the soaked electrics and rolling storm fronts that kept coming relentlessly throughout the day necessitated moving the event to Station 4, a crappy venue (terminally unimaginative management, rude staff, shitty music, ugly interior, and complete lack of food) but a suddenly convenient indoor location two blocks away. The rain and wind was very powerful at certain points during the day, the biggest storm of the summer.
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Local artists break out the hula hoops when rain stopped play. An extremely relieved Star Tribune photographer sent to cover the washed-out event, Marlin Levison, lept around like a rabbit snapping photos of the hula hoopers. He got a great one, found below.
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The photo that made it into the Star Tribune. Caption: "Jessie Falon of Minneapolis, front, did her best to keep her Hula-Hoop in motion Sunday at the Black Dog Block Party in downtown St. Paul. The live band performance was cut back because of thunderstorms that moved through the area, but games in the rain such as the Hula-Hoop contest went on as scheduled." L-R: Alley Kat, Jessie, Ashley and Texas Teena.
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For the last couple of weeks, I've been listing to the Quannum Spectrum CD that Del6 loaned me. It's all about Track 3, "Storm Warning", by Latyrx (Lateef the Truth Speaker, Lyrics Born, DJ Shadow, and Blackalicious). The lyrics were perfect for today:
Riveting whirlwinds
Gripping the world
Women and children -- wait a minute -- we're all in jeopardy!
Check it:
It began at sea
Three cross currents concurrently
Started turning
Creating the mother of all tempests to be
Excess precipitation and ionization
The cloud cover hovered round 2000 feet
Listening swiftly to meet the ocean's wave peak
Along the jet stream was a fog
Sparking, rolling, and pouring needles of rain
Thundering like God's bowling lane..."
Related Links
Download the MP3 of "Storm Warning"
Black Dog Coffee and Wine Bar on MySpace.
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