Our sixteenth year/day as a band found us parking our recreational vehicle in a driveway in Ypsilanti, a short walk down from a theater basement full of abandoned costumes, broken props, and haunted handless puppets. We scuttled our instruments down the cellar steps while a festival raged in the city above: the police tazed a man and bloodied the cathedral stairs; the ladies at the disco were elbow deep in drag; downtown chicks mixed it up with peeping neighbors and union thugs.

But we had our own noise to make.

So the band walled itself in the catacombs and found songs in far-gone gemologists and groovy undergarments. We found songs in smuggled theremins snuck in by spies. We made a hole in the floor that went up to the sky. Digits and other extremities floated away, bouncing off exposed pipes and reattaching to body parts incorrectly. At the end of the day, we returned, misreattached, to the surface.

The festival was over, and the union parade marched away. Every band reaches a pinnacle of creativity, but no peak was summited there in dreamland. This bodes well, once again, for the future of The Monkey Power Trio.