10/25/2006 The Door - Dallas, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald
One thing I can say about the screaming high colonic is that rather than signifying a mental implosion, it initiated the final breaking off of a thirty-year ice floe. Or put another way, an accelerator was mashed to the floor of my brain and my injectors were knocking off stone-cold black deposits of old-think like a stock car on Carb Day.
I was transfigured again.
The day started with sleep paralysis. We rolled into town well before dawn to stay with some Texas friends, a group of girls with crushes on all of us. I was in the passenger seat, vaguely aware that we were stopping in a parking lot. When the engine went off, I realized I couldn't open my eyes. Couldn't move my hands. Could barely breathe.
I felt like I was drowning. I could say, for dramatic effect, it was because of my fragile state of mind that I was trapped in my corpse-like body. But to be truthful, sleep paralysis happens a lot when you sleep sitting up. And I had been, for the past few drives. It was scary as hell, and I was kind of afraid to go back to sleep thereafter.
The Door filled up with another gaggle of the girl-jeans-for-Christ crowd. In these Bible Belt shows, the direct support act was getting more love than the headliner. I wondered what Aaron did with his money, because it seemed like he wore the same clothes and ate tossed food. Story was, he gave it away. Which must have been a lot, because I have good reason to assume their nightly guarantees were more than we were making per week, not to mention long lines at the merch table.
The merch table. Our merch table.
Our lonely merch table.
Kids still weren't biting in droves. Five to ten shirts a night was still the average, and on a tour like this I was usually too embarrassed to provide our management or label with accurate sales figures, and instead chose to say something vaguely positive like "we sold more than last night!" On rare occasion, I inflated the numbers. Lots of bands did that, even when it was numerically impossible for them to have done so.
$1500 worth of merch sold to a crowd of thirty, you say?
It used to bother me. But now I didn't care. Not about anything. The sole purpose of my existence out here was as a conductor of energy. In a manner of speaking, I was killing my self.
And it felt good.
The rest of the year and beyond saw the finest shows we had ever played.
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
October 24, 2006 "Snappy Kakkie"
10/24/2006 Numbers - Houston, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald
I shot a kid in the face with a confetti cannon at close range.
It was an accident, but I wasn’t sorry. Nic suggested I aim higher next time. I laugh now, because I saw his hair blown back by the force and that’s the only thing I remember. I had about eighteen of the twenty cannons left from our ill-fated release show several days before, and I figured I might as well continue to end our sets with a CO2 bang as long as I could.
Aaron Weiss was eating out of a dumpster when we arrived. He was dirty, unkempt and stank. It was just how he wanted to be. He was a far cry from the mop top indie kid I knew from 1999, and the dapper Edwardian catechumen he became in 2002. I fault no one for evolving.
Our entourage was now three buses. Two of them were powered by restaurant grease. We were, again, the small man out. Still putting 87 octane through our injectors like petroleum dependent chumps. I’m half-joking. For as expensive as gas was at the time, the “free” alternative seemed to have a lot of time-consuming strings that eroded its overall net gain.
It stopped seeming an any way interesting, odd or exciting that our work week would begin with an eighteen hour drive south. Our main battles were to stave off boredom, stave off whatever it was that pissed us off about each other, and stave off our odds that increasingly favored a highway-related death.
Wiseguys in airports always like to quote the statistic that you're a million times more likely to die in a car wreck than you are a plane crash, but I always seemed to feel safe behind the wheel of our Super Duty. It sat high and it didn't take very long to get where you could feel like the trailer was extension of ourselves.
I was slowly becoming obsessed with death and with the macabre humor of the absurdity of life that had become a relentless joke upon every tenet of gospel that I had been hardwired to cognize: that if you would work hard, you would find your Alabama leprechaun.
If this were a David Fincher film, this is the sequence where you’d be directed, as a viewer, from my mind’s eye to the real-time scene in which I sat in the dank Numbers dressing room, surrounded by the debris of seven appetites to a nauseating wide shot of me screaming at the top of my lungs.
I don’t know when I started screaming. Nor breaking the bottles. I more or less came to, sometime after our set and found myself throwing half-full bottles of beer at the cinder block walls. I must have smashed two cases. The floor was covered in malt-smelling glass. And I screamed.
