The City Veins

I thought I would give you all a heads up. We are going to be bother the hell out of you for the next six weeks, or so, about the release of our new CD, “Cracks in the Floor.” It will happen on June 6th at Iota. We are playing with Yell County and Julie Ocean. I think that all three bands are releasing a CD on that date, so bring your wallet. It should be a really good show, and I am currently trying to line up some surprises as well.

Now all I have to do is make sure that the damn thing is done on time.

So after much wrangling, several fistfights, and the almost dissolution of The City Veins, we have a title for our upcoming EP:

“Cracks in the Floor”

There it is people.  If you have thoughts or comments, we welcome them as long as they are of the “Huzzah, boys, I really love it” variety.  If you don’t have anything nice to say about it, please listen to your mother and don’t say anything at all.  Our grip on the peace that this name has brought is tenuous at best, and I fear that re-opening the name debate will only send Charles further down his self-abusive, drunken shame spiral.

( j/k Charles - maybe.)

I neglected to mention something stupid that I did a couple weeks ago, and there have been many good opportunities to say it.  However, I was just reminded when I looked over at my fridge, where the evidence now clings to a magnet readin “Ticket Alternative”.

So playing a show in which tickets are sold on the internet is a pretty big deal.  Now I know almost every club on the planet will sell tickets through a variety of outlets these days, but it still feels as if you are on par with much larger bands.  Last week you could go on-line to buy tickets to Pimlico, or to see The City Veins.  That’s where my brain is coming from on this.

So, wanting to see my name in the big headlights, I bought tickets to my own show.  Not just one or two, but four.  My thinking at the time was that I would get them framed as the 1st tickets this band had been on.  The last band Charles and I were in, Roosevelt Roosevelt, did a lot of really interesting things but was very poor at documenting them.  This time I wanted to scrapbook everything, and this was a major step.

The tickets came in the mail, and we weren’t on them.  Big, beautiful, blue tickets with the name “Robber on High Street” and then blank space; that’s what I got.  So my intention was to give them to my girlfriend Rachel, but I forgot.  It’s just like I was high, but I was not.  Just an idiot.

So here they sit.  I hope the club reads this post so they can see that not only did we play the show for free, but that we actually paid $40 to play the show.

Most saturday afternoons the band gets together to practice, discuss band matters, or play with arts and crafts.  We are basically a glorified kindergarten class, though we don’t require as much supervision or take as many naps.  The enduring quote from the past weekend went something like this:

I am way too sober to be working with a knife–Charles

We had just bought nearly $100 worth of paint to get all Jackson Pollock, making posters to promote future shows that we have yet to book.  Charles job was to cut out a stecil of me playing the bass to be spray-painted on to the top section of each poster.  Though I have no first-hand knowledge of how difficult this is, it certainly looked like an arduous process.  And, like all activities that require precission and a steady hand, Charles required alcohol in order to function properly.  Now I’ve never seen Charles get the shakes, but I’ve also never seen Charles without a beer so late in the day.  So we got Charles his “blanky”, and he continued to do the lords work.

Arts and crafts began as an activity intended to avoid the processes that every band seems to take as a natural matter of fact:  promo pictures.  We wanted to avoid poses, frolicking in a field while a photographer catches us in the act, or having our silhouttes turned into a poster.  We’ve all made these mistakes before.  So instead we paint random shit, throwing paint around with our hands or any household item we find in our shed that we no longer care about.  Not one of us is a trained visual artist, but for that fact we seem to come up with some pretty decent stuff.  Spencer will literally try anything to put paint on a poster.  Charles poured some paint, swung the poster up and down to get a streaking effect, and flipped green paint all over his face.  It was awesome.  It was the band version of Porky’s Bikini Carwash.  If Charles had just knotted off his shirt to show his mid-drift….

Now Spencer is painting-insane.  Maybe it triggered some serene memory from his childhood–Spencer’s Rosebud–or maybe he just really likes the smell of acrylic, but Spencer now wants us to paint everything.  So now we’re thinking of different things we can paint.  Look out for limited edition EP’s, painted by the band.  I think it’s a neat idea, really for the super-fan.  Our parents–who I imagine are the only people who will buy both versions–can put the painted EP’s on the fridge next to my 2nd grade self portrait in which I mis-spelled my own name.  Though we might be getting older, we certainly remain young at heart.  Except Charles didn’t drink in second grade.  Well, maybe.

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.