No Stage Too Small April 4
The Rock and Roll Hotel is a very cool place. It’s the 1st time I’d ever been there, and I was impressed with the whole lay-out. We are grateful to those of you who came out last night. All in all it was a pretty good show, and I was very appreciative of how vocal our support seemed. People were good and loud, clapping and “woo,woo”-ing after the songs. As for the club, you can hear very well on stage, a stark difference from most clubs we play. Unfortunately, we could tell from the clear sound that we played sloppy as hell. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t our best show.
Several problems arise on a stage like Rock and Roll Hotel. First of all, the stage is a bit larger than most of the stages we play. I’ve grow to find small stages a comfort. Frankly, I don’t know what the hell to do with myself with all that space. The stage was made a little bit smaller by Robber on High Streets equipment (standard practice), but it still seemed too big for me.
Secondly, there is a bit of an aura on that stage. I’ve played on some bigger stages before (most notably the Recher Theatre), but you feel a bit special at that place becuase so many good bands have played there. At the beginning of the set I was feeling profoundly mediocre. I think we’d all agree that our older stuff is growing a little stale, and we front-loaded our set with old stuff. It will be nice to phase some of that stuff out and continue to write new a better music, though I will always want to play “Toe the Line” and “Strike Up the Band”….okay, so it’s only “Don’t See it Coming” that I don’t think suits us anymore.
So it is back to the rcording table to continue work on the mixing.
Tom Apr 4
I’ve gotta disagree on “Don’t See It Coming”. It’s too early to say since I haven’t seen your new stuff played much yet, but it seems safe to say that it’s your biggest crowd-pleaser, as that night at Velvet with the cancelled 9:30 show proves. Besides you guys have reworked it several times, and consistently manage to imbue it with urgency — I still find it interesting whenever you play it. I know you probably find it a little boring as a song at this point, but that has just pushed you to invest more energy into the performance of it.
Honestly, I’d say “Strike Up The Band” is the most marginal live song you’ve got right now. Not that it isn’t a good song — it is, and it works wonderfully to close out the first EP (if I remember right) — but it takes a long time to develop and consequently it’s really tough to work into the pacing of your set. It either kills the crowd’s energy or ends the set on a down note. Although putting it near or at the very front of the set like you guys did last night works pretty well to get people in an increasingly rockin’ frame of mind.
Aaron Apr 4
Huh. That’s very interesting. Part of my problem with the song is that I feel like we play it flat, but that doesn’t seem to be the case from your perspective. It always astounds me how different things are in the audience.
Furthermore, in my mind that song is a bit too pop for the direction we’re heading. But it’s also funny how those things go: those who write the song are probably the least qualified to determine what genre it fits in. Maybe it is more interesting than I give it credit for, but from a chord/melody perspective it’s probably our least complex. I guess the dynamics make it more interesting, but that’s hard to sense from the stage.
This brings me back to a point I made several posts ago: we do not yet know what we are good at. We are not particularly good at self-evaluation, but that’s not because we don’t try. Actually, it’s quite the opposite. Our tendency towards over-analysis makes us incapable of being objective since we’re always examining things from too close a proximity. We should get better at that.