November 18, 2006 "No One Can Make Me Play Along with This"

11/18/2006 Scene Metropolis - Lansing, MI
Other bands: locals



The Scene Metropolis was a small art gallery, a filler date to keep us busy and making money while the headliners took a day to do something important. It was cold and dark and the people of Lansing all seemed to be shuttering themselves in from the freezing November temps.

We ate our fast food and drank our secret booze in a back room, sitting on the floor amid a pile of amps and guitars.

Loneliness was coupled with the omniscient cold air. Warm companionship was, in theory, a phone call away. Except it wasn't. There was always work. There was always sleep. I made what friends I could but on the road it was always single-serving-style, people who always wanted to talk about records and band gossip and things I was already sick of, and then we'd be off and never see them again. Or see them the following year, and to them no time had passed but to us it was an uncomfortable game of place-the-face-as-face-as-you-can-before-the-message-board-posts-about-how-you're-an-arrogant-asshole-start-appearing.

I shied away from the girls. Only gave them as much attention as needed to try to get them to buy an album. I flirted at times, but it was always with a goal in mind, a goal that did not involve clothes strewn on an apartment floor and a profound feeling of remorse the next day. Given our penchant for holing up in hotel rooms on this run, that situation would rarely present itself as an opportunity to be denied.

We played on a small stage along the wall, through the kind of PA we had cut our teeth on. Small Peavey mains held aloft on spindly stems and connected to a single beer cooler-shaped amp.

A thin horseshoe of people arced around us as we played. It was fun being up that close again, being able to touch people and look into their eyes without having to leap across a six-foot gulf to the barricades. It was hard to tell if these were "our" people or not, if they had come specifically to see us or had just stopped in for something to do that night. It was somehow locked in my brain that a show of true appreciation could only involve heartfelt singalongs and lilty dances and pileups of the first order. It rarely occurred to me that other people might enjoy live music the same way I might, which was to stand idly back in the shadows. We were never really a crowd-participation band, so I don't know what I was ever expecting.