I did not know what I was screaming about at the time. There was still too much disconnect between me, myself, and I but the barbaric yalping was something to the effect of an emotional high colonic.
I was screaming because I was lost and had no money. I was screaming because I was a nerve ending, gradually exposed and scraped clean over the course of half a decade. I was screaming because the thought of humping another 120-foot aluminum extrusion from a semi at minimum wage was making me question the worth my existence and render morbid calculations in my head on the value of my current life insurance policy against the debts I held the family under. I was screaming because Max Bemis was considered the crazy one and I wasn’t. But fuck if I felt like it.
The universe was unjust.
The universe was unjust.
I did my best. Social justice is never served in the marketplace.
We were, however, served a warning by the TM in charge.
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald
I shot a kid in the face with a confetti cannon at close range.
It was an accident, but I wasn’t sorry. Nic suggested I aim higher next time. I laugh now, because I saw his hair blown back by the force and that’s the only thing I remember. I had about eighteen of the twenty cannons left from our ill-fated release show several days before, and I figured I might as well continue to end our sets with a CO2 bang as long as I could.
Aaron Weiss was eating out of a dumpster when we arrived. He was dirty, unkempt and stank. It was just how he wanted to be. He was a far cry from the mop top indie kid I knew from 1999, and the dapper Edwardian catechumen he became in 2002. I fault no one for evolving.
Our entourage was now three buses. Two of them were powered by restaurant grease. We were, again, the small man out. Still putting 87 octane through our injectors like petroleum dependent chumps. I’m half-joking. For as expensive as gas was at the time, the “free” alternative seemed to have a lot of time-consuming strings that eroded its overall net gain.
It stopped seeming an any way interesting, odd or exciting that our work week would begin with an eighteen hour drive south. Our main battles were to stave off boredom, stave off whatever it was that pissed us off about each other, and stave off our odds that increasingly favored a highway-related death.
Wiseguys in airports always like to quote the statistic that you're a million times more likely to die in a car wreck than you are a plane crash, but I always seemed to feel safe behind the wheel of our Super Duty. It sat high and it didn't take very long to get where you could feel like the trailer was extension of ourselves.
I was slowly becoming obsessed with death and with the macabre humor of the absurdity of life that had become a relentless joke upon every tenet of gospel that I had been hardwired to cognize: that if you would work hard, you would find your Alabama leprechaun.
If this were a David Fincher film, this is the sequence where you’d be directed, as a viewer, from my mind’s eye to the real-time scene in which I sat in the dank Numbers dressing room, surrounded by the debris of seven appetites to a nauseating wide shot of me screaming at the top of my lungs.
I don’t know when I started screaming. Nor breaking the bottles. I more or less came to, sometime after our set and found myself throwing half-full bottles of beer at the cinder block walls. I must have smashed two cases. The floor was covered in malt-smelling glass. And I screamed.
I did not know what I was screaming about at the time. There was still too much disconnect between me, myself, and I but the barbaric yalping was something to the effect of an emotional high colonic.
I was screaming because I was lost and had no money. I was screaming because I was a nerve ending, gradually exposed and scraped clean over the course of half a decade. I was screaming because the thought of humping another 120-foot aluminum extrusion from a semi at minimum wage was making me question the worth my existence and render morbid calculations in my head on the value of my current life insurance policy against the debts I held the family under. I was screaming because Max Bemis was considered the crazy one and I wasn’t. But fuck if I felt like it.
The universe was unjust.
The universe was unjust.
I did my best. Social justice is never served in the marketplace.
We were, however, served a warning by the TM in charge.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Intermezzo Intermezzo
The man I let into my apartment was neither tall nor short. He was neither handsome nor ugly. He was older than me by about thirty years, but he was not ancient. He had an air that was at once serious and mischievous, and his countenance was neither calm nor tense. He smelled of smoke but did not stink.
And he spoke with a peculiar slant.
“Beg pardon for dropping by at this hour,” he said. “I thought I heard some familiar music coming from your open window. The doorman let me in.”
He pulled out a cigarette and made a move to light it, catching himself and quickly turning to me before touching flame to tobacco.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked. I offered to take his coat and hat, but the only thing he handed me was his dripping umbrella. The cigarettes he carried with him were tucked away inside a silver case with onyx inlays of small stones. He took a drag and let loose a stream of noxious citronella smoke that filled my room with a living cloud of faces, places and things. It was like lying on my back on a hill, watching dark clouds.
