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.