Phew! Finally a few minutes to post.
The last few weeks have been pretty nuts – my band had it’s first show(which was great, more on that in a moment), it was finals week at school, I drove 16 hours home, and I’ve gone out every day since I’ve been home on Tuesday. Now that I’m home, g27 was really screwed up, my email wasn’t working, and I moved to a new host that is right here in Chicago. The transition over here was pretty rough because my content management system kept crashing my host’s server when I would run a certain process. I soon figured out that it was due to some 0 byte cgi files in the archives folder that it was encountering and not knowing what to do with. So I fixed that up, and to kick off the new host in style, I made a supa-cool new top image for you all to enjoy. The picture of me is from a photo shoot that my homey Paul did of me and Aaron, so I’ll be putting up some new pics in the gallery soon. What do you think of the new image?
So my band finally(ha! we’ve been together like 2 months total) got our first show. We have a profile on Myspace and the booking manager of the Oriental Theatre emailed me on it and said “Hey, I like your sound. Wanna play on the 21st?” Hell yeah we wanna play! Our first gig and we didn’t even have to go looking for it – it came to us! Awesome. The Oriental is this old movie theater built in the 20s – it was a great venue. It turned out that we would be one of six bands playing that night, and we weren’t even the first opener! We found out that all the other bands we were playing with were made up of high school kids (for the most part), and the first band’s drummer got grounded so they had to do an all-acoustic set! It was very funny and very sad. Were all totally psyched about the show, but we had to sell our own tickets! They were only $5 so it wasn’t exactly a hard sell, but it was just before finals week and a lot of people were busy. We sold them to friends, family, anyone we could think of. Jon and I walked around almost every floor of every dorm on campus telling people about our band and selling tickets. We wore our Halloween costumes – I was in a suit (I still have no idea what exactly I was) and Jon was in his red ninja outfit, made to fit an 8 year old, complete with nunchucks. Awesome. It turned out that we sold more tickets than the promoter had given us to sell- 100+ – so before the show we all stood outside with a “To The Rescue Will Call” list. We sold more tickets than every other band there, all 5, including the headliner! At our first show! It was such a great feeling to know that the majority of the people coming to the theatre were there to see us.
Finally, the day of the show came. We were all really excited and I personally couldn’t wait to hit the stage. We got to the venue and our people started rolling in. The place was pretty empty until we got on stage and there were a ton of people there. We soundchecked quickly and started our set. We’re playing, and we all realize that the sound guy SUCKS at setting levels – we couldn’t hear the guitars in our monitors at all – the only thing any of us could really hear was drums so that sucked. Everyone in the audience said that everything sounded great (the levels for our monitors and the crowd speakers are totally independent of each other) but we made a few minor timing mistakes on stage because we couldn’t hear each other at all. We asked our friends who had heard us play (big shoutout to Dustin, high ten!) and they said they didn’t hear any mistakes. Considering the circumstances, we kicked ass. I put all the pictures in a new gallery. Thanks to Paul for coming along and snapping some SICK shots of us – he’s gonna come to all our shows and take pictures for us!
Finals weren’t too bad – I won’t bore you with the specifics. I did great. End of story.
The night before I headed for home, I saw two of my favorite bands live – The Starting Line and Yellowcard baby! They both rocked the house. The opener was Heymike! and they were great. Kenny, the lead singer of Starting Line, is in his awkward gangley teenager phase, it’s hilarious. Shawn from Yellowcard is from Denver so they played for almost 2 hours! I hope to someday tour with them.
Driving home from Denver wasn’t too bad – it was 16 hours over two days and I stayed overnight in Omaha like I always do. I’ve discovered that standup comedy CDs are much better to listen to than music during long drives… they keep your attention away from the long, boring road significantly better. Go get David Cross’s album, “Shut Up, You F*cking Baby”. You won’t be disappointed.
Since I’ve been home, I’ve actually been in the house maybe 8 hours besides sleeping. I’ve already gone out with Josh, Carley, Colin Dave Jeff and Alex, and Ed and Xaq. Freaking awesome. It’s great to be home, but there are things I miss about Denver. Oh well, I’ve gotta enjoy my break and write some new songs! The venue booking guy thought we rocked so hard that he wants us back in February to put together our own show. We’re either going to headline, or get a band like Zebrahead or Relient K to come play and we’ll open for them! More to come soon.
Listening to: Motion City Soundtrack – Modern Chemistry