His black suit was stiffly pressed and his grey hair was pulled tightly back from his high forehead with a generous amount of sickly sweet-smelling pomade. He was neither smiling nor frowning and his eyes shone dark and obsidian.
And he spoke with a peculiar slant.
“Beg pardon for dropping by at this hour,” he said. “I thought I heard some familiar music coming from your open window. The doorman let me in.”
He pulled out a cigarette and made a move to light it, catching himself and quickly turning to me before touching flame to tobacco.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked. I offered to take his coat and hat, but the only thing he handed me was his dripping umbrella. The cigarettes he carried with him were tucked away inside a silver case with onyx inlays of small stones. He took a drag and let loose a stream of noxious citronella smoke that filled my room with a living cloud of faces, places and things. It was like lying on my back on a hill, watching dark clouds.
His black suit was stiffly pressed and his grey hair was pulled tightly back from his high forehead with a generous amount of sickly sweet-smelling pomade. He was neither smiling nor frowning and his eyes shone dark and obsidian.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
October 21, 2006 "White People Do This"
10/21/2006 Irving Theater - Indianapolis, IN
Other bands: Theanti, Them Roaring Twenties & BIGBIGcar
Words do little to describe how much planning went into this concert, our official release show for our third offering for public consumption. Our second, long-awaited full-length album.
It started weeks before in Kansas City, in the massive basement entertainment center of Aaron's aunt and uncle. The idea struck me that it might be a good, or at least interesting, idea to go whole hog on the absurdity tip and make this concert a confetti-fest of Spoonful Weighs a Ton proportions.
So in our downtime, I scoured eBay for cheap confetti cannons and beach balls. I passed a small budget by the rest of the guys and went on shopping spree of sorts, buying up entire lots of balloons and beach balls. I found a case of 20 twist-to-fire confetti cannons, each about 2 ft. high and in the shape of giant champagne bottles.
I bought a shitload of those tiny confetti poppers that drunk people pop on New Years to pass out at the door, and I looked for a place I could rent those giant dancing air-filled balloon people that are always in the front of car lots but all the places I could find were out of state and too expensive. I thought it would be great to have those things spring to life at the end of Strange Days when Eric launched into his solo.
I bought pancake mix and borrowed a portable self-heating pancake griddle to fling pancakes at the crowd. I made muffins to do the same. (To be fair, I didn't invent the pancake gag. Everything, Now did it at their release show and I was riding their jock.)
In short, I was preparing for massive messy mayhem in a room full of sweaty, confetti-soaked kids floating dozens of volleyballs above their heads like enormous pastel molecules floating on a dark sea of hands. I was preparing for aural armageddon in a wash of bright blinking lights and the smell of fog and burnt pancakes.
Captain Mainwaring at The Irving Theater, 10/21/06.
The venue was an old historic building, an old 600-cap venue with a stage that once lived in Market Square Arena and that supposedly supported Elvis' fat ass a few decades prior. A local kid I'd never met but who was a friend of a friend of a band I knew made the connections to set up the show. He promised a massive flyering campaign all over the city.
We also partnered with a national Darfur campaign, who put our name on glossy promotional material and slapped our pics up on their smooth website right next to the likes of Sparta and Rise Against. We were one of only a dozen bands on the carousel, and because we had agreed to lay out some literature and say a few words between a song or two about the cause, our show was listed on the site in front of millions of eyeballs worth of traffic.
This show, by all intents and purposes, had the makings of greatness. Another stepping stone to The Storybook Ending and a monumental reminder that we were, in fact, still relevant and that good things come to those who wait and that Jesus Christ and Ray Kroc and John Wayne love us all.
So when the twenty ticket holders trickled in the door, including my wife, whom I had finally convinced to come to another show after nearly four years, all the while hoping she'd see the vast amounts of progress we'd made (only to leave early), I went backstage and got drunk on Canadian Club.
"Oh god, people actually listen to these guys." -written on a Brazil poster at the Irving. We think it was Bigbigcar.
