Contrast

Contrast

The other night I stayed at a fancy resort hotel up in Orlando. Everything is grandious. Big pillars. Heavy granite. Huge spaces. High ceilings. Everything BIG. Everything NEW. My hotel room bigger and better equiped than my new apartment. (Which, ok, isn't saying all that much.) Guarded entry. Six foot fence to keep those people out.

Tonight I'm down in Palm Beach, which is, mostly, older wealth; also at the high end scale of things.

Except I decided to take the evening off and find some live music. After poking around online for a while I found a link to a link to a link to a musician's website. This guy sounded like he might be good, so I headed downtown to the Office Bar & Grill.

Ben Prestage far exceeded my expections: he was fantastic. And it was pretty much the polar opposite from the high tone ostentatious crap we had been at a couple nights ago. Think biker bar. Signs on a couple of that tables that they were reserved for the Pool League. And the Pool Leaque players were there - with padded cue cases. Did you know there are single and double cue cases? Padded? I was impressed. It reminded me of Poling's in Muncie in 1981.

Prestage was billed as a solo act, and he is a one-man band. He played a drum set with his feet (bass drum with right foot, and trap and snare drum with two separate foot pedals (heel and toe) with his left. Snare drum mounted edgewise in a plastic milk crate. Everything miked to the nines, so the sound was tight. He had half a dozen guitars that he swapped around including a hollow-bodied electric, a resonator, a couple of accoustics and some weird cigar box bass with a long neck, 2 strings and no frets that he played with a slide. All finger picking. We were there for 90 minutes and he played more or less non-stop with almost no talking between songs. He just peeled them off, one after the other. Vocals fit perfect.

Music covered included a bunch of Robert Johnson tunes. Some harp player sat in and reminded me why I think I'm just toying with the instrument. He also covered a great song called "Bigboned and Buttugly" from someone name Brian Martin that Steve would love. (The countdown from 15 is a blast!)

Great music. Down and gritty venue. Fantastic food. I had the Obscene Roast Beef Sandwich. Hoping for a cheap thrill I looked and was disappointed. Except for being really big, it was just a really good sandwich.