I had an astoundingly specific musical dream last night in which I was attending a gig by a reformed Rocket from the Tombs. RFFT were an early 70s proto-punk band from Cleveland fronted by Dave Thomas. The other original members included Craig Bell, Johnny Mandansky, Peter Laughner, and Gene O’Connor. The band lasted a year before the band split. Thomas and Laughner formed Pere Ubu while O’Connor and Mandansky joined Stiv Bators to form Frankenstein and later the Dead Boys.

Right, In the dream, I was watching a lineup RFFT that also included Robert Forster, one of the founders of Australian pop band the Go-Betweens. In the dream Forster was the founding member of the Go-Betweens who had passed away. In the waking world it was Grant McLennan who died of a heart attack in 2006. Forster is a going concern.

The gig took place in the large back room of a diner. It was brightly lit and the stage was barely raised at all. And there was a serious mosh pit. The song in the dream was 30 Seconds Over Tokyo and before the song was over, the mosh pit spilled its way into the diner.

We had friends over last night who I regaled with tales of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. One of the acts I brought up was Kamasi Washington (a fair distance, musically from RFFT), and in a later dream, I was at the office and rushing out to catch a bus to see Washington, but I saw the bus (#71) drive by as I was leaving. I must have been in San Francisco because I ran down a hill to catch the train at Market and Montgomery, but I took the wrong entrance and I and another guy ran two or three flights downstairs only to find that the platform wasn’t there. A guy working on a car at the bottom of the stairs told us to go back up and take the other entrance. As I was running up the stairs I woke up. And I’ll conclude with this excerpt from Kamasi’s Show Us the Way.