Other bands: Theanti, Them Roaring Twenties & BIGBIGcar
Words do little to describe how much planning went into this concert, our official release show for our third offering for public consumption. Our second, long-awaited full-length album.
It started weeks before in Kansas City, in the massive basement entertainment center of Aaron's aunt and uncle. The idea struck me that it might be a good, or at least interesting, idea to go whole hog on the absurdity tip and make this concert a confetti-fest of Spoonful Weighs a Ton proportions.
So in our downtime, I scoured eBay for cheap confetti cannons and beach balls. I passed a small budget by the rest of the guys and went on shopping spree of sorts, buying up entire lots of balloons and beach balls. I found a case of 20 twist-to-fire confetti cannons, each about 2 ft. high and in the shape of giant champagne bottles.
I bought a shitload of those tiny confetti poppers that drunk people pop on New Years to pass out at the door, and I looked for a place I could rent those giant dancing air-filled balloon people that are always in the front of car lots but all the places I could find were out of state and too expensive. I thought it would be great to have those things spring to life at the end of Strange Days when Eric launched into his solo.
I bought pancake mix and borrowed a portable self-heating pancake griddle to fling pancakes at the crowd. I made muffins to do the same. (To be fair, I didn't invent the pancake gag. Everything, Now did it at their release show and I was riding their jock.)
In short, I was preparing for massive messy mayhem in a room full of sweaty, confetti-soaked kids floating dozens of volleyballs above their heads like enormous pastel molecules floating on a dark sea of hands. I was preparing for aural armageddon in a wash of bright blinking lights and the smell of fog and burnt pancakes.
Captain Mainwaring at The Irving Theater, 10/21/06.
The venue was an old historic building, an old 600-cap venue with a stage that once lived in Market Square Arena and that supposedly supported Elvis' fat ass a few decades prior. A local kid I'd never met but who was a friend of a friend of a band I knew made the connections to set up the show. He promised a massive flyering campaign all over the city.
We also partnered with a national Darfur campaign, who put our name on glossy promotional material and slapped our pics up on their smooth website right next to the likes of Sparta and Rise Against. We were one of only a dozen bands on the carousel, and because we had agreed to lay out some literature and say a few words between a song or two about the cause, our show was listed on the site in front of millions of eyeballs worth of traffic.
This show, by all intents and purposes, had the makings of greatness. Another stepping stone to The Storybook Ending and a monumental reminder that we were, in fact, still relevant and that good things come to those who wait and that Jesus Christ and Ray Kroc and John Wayne love us all.
So when the twenty ticket holders trickled in the door, including my wife, whom I had finally convinced to come to another show after nearly four years, all the while hoping she'd see the vast amounts of progress we'd made (only to leave early), I went backstage and got drunk on Canadian Club.
"Oh god, people actually listen to these guys." -written on a Brazil poster at the Irving. We think it was Bigbigcar.
October 17, 2006 "Avalava"
10/17/2006 Village Green Records - Muncie, IN
Other bands: Arrah and the Ferns, Works Cited
Flat-bed trailers, I'm convinced, we're invented with the expedient musician in mind. I knew a guy once - actually the guy that recorded our demos at The Back Forty in Markleville - that hatched up a plan to do drive-by banding, wherein his band would set up on the flat bed of a large truck, drums and amps bolted to the floor, and they'd pull into parking lots and intersections, power up, and rock the fuck out.
He had electrical schematics drawn, welding scenarios, the whole bit. I don't know if he ever did it. He smoked a lot of pot so it likely never got farther than the couch. But I always thought it was a great idea.
Flat-bed trailers are great, especially because an instant stage is never more than a friend-of-a-friends-dad away.
There was one parked in front of Village Green Records, which was the new town hipster nest that had opened up in a former video rental place owned by a blind guy.
It was a house-ish property that had grown a dense crust of paint and flyers and faded vinyl stickers. The barnacled crust of youthful liberalism. Short-term boarders crashed and long term renters stayed in the back rooms, rehydrating dried asian food in an obliterated kitchen with out-of-code wiring and unseen, but smelled, water damage. A vinyl utopia saturated in the esoteric stench of incense.
Eric and Aaron and I had worked up some acoustic versions of some songs, none of which were very solid but they were interesting arrangements nonetheless, replete with accordion and glockenspiel. My new props from the theater of the Absurd. It felt surprisingly good to break away from high-decibel walls of sound from time to time.
