Rock Blogs from antiMUSIC's staff. My Night With The AKA's By Dr. Fever

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Over the years, my friend Dana White has booked a lot of shows here in West Virginia. And, over the years, I've spoken to many many bands that some of you are hearing about just now (Poison The Well, Sworn Enemy, and Hatebreed to name a couple.) Hell, I even ate with Thursday at Eat N Park once...but never before had I hung out with a band in quite the fashion as I did The AKA's back on September 17th after their first night in WV. The band was scheduled to play in Charleston that night, then the next night in Princeton...and yours truely was scheduled to be at both shows. 

The first night the AKA's were in town was, by far, one of the better times I've had in quite a while. The show itself was ok..The AKA's were great, but I was disappointed in the underwhelming turnout. It was after the show that the fun began. After getting a bite to eat myself and Dana, as well as our friends Matt and Moe went with the AKA's to Tri State Greyhound Park & Gaming Center for some serious gambling. Now, this could have been potentially horrible; I am horrible with money and me in a position to potentially win MORE money could have hazardous results on my weight of my wallet. But, things turned out better than I could have expected.

Now, before we get into the gritty details let me take a moment to tell you just how incredibly cool the people in the AKA's are. I knew Mike Ski was a quality person, as I'd spoken to him a few previous times and had developed a sort of working relationship with (he's the reason I got hooked up with their PR person and was able to get my hands on an advance of their debut 'White Doves And Smoking Guns', which if you haven't gotten yet you need to.) But, the rest of the people in the band (Chad, Lukas, Nina and Bobby) were supercool and definitely among the nicest people I've met in my many years of going to shows n whatnot.  And, Nina, if you're reading this...you're still the coolest woman in the world in my book. Rock on!

Anyway, back to the story; Everything started off well enough with Dana winning a few dollars on the Nickel machines (he'd eventually break even) and a couple of the AKA's folks coming out ahead...but, yours truly had the best night of the bunch. After winning about 15 dollars on one Nickel machine, Matt and I decided we should go into the High Roller room as a joke. It turned out to be a profitable joke. After ignoring Matt's pleas not to stuff a five dollar bill in one of the dollar slots I ended up..well..winning. $200 to be exact. This set off a mini-celebration that was continued when we hooked back up with the rest of our party. High fives all around. Good times.

After calling it a night and heading home I woke up the next day to, well, a hurricane. Yeah...even West Virginia caught a little bit of Hurricane Isabella's fury. But, rain or no rain, I still had things to do. After pulling a  5 hour shift at the record store, it was time to make the short (30 minutes give or take a few minutes) down Interstate 77 to Princeton for the second night of the AKA's. Unfortunately, the heavy rain and wind slowed me down to almost a crawl on the always treacherous I-77 south and resulted in me missing the AKA's set. But, still, I did get to spend some more time hanging out with the fine AKA folks, this time we had ourselves a late dinner at Princeton's finest late night eating establishment; The Omlette Shoppe. 

That's pretty much it. Their should be a nice group picture of myself and the band to put here at the end of this piece, but as per my luck, the damn digital camera decided it didn't feel like taking pictures and wouldn't work. So, that's a bummer. But, none the less, I had one of the best times of recent memory spending two nights rocking out, gambling and hanging out with The AKA's.  So, make sure you check the bands website and see where they're playing next; you don't want to miss out on the experience. 

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