Other bands: none
The distance from where I sit at my desk to the door that contains the mail slot is less than five feet. The distance from the mail slot to the floor is about four feet, or eye level if you’re sitting down. I inched the chair over to the door until my face was nearly even with the brass shutter and let loose my breath. For no reason in particular, I felt a feeling of general unease.
I took hold of the tarnished brass plate and slowly pulled it up. As I did, the thundering sound of a hundred stampeding wingtips and Oxfords charging up the stairs as if from a fire jarred me to drop it again. Like the roar of an elevated train, with no human sounds of breathing or conversing, the feet pounded their way up the stairs like the world’s most silent mob, causing the chain on my deadbolt to swing irritably and the bottles of Maudlin to clink Morse code-like in the fracas.
Then it ended.
The familiar eerie quiet settled over the building while I sat still with a heart beating like an over-worked typewriter. Everything was still. The bottles of Maudlin stood wetly at attention. The deadbolt returned to being dead. I peered out the mail slot and saw the going-up staircase banister. The going-down staircase disappeared into diffuse light and shadow down below. There were no scuffmarks on the walls to indicate a boisterously polite throng passing through. No sounds from came upstairs. It was complete silence except for the ringing of blood coursing through the vessels in my ears.
* * *
Cedar City. Beautiful views, but the beer sucks.
Our venue was the far end of a soccer field, where programing board people had set up a small stage of risers and a cheap PA. These shows seemed increasingly like afterthoughts, as if the person at our label responsible for booking them made the requisite "I need a quick favor" phone calls at the last minute, and the university people told them they'd "see what they could do."
We had a campus radio interview with a girl DJ who'd never heard of our band. We did some flyering around the quad area like we did at Warped Tour, except this time it was tarnished against a noticeable backdrop of fatigue.
Our noise attracted a few dozen temporary gawkers, but we sold very little merch. Driving the mountain states is brutal on the gas gauge, and even more so on the cashbox when you're not making money. It seemed like we should have been farther along than this.
Nikki secured us an opening spot after this run with a band called Smile Empty Soul, as her first official booking for our band. SES were a radio rock, post-grunge band in the vein of Nickelback or Sevendust who had a minor hit about drugs or some girls ass in the early part of this decade. Not really our cup of tea, but the money was good and we rationalized it by thinking that we'd never tried to tap into that audience before and goddammit we might as well try.
We hadn't struck gold anywhere else.
0 comments:
Post a Comment