I was nervous, feeling like someone's lame dad playing for all this new blood. My guts still churned with ammonia residue of caustic criticism both heard and imagined. One local kid trolled our message board the previous summer and tried valiantly to wound our pride with snide comments about our exploitation of another country from our choice of band name, and our sonic derivations from bands I never owned records of but whom he was sure we listened to constantly. A post-adolescent blowhard, intensely opinionated but intellectually inept. We traced his ISP from the message board and gleaned a few clues from his posts to find out he was a dishwasher at a local dinner spot.
Something about a prophet is without honor only in his hometown.
So we sat up on the trailer bed in folding chairs, singing dark and serious songs that were loose and held together by a vague sense of tune and time, playing after two sugary-psychedelic-devil-may-care indie pop darlings of the time. Our music, to me, felt overwrought and melodramatic in those climes. My banter felt contrived and indulgent.
Because I rarely left the house anymore when we were home, the sets of eyes staring up at the truck bed felt critical and unwavering. My scene was gone. I no longer had my finger on this town's pulse.
Other bands: Arrah and the Ferns, Works Cited
Flat-bed trailers, I'm convinced, we're invented with the expedient musician in mind. I knew a guy once - actually the guy that recorded our demos at The Back Forty in Markleville - that hatched up a plan to do drive-by banding, wherein his band would set up on the flat bed of a large truck, drums and amps bolted to the floor, and they'd pull into parking lots and intersections, power up, and rock the fuck out.
He had electrical schematics drawn, welding scenarios, the whole bit. I don't know if he ever did it. He smoked a lot of pot so it likely never got farther than the couch. But I always thought it was a great idea.
Flat-bed trailers are great, especially because an instant stage is never more than a friend-of-a-friends-dad away.
There was one parked in front of Village Green Records, which was the new town hipster nest that had opened up in a former video rental place owned by a blind guy.
It was a house-ish property that had grown a dense crust of paint and flyers and faded vinyl stickers. The barnacled crust of youthful liberalism. Short-term boarders crashed and long term renters stayed in the back rooms, rehydrating dried asian food in an obliterated kitchen with out-of-code wiring and unseen, but smelled, water damage. A vinyl utopia saturated in the esoteric stench of incense.
Eric and Aaron and I had worked up some acoustic versions of some songs, none of which were very solid but they were interesting arrangements nonetheless, replete with accordion and glockenspiel. My new props from the theater of the Absurd. It felt surprisingly good to break away from high-decibel walls of sound from time to time.
I was nervous, feeling like someone's lame dad playing for all this new blood. My guts still churned with ammonia residue of caustic criticism both heard and imagined. One local kid trolled our message board the previous summer and tried valiantly to wound our pride with snide comments about our exploitation of another country from our choice of band name, and our sonic derivations from bands I never owned records of but whom he was sure we listened to constantly. A post-adolescent blowhard, intensely opinionated but intellectually inept. We traced his ISP from the message board and gleaned a few clues from his posts to find out he was a dishwasher at a local dinner spot.
Something about a prophet is without honor only in his hometown.
So we sat up on the trailer bed in folding chairs, singing dark and serious songs that were loose and held together by a vague sense of tune and time, playing after two sugary-psychedelic-devil-may-care indie pop darlings of the time. Our music, to me, felt overwrought and melodramatic in those climes. My banter felt contrived and indulgent.
Because I rarely left the house anymore when we were home, the sets of eyes staring up at the truck bed felt critical and unwavering. My scene was gone. I no longer had my finger on this town's pulse.
Intermezzo 9875
I forgot to mention that we'd been offered a two-week run with the band Say Anything during the space between our ill-fated college tour and the beginning of our long and quizzical stretch of dates with post-grungers Smile Empty Soul.
This marked a well-deserved return to large stages and sold out venues and guaranteed free dinner every night there was a show. A tonic for the ego, even though the inevitable subconscious fan envy would undoubtedly take hold the minute we watched our tourmate's merch tables get mobbed. Regular hot meals would almost make up for it. Almost.
