DogAndPanda: Flower Travellin' Band at the Knitting Factory 03/14/2009

Flower Travellin' Band at the Knitting Factory 03/14/2009

This was quite a show to go to - the first ever FTB show in the U.S. I could go on at length about how, during the original height of their career, before 'breaking up' in the early 1970s, they never got to play here - and it's only on this reunion tour (promoting, among other things, a new album) that they finally manage to play here. This was originally supposed to happen last year, but there were passport problems.

  • Once the show started, there was the immediate smell of skunk in the air - skunk in the slang sense, that is. An appropriate beginning.
  • The band played one song off of Satori (part 2), one song off of Made In Japan (Hiroshima), and two off of Make Up (Slowly But Surely and Shadows of Lost Days), and the rest were off of their new album (We Are Here). This is actually the kind of set you want from an old band - you want them to be excited about their new material.
  • The set was almost exactly 90 minutes long!
  • Throughout the show, you got the feeling that they really were still jamming - at the end of a guitar solo, when Ishima was done, he would turn to the drummer and nod.
  • The band waited til near the end to break out the big youtube hit - Satori pt 2 - to a huge cheer from the crowd. I thought that would be the next to last song, but then they broke out Hiroshima, of which there is a 20 minute live version of Make Up. This version went over 10 minutes, and had some nice solo work on the sitaria particularly (Ishima played a 'bass solo' as well as a standard guitar-range solo). Joe's singing on this was particularly impressive - this must be one of their hardest songs to sing, yet he still managed to get all of the tonal fluctuations in the original.
  • Ishima's solos were sometimes very impressive - he has great control of colume (i think there is a volume pedal involved) and serious sitar-like note bending.


    Slowly But Surely
    We Are Here
    Shadows of Lost Days http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYGrTTsKIxQ&feature=channel_page
    Satori pt 2
    Hiroshima

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