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Diary of a glamourous band
5 August : Going going gone
The day after a gig I always feel like there has been some sort of massive change in the universe only to look around and find that the world has gone on as normal. No major continental shifts, no publicized NASA pics of alien life forms, no rainbow across the sky...almost a let down.
Friday was a lot of fun. No nervous jitters before the show; no butterflies. That was really strange considering that I was playing keyboards for the first time live. Mind you, when I say "playing keyboards" I mean more ambient chords (and sometimes only notes) than actual rapid succesion anything. It went great. I even impressed Germán with the crazy inversions I was coming up with at the beginning of Smitten. The only hitch was my vast inability to change patches with any degree of subtlety...and sometimes not at all.
Our cover of Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic was a very Tracey Thorn meets Sting on cocaine. A very warbling/screaming experience: quite the crowd pleaser (Ee-yo-oh). Our stuff always goes down well, though I often think people are trying to think where they've heard it before...thinking it's some famous stuff they may have heard on the radio. They're right, of course, just in the future. Wild enthusiasm for Sweet Dreams (are made of this), and a surprising rush of fervent applause for the improv version of Low Rider with over-blown flute.
Surprises all around in the area of attendance. Linguacenter attendees (Thanks Mary Jo, Veronique, Ron, Susi) were better represented than Paul and Sheila's much appreciated appearance at the last one. All told, I think we had around 70 people there...getting better.
Will we play there again? Yes, but in September.
For now we're scouting new frontiers as much for August as for the fall. With any luck we can get our butts up to the Netherlands in October for the European Musician Conference. Now if I can just figure out how to get into these indie music festivals, we'll be cooking.
29 July : Plans for Friday
Last Thursday I cashed in some Karma chips and we got a gig. A friend of a student opened a bar with her husband two weeks ago. We went and gave said friend a copy of the disc along with our hard sell about what phenomenal performers we are. (Modesty never got anyone anywhere; besides if you tell them you're "okay", they think you must suck big time.) Silence. No word for days. So I called and spoke to the husband half.
Lis "Hi, I'm Lis I left a disc last Friday"
Esteban "Who? When? I haven't listened to any disc"
L "Umm, I gave it to your wife"
E "Oh, well, she hasn't said anything to me. Just a second, there's an orange disc here Many lifetimes of practice. Is that it?
L "That's the one"
E "Oh, well I can put it on here after the Springsteen finishes."
L "Hmm, I don't know how well we go down after the Boss, but hey, sure. You see, we have ALL THESE FANS that want to hear us and you have a new bar that needs clients. We could be very helpful to one another."
E "True, true. But if you have all your equipment, that would be a higher fee, and I don't know that our budget would match what you want to be paid."
L "How about if we swing round to the bar tonight and talk about it calmly over a few beers?"
E "Sounds great."
And thus do we have a gig Friday August 3rd.
The bar is two floors. The ground floor is a Scottish Tavern and the basement is an Irish Pub. This creates MASSIVE confusion when printing up posters as the two floors have different names. Yes, they are owned by the same people, but they gave them two entirely different names. Don't ask me. But Esteban is planning to have Fridays be live music night, I personally am hoping for Fridays to be Glammest night, but we'll see how tickled he is after the first show.
12 July : Sala El Sol
Great gig, horrible dressing room.
The first of what we hope to be many gigs as "Glammest", the day was fraught with both magic and mayhem. From doubts about whether Jay's snare stand was going to give out under the pressure (he belongs to the firing squad decibel school of drumming), to doubts about whether we were going to have to kill our synth player directly (he forgot both the video camera and the synth support), to doubts about whether the many people who promised to show actually would. Actual attendance was around fifty, with thirty-two paying members of the public for a venue with a capacity of 300. Lots of elbow room out there.
The magic was actually warming them up. As any sociologist (or bar owner) knows: the more space there is between the people in your crowd, the harder it is to get them to rock. They weren't exactly slam dancing out there, but they were showing some great enthusiasm.
Also under the magic heading would be our drummer Jay. He was a ROCK. I suspected this in spite of his modesty, but his playing live was so solid and so tight that all involved have been open mouthed admirers ever since. Oh, and the snare stand did indeed hold up, by the way.
Sound man Willy (very Scorpio) was very professional and efficient, even if I did find my mic mysteriously at a different height between sound check and concert time...hmmm. Liason Julio was an underhanded creep. Why they bothered to fax us a contract to sign stating that the sound would be shut down at 2am only to say on the day of the show that, oh, well, we actually meant 1:30am, those darned office staff...is completely beyond me. Further acts of insecthood on Julio's part was to inform us every 5 minutes before the show of how few people we had outside. Not nice.
The dressing rooms were the biggest headache producer. Think: all the majestic beauty of subway bathroom art with the added aesthetic bonus of medium yellow painted walls. A really soothing pre-show moment.
But, in the end we got it on video, though you couldn't even tell we have ANYONE in the crowd if it weren't for the background noise on the tape, it still captured some great moments. For my part, I was very happy with the singing, in spite of a few well placed yodels, and I even managed to come up with a little flute ditty for Sticky girl. Not bad at all. And lots of fun.
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NEXT GIG ALERT:
(Still trolling; check back soon)
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