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.

Tomorrow night is our first concert as a three-piece band. I think the three of us are excited, and a little curious to see how everything will work out. Some come out and see us at Jammin Java. The show costs $10, and we should be going on around 10:00 or so; but don’t hold me to that.

I am going to add a little more excitement to the whole concert. I bet $10 that Aaron will NOT know all of the lyrics to the cover song that we are doing tomorrow night. That’s right. If you show up tomorrow and Aaron gets all of the words right to the cover song that we are doing, I will pay for your cover to get into the show! But let me be clear. There is almost no way that Aaron is going to get all the words right. He barely gets the words right to songs that he has written the lyrics for. He has no chance.

Like many people, I felt lost at college. The sudden rush of independence left me unsure of who I was, or what the point of everything was. While lost in this existential abyss, I did some things that I am not proud of, and would prefer not to recount. I think it was sometime in my junior year that I stumbled upon The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. It was then that I accepted Bruce Springsteen as my own personal savior.

Sure, I had heard of him before. I knew the hits, and I was a fan, but it was when I heard that album that I started to truly understand the man’s message. I know that Greetings from Asbury Park would be more appropriate to find on my Road to Damascus, but by the time the Fish Lady appears in “New York City Serenade,” I was a convert. When I finally saw him live for the first time in Milan, San Siro might as well have been a large tent. It was then that I knew I could accept no other musicians before Bruce.

It is because of this fervor that I am so impressed with Win and Regine Butler in this clip. If I were on stage with Bruce and the E Street Band performing one of my songs, I don’t think I would be able to stay conscious.

I would be a lot more like Craig Finn in this clip.

“Musicians, Simon complained, were harder to pin down for meetings than drug dealers.”

I would add that club owners are probably worse than musicians. This quote is from the New Yorker’s profile of David Simon, creator of The Wire. I believe that the final season is starting soon. If you have not been watching, you owe it to yourself to catch up. I guarantee that it is a better show than whatever else you are watching.

Over the course of the past few weeks, Spencer, Charles, and I have blogged more consistently than we had previously at any point. Through this period of time, each has independently taken up a role or blog personality (blogonality? Yeah, that’s right). Spencer writes about the industry, Charles is sort of funny yet somewhat whiny, and I ramble. To counteract this development, I’m going to write a short, concise opinion piece on why we should remain a 3-piece band.

1) It’s easier to get shit done.

Democracies are great, right? Wrong. Fuck that bull-shit. I want an organization where things happen quickly, where people bully each other, and where stalemates are a numeric impossibility. I’d prefer a dictatorship—with me at the top—but there doesn’t seem to be much support for that. A four-piece band ended up with 2-on-2 arguments, overly diplomatic processes (my fault, mostly), and immobility on almost every issue. Adding people would return to that state of things.

2) Addition most often occurs by subtraction

Yes, that makes no sense. But it’s true that some of the great 3-piece bands have more sound and “balls” than 4 piece bands. Four piece bands manage to hide their mistakes by making more noise, but it’s not necessarily useful noise. With a 3 piece, every note has to have meaning and use because every note will be heard clearly. You have to be tight and play hard to make up for having fewer people, and this necessary energy is almost always positive.

3) Fewer people to pay.

$60 divided by four is $15. $60 divided by three is tens of dollars. I would rather make multiple tens of dollars than $15. It’s an economic decision. My fiscal responsibility to myself demands a 3 piece band.

4) My grandmother will give me stuff.

Bayes owned an X-Terra, in which we drove around all of our band stuff. We are now a “compact only” band, or a band that can fit all of our respective cars in a large handicap spot. This is not good for driving stuff around. If we remain a 3 piece, my 88 year old grandmother—who yesterday claimed to be 98—will give me her 1987 Mazda Pick-Up with no cab. It was the first year (and maybe the last) Mazda produced a pick-up, so you know it’s good. In other words, remaining a 3-piece will give me an excuse to take advantage of my grandmother’s senility.

There you go–Four concise arguments in no time at all. I hope you’ve enjoyed my readers-digest style blog. Maybe, because of its brevity, Spencer won’t have to have someone read it to him.

Photo by Flickr user dbking.