The band had a singer named Max who, it was said, suffered from an acute personality disorder that required fistfuls of medication in order for him to function properly in normal society. I talked to him a few times during the run, but most of the time he shuffled around the bus area in pajama pants and a band t-shirt. Every interview I read about him started with a few paragraphs about an infamous incident where he was found running down the middle of a Manhattan street, naked and incoherent.
He may very well have been certifiably insane, but the way his batshit antics were almost too perfectly baked in to the press release made it seem as if there was a preconceived marketing concept at work under the surface. And to those of us who were under some real mental duress at the time, any insincerity in Crazytown was highly, highly frowned upon. I kept my eyes open.
But in the meantime, I grabbed a couple days of work from the glass and aluminum shop. I grew to hate the cochlea-raping scream of the aluminum saw that used to hit me as soon as I walked in the door at 5:55 a.m.. I wore headphone-style hearing protection to keep my wits and the integrity of my most valuable asset, but I realized I liked the solitude of not having to hear anything in that shop, ever, and I eventually never took them off.
I didn't have much to say though, and I don't think a lot of my colleagues were all that anxious to hear what an on-again-off-again rocker had to say about anything, since most of the rock guys they knew were local burnouts who played The Water Bowl once or twice a year. They were nice guys but I could see their eyes glaze over when I told them about the "other thing" I did.
To some it was a glaze of disbelief and to others it was the glaze of "you're not living real life." It certainly made for awkward conversation when a publicist from New York would call me while I was up on a ladder in Blackford County to talk about doing editorial for Alternative Press, a magazine you could buy at the supermarket across the street from our employee parking lot. It would seem too surreal, and I would feel like I was coming across like a kid who makes outrageous lies to get attention.
One guy said he picked up the new Brazil CD at Best Buy, which lent a good dose of proof to my burden. But the idea that a guy that sweeps floors at a metal shop behind a Wal-Mart supercenter could have an album available in the electronics mega-mart across the highway was beginning to illustrate a hard truth that was not always apparent to a casual observer.
This marked a well-deserved return to large stages and sold out venues and guaranteed free dinner every night there was a show. A tonic for the ego, even though the inevitable subconscious fan envy would undoubtedly take hold the minute we watched our tourmate's merch tables get mobbed. Regular hot meals would almost make up for it. Almost.
The band had a singer named Max who, it was said, suffered from an acute personality disorder that required fistfuls of medication in order for him to function properly in normal society. I talked to him a few times during the run, but most of the time he shuffled around the bus area in pajama pants and a band t-shirt. Every interview I read about him started with a few paragraphs about an infamous incident where he was found running down the middle of a Manhattan street, naked and incoherent.
He may very well have been certifiably insane, but the way his batshit antics were almost too perfectly baked in to the press release made it seem as if there was a preconceived marketing concept at work under the surface. And to those of us who were under some real mental duress at the time, any insincerity in Crazytown was highly, highly frowned upon. I kept my eyes open.
But in the meantime, I grabbed a couple days of work from the glass and aluminum shop. I grew to hate the cochlea-raping scream of the aluminum saw that used to hit me as soon as I walked in the door at 5:55 a.m.. I wore headphone-style hearing protection to keep my wits and the integrity of my most valuable asset, but I realized I liked the solitude of not having to hear anything in that shop, ever, and I eventually never took them off.
I didn't have much to say though, and I don't think a lot of my colleagues were all that anxious to hear what an on-again-off-again rocker had to say about anything, since most of the rock guys they knew were local burnouts who played The Water Bowl once or twice a year. They were nice guys but I could see their eyes glaze over when I told them about the "other thing" I did.
To some it was a glaze of disbelief and to others it was the glaze of "you're not living real life." It certainly made for awkward conversation when a publicist from New York would call me while I was up on a ladder in Blackford County to talk about doing editorial for Alternative Press, a magazine you could buy at the supermarket across the street from our employee parking lot. It would seem too surreal, and I would feel like I was coming across like a kid who makes outrageous lies to get attention.
One guy said he picked up the new Brazil CD at Best Buy, which lent a good dose of proof to my burden. But the idea that a guy that sweeps floors at a metal shop behind a Wal-Mart supercenter could have an album available in the electronics mega-mart across the highway was beginning to illustrate a hard truth that was not always apparent to a casual observer.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
October 4, 2006 "Rearrange My Face"
10/04/2006 Northwestern University - Evanston, IL
Other bands: none
Peaceful, idyllic Northwestern University.
