September 29, 2006 "Indiana"

09/29/2006 University of Utah - Salt Lake City, UT
Other bands: Crimson Night Festival

After trying to milk as many sales as possible from the SUU crowd - and I think we sold six of our new album - we jumped back on the highway to make Salt Lake City in time for the Crimson Night Festival at the University of Utah.

This was an annual underclassman mixer where the university played babysitter to a thousand hypersexual teens and early-twenty-somethings all eager for free food, free t-shirts and, if they were lucky, a free trip around the bases before the sun came up.

They'd roped off a classroom in a hallway behind the auditorium for our green room and filled with with boxes of pizza and water. Not bad, except I was sick of pizza. Our PA was a tiny four-channel amp at the side of the stage powering a single mic with an on/off switch. We already knew what kind of show this was going to be and we steeled ourselves to commit an hour to brazen self-flagellation.

And we were not disappointed.

At first there were a few hundred kids watching us on the enormous riser stage. Five minutes (or less) after our amps had hit their screeching highs, the number thinned to 100, then 50, until maybe five were left by the time we finished our set. Roving hordes of red-shirted post-teens would head east through the main corridor that our stage faced, then west, stopping only long enough to make the sort of comments kids make when they are flying high on the energy of their peers and have lasered in on an easy target. The band of spastic outsiders playing songs they'd never heard before.

I walked through the throngs moving gear. It always felt like a hundred eyes were on me. Kids saying to each other, backhandedly, "there goes that shitty, shitty band." I don't know if I'd always been that paranoid or if it was a symptom of my growing anxiousness.

We weren't paid, but the university offered us a room at the student center hotel, which we begrudgingly took after realizing it would take us almost an entire day to get to Denver. We could sleep, though for two hours.

It was typical of our damn luck. When we needed a room the most, we couldn't afford one and when we got one handed to us, we couldn't stay in it for very long.