Sweat, Mattresses, Egg Cartons and Rock & Roll

Philadelphia I can taste my own sweat. My ears are ringing. When I speak it sounds like I'm underwater. The house lights have been up since the encore. The crowd's filing out. The crushed beer cans I was stepping on all night are visible now. I head out past the bar and into the Philadelphia air.

This was something wonderful. Raw, naked, no regrets, capital R and R. Rock and Roll. What Boomers reminisce about between songs on artist-dedicated internet radio stations. No lasers, no fog machines, no rotating stages. This was razor-sharp, bunker-busting live music delivered into Shure microphones, zapped through coaxial highways, and catapulted out of PA speakers into the crowd below.

Outside, in the glow of the venue's crimson neon, I realized that I now had my own rock and roll legend to tell. It centers on a piano-climbing, tank top-ripping, chest hair-pulling musician named Adam Weiner and his band, Low Cut Connie.

Subsequent trips to this piano rock parish allowed me to bleed a bit from the vein of mundane that courses through all of us. And in place of the blackish blood rushed bright red renewal and exhilaration.

I wanted to know where a band prepares for this kind of Sunday sermon. Perhaps they inherited some Brotherly Love practice room from a legendary Independence City rocker. Or maybe it's more of a mythical space. Like something out of a divine edit of National Treasure.

As it turns out, every superhero has a lair. This band’s is underground with a discreet entrance. It’s musty and damp. A light haze fills the cramped room. A low, consuming hum persists. Things, other-worldly bits and pieces were spliced together and created in this space. I can sense it. I saw both everything and nothing when I stepped foot here.

It became clear that Low Cut Connie sets out to change the world from a South Philadelphia basement.