Double Umphrey's

I've already unembarrassedly professed my love for Benehanas. I'm cool with it, even if y'all think it's nasty. Munch my balls, haters.

Well, Benehanas was a strong contributor to the ultimate Friday night. It started off by meeting Jeff and Natalee where dinner is the show. Soup, salad, shrimp, habatchi chicken, veggies, oh my. Fruity frozen drinks. The crazy chef guy made an egg dragon. It was wicked. It's also conveniently located two blocks away from the Fillmore, where Umphrey's Mcgee were starting a two night run.

So we wobbled over to the Fillmore after dinner. This has got to be the fullest I've ever been walking into a concert. We met up with Zaq, Ryan, and Lizzie. Umphrey's was raging. They are total music geeks - they love to play in weird time signatures and off kilter scales. They were bringing the heat. Good times all around. They brought up Keller Williams for an amusing vocal jam. We made it most of the way through the second set.

Ryan Kerrigan had been commissioned to do the poster - and it was fucking amazing. I think they might have sold them out, which it totally should have. Its gotta be one of my favorite posters he's ever done. That's saying something.

We woke up to a glorious Saturday. It was like 70 degrees out. We kicked it off with some tasty Dim Sum at the Seafood Express place right next to our apartment. Then a long walk around the park. There was a big memorial for James Kim over at the half shell - they had all sorts of crazy origami mounted everywhere and some DJs spinning. Everyone was out - it was simply too nice to be inside.

Later that night, I cruised back to the Fillmore solo for Umphrey's round 2. I walked in as Ryan walked in. I wasn't feeling it quite as much, but that might be three days of back to back shows. That and I was starting to feel kinda crappy. I caught Garren Benfield's set in the poster room during set break. He does all sorts of crazy shit with looping pedals to build up a wall of sound, which he can then sing and solo over. Its pretty impressive. I ran into a bunch of different folks who I knew independently, and found that they all knew each other. There's the little SF jam band community, right there.

I stuck around for half of the second set, and went home. On Sunday I woke up pretty sick, and spend most of the day watching West Wing. Boo to the sickness, which is kicking my ass today.