No one knew, as far as I could tell, that we were supposed to play in the cafeteria at Northwestern University. Other than the small vocal PA set up in front of the doors near the courtyard, there was really no clue that the student body expected anyone to show up to entertain them over Chik-fil-A and Panda Express.
We played loud in the noontime hour while a handful of bored students sat at the rear tables, texting their other friends who had moved to places where they could more easily talk without the noise.
I was utterly bored and mouthing the words with very little brainconnect so I threw a bottle of water up onto the balcony and stole an unwitting girl's cell phone.
It was a waste of a good Wednesday afternoon, one where I could have been raking leaves or taking Elliot to the Children's Museum, and our performance had all the imagination-capturing of a visiting washing machine repairman. There's something wrong with leaving a venue at 2 in the afternoon.
I had more pressing things to fuss with, as it were. We had an official album release show coming up in a week and I'd made designs to make it an enormous ordeal, taking a cue - probably too heavily - from The Flaming Lips. I bought confetti cannons, champagne poppers, balloons and I was scoping out those giant wobbly air statues that new car dealerships have to announce great savings.
This was going to be huge and I aimed to make it memorable for all involved.
We were invited to play, initially, by a young Indianapolis kid I'd never met. He rented out the old Irving Theater, which sat in one of the many tiny and spotty artist districts in the city, and was another old relic from the days of Tallulah Bankhead and hats that came in boxes.
This kid talked big, especially of his flyering campaign, and I chose to believe him. We made our show part of an Amnesty International benefit for Darfur, which gave us a modicum of more exposure for the show. Our promo shots were on a photo carousel that included Sparta and some other bigger bands.
And what's more, Alison, my wife, planned to come. It had been almost 2 years since she last saw me ply my trade on the stage and saw with her own eyes the reason I was away for so long. It was a chance to captivate her again, to bring her up out of our fast forming rut and feel like she was married to someone unique and special whose ass wasn't glued to an office chair and who considered doing for a living what you love the most honorable thing one can do. I very much looked forward to it.
Other bands: none
Peaceful, idyllic Northwestern University.
No one knew, as far as I could tell, that we were supposed to play in the cafeteria at Northwestern University. Other than the small vocal PA set up in front of the doors near the courtyard, there was really no clue that the student body expected anyone to show up to entertain them over Chik-fil-A and Panda Express.
We played loud in the noontime hour while a handful of bored students sat at the rear tables, texting their other friends who had moved to places where they could more easily talk without the noise.
I was utterly bored and mouthing the words with very little brainconnect so I threw a bottle of water up onto the balcony and stole an unwitting girl's cell phone.
It was a waste of a good Wednesday afternoon, one where I could have been raking leaves or taking Elliot to the Children's Museum, and our performance had all the imagination-capturing of a visiting washing machine repairman. There's something wrong with leaving a venue at 2 in the afternoon.
I had more pressing things to fuss with, as it were. We had an official album release show coming up in a week and I'd made designs to make it an enormous ordeal, taking a cue - probably too heavily - from The Flaming Lips. I bought confetti cannons, champagne poppers, balloons and I was scoping out those giant wobbly air statues that new car dealerships have to announce great savings.
This was going to be huge and I aimed to make it memorable for all involved.
We were invited to play, initially, by a young Indianapolis kid I'd never met. He rented out the old Irving Theater, which sat in one of the many tiny and spotty artist districts in the city, and was another old relic from the days of Tallulah Bankhead and hats that came in boxes.
This kid talked big, especially of his flyering campaign, and I chose to believe him. We made our show part of an Amnesty International benefit for Darfur, which gave us a modicum of more exposure for the show. Our promo shots were on a photo carousel that included Sparta and some other bigger bands.
And what's more, Alison, my wife, planned to come. It had been almost 2 years since she last saw me ply my trade on the stage and saw with her own eyes the reason I was away for so long. It was a chance to captivate her again, to bring her up out of our fast forming rut and feel like she was married to someone unique and special whose ass wasn't glued to an office chair and who considered doing for a living what you love the most honorable thing one can do. I very much looked forward to it.
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