The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band Concert (with some Kumon and Badminton Racquet Shopping Thrown In)

Posted in Blog by Joe on Sunday, July 30, 2006 at 5:32 am

Another video of ASMZ performing in Berlin can be seen on YouTube by clicking here.

(see more pictures and video in the gallery).

What a busy day…

Today (well, technically yesterday) began when I had to wake up early (eg 10:00) for work. Got dressed for the occasion (white polo shirt w/ name tag - it’s coming back!), and arrived at work. Once again it was pretty slow, not a lot of kids like simplifying fractions on a summer Saturday afternoon…after work we all went to Mrs. Chows for a very cheap lunch. After lunch, Larry and I went to Sports Authority to buy our brand new badminton racquets. A few dollars later, we had our new racquets. It was getting to the time when I had to leave to pick up Paul to go to New York, so I bid larry adieu and got ready to go to New York for the Silver Mt. Zion concert.
I picked up Paul and we made our merry way to Princeton Junction, and I thought I was somehow being deceived by a) the many parking spaces available at the station, and b) the fact that I didn’t have to pay for parking. Too good to be true - but it was. So we bought our tickets and waited for the 5:23 train to arrive.
Once we got into the city we wanted to go see the Apple Store again, so we took the subway up to it. We spent some time in there but it was nearing 8 o’clock and we had to get a move on if we wanted to see the show. So we reluctantly left the Apple Store and tried to find a subway that would take us Downtown. We eventually did, I guess, but on coming out of that subway we didn’t know where to go. The directions told us to go east - where’s east???? Needless to say, we were walking all over the place with no luck, so we called down a taxi (with the perfect wrist movement, by the way) and told the cab driver, who looked like a sultan or some rich arabian guy with a long mustache, to take us to Delancy Street. The directions we had were wrong; we had to go up a few blocks before we would hit the street we were looking for earlier. Oh well. Cab fare wasn’t that much anyway, and it was my first time ever riding in a taxi cab. Wild stuff.
So, we walked around and then, there it was, the Bowery Ballroom. The first club I’ve ever been in, complete with the roped entryway and a bouncer, who checked our IDs before we climbed down into the lounge area, which we waited in for a bit until they opened the hall. I guess the doors opened at 9 - the concert didn’t actually start until a little bit after 10. So, we got a pretty good standing location, closest I’ve ever been to the stage at a concert.
The first group was Black Ox Orkestar, which played old Jewish folk songs which was pretty cool. Most of the members of this group were members of the featured band A Silver Mt. Zion.
The main event, ASMZ, came onto stage (see the intro video up above) and Efrim Menuck introduced the band, and came raging out with the first song “God Bless Our Dead Marines.” The second song they played was one of my favorites, so I was pretty stoked with that. One of the new songs they played was really good and I can’t wait to hear a studio version if they ever surface that song to an album or ep. All in all the concert was awesome, it was really cool seeing these people whom you’ve listened to and read about for a while up on stage, not 20 feet away. Fun stuff.
After an encore song, the band left the stage and the lights went up - Paul says, “Hey Joe, it’s kinda late.” I look at my watch - 12:50! WHOA! I thought for sure the concert would have ended before midnight - I thought we would have caught the 12:42 train. Guess not. So I said, “Paul, we gotta go!” and we busted out of the Bowery Ballroom and raced around like mad rats in a maze (literally) trying to find a subway that would take us Uptown to Penn Station.
I didn’t know when the last train ran to Trenton, but I knew that there were no trains after 2 AM. So we had to hustle. At a lot of points my worries were twofold: we would possibly not catch the last train out of New York, and that my car was towed since I was so doubtful about the free parking. We caught a subway and ran down towards Penn Station, and saw the time schedule - next (and last) train to trenton would be arriving at 1:41. It was 1:29 when we got to Penn Station, so we had enough time to get drinks (we hadn’t had ANYTHING the whole time we were there, sooo hungry….). Wow. We made the train. That was exciting.
I don’t know if any of you drive around at 3 in the morning, but there is NO ONE on the roads. It’s amazing. Princeton was a Desolate Railyard (Silver Mt. Zion song reference, yea!).
Oh and it turns out my car wasn’t towed after all.

The birds are starting to sing, that’s my cue to go to sleep.