The City Veins

When my roommate called me yesterday to tell me that someone had broken into our apartment, I should have known that our debut concert as a trio might not be triumphant. At least nothing was stolen from my apartment.

I got to Aaron and Spencer’s place and we loaded up our equipment in our small cars. It turns out that we can transport all of our equipment in two cars! This might not seem like a big deal, but we lost a nice big car along with a guitarist. While he was certainly more valuable to us than the car…it was nice to have that car.

So we got to the venue, unloaded, and then started the long process of trying not to go crazy in the 2.5 hours before we were supposed to play. This is really more of a skill than anything else, particularly when Aaron is jabbering nonsense in my ear for most of the wait. Personally, I think I should be congratulated for not getting drunk, because getting drunk seemed like a really good idea at the time.

Let me say that Jammin’ Java is kind of a weird place. It is a coffee shop/bar/music venue/recording studio, and amazingly enough, it does all of those things really well. It is the nicest place we have played, and probably will be the nicest place we will play for a while. Also, I got a good BLT with a salad.

So the first band, Wonderjack, went on and amazingly enough they:

1) Have a bassist that went to high school with Aaron and I, and graduated with Adam’s brother.
2) A guitarist who is named Charles Gray! He goes by Charlie, which was my nickname growing up, although I spelled it with a much cooler -ey instead of -ie.

The second band of the night was Zelos. I don’t usually do this, but I really have to quote from the influences section of their MySpace page.

“Any music that strikes a chord of emotion common to humanity and stirs the soul with individual originality. OK, Ok…. U2, Coldplay, John Mayer, Dave Matthews, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beethoven, Chopin, Bach, Brahms, etc. etc.”

Isn’t that pretty fantastic. You know what is more fantastic? Bands that can get their shit off stage in a timely manner.

So we finally got on stage only to find out that our guitar amplifier wasn’t working. It was making noise, but very quietly. This surprised us, mainly because it is the bass amp that has been acting funny recently. I was prepared for the bass amp to not work. The guitar amp had been fine, but alas. The sound guy was nice enough to loan us his guitar amp. After we got everything set up, the sound guy asked if we could cut a song because it was starting to get late. I also heard last call right before we started. This is never a good sign.

Our performance was fine. We are still getting use to having three members. For example, Aaron and I split the stage in two with the bass on one side and the guitar on the other. When we swapped instruments, we also swapped sides. Unfortunately, Jammin’ Java has a nice big stage that felt very empty with just the three of us. I still like our idea of switching sides, and I think it will work better in the smaller venues that we usually play, but the stage felt like it was missing something.

As for the crowd. Thanks to everyone who came out. At one point Aaron observed that “40% of the audience is named Stephanie.” This should tell you that Aaron knew everyone who was there, and the crowd was small enough that Aaron could do the math inside of his feeble mind. It is a little disheartening to see that small a crowd, particularly after the last month. Still, as long as there is one person there, it is better than a concert I had with my old band. Promoting shows is something that we are not very good at. We just have to resolve to do better.

As for the bet; we cut the cover for time reasons, so it is a push. That said, Aaron was listening to the song repeatedly on the drive to Jammin’ Java and I am confident that he would NOT have gotten the words right. Actually, before we left Aaron claimed to have the lyrics “pretty much down.” I asked him to recite them, and he just gave me a stare. That was actually the best part of the whole day.

Photo taken from Flickr user joelogon.