28 May 2009

2nd Worst Show Ever

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Some folks are under the mistaken impression that my band, The Alphabet, is famous. To disprove this misconception, consider the following:

  • Last night, we, The Alphabet, played a concert in Pasadena, Maryland, at a restaurant called Cheeseburger in Paradise. It was, in fact, a weekly Wednesday night Battle of the Bands.

  • We got this show because I am our manager, and for a number of reasons, not least of which is procrastination, I didn't start booking our tour 'til a month before we were supposed to play it, and this Battle of the Bands at Cheeseburger in Paradise was what we could get.

  • The other two bands were called Harmsway and Less than Zero. Harmsway was a metal cover band. Less than Zero was a classic rock cover band. They were both local.

  • We played last, after Less than Zero's set. We noticed as they were tearing down that they were taking the PA with them. This worried us, as we don't have a PA. Even if we did we couldn't fit it in the station wagon.

  • Upon frantically questioning the woman who had been announcing the bands, we learned that the venue DID have its own PA, but that it had no microphones or mic stands.

  • Parker unearthed one microphone from his bass case.

  • Forest taped it to the cymbal stand.

  • We then remembered that we didn't have an extra 1/4" cable for the keyboard, and furthermore that when we'd tried to use a borrowed one at our show the previous night, it kept cutting out and we ended up mic'ing the piano speakers, which worked just fine.

  • Except this venue didn't have any more microphones.

  • One of the members of Less than Zero kindly loaned us a microphone and mic stand.

  • We began to sound check and discovered that both the PA speakers were blown.

  • We had no way to amplify either the piano or my voice, other than the built-in piano speakers.

  • We turned the piano up all the way, and I shouted, and Forest and Parker played very quietly.



So. The end. We made $20 in CD sales. Eight people had come exclusively to see us, which was actually quite impressive. In conclusion, we are not yet rockstars. But we will be soon.

[P.S. The worst show ever was in Kent, Ohio. The only audience members were the other band.]

3 comments:

  1. back when i was in highschool, one of our local bands was called "less than zero" !

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  2. Hah. Yeah, we also discovered that there were about 4905847609 bands called Harmsway when we tried to find them on MySpace.

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  3. "Fuck microphones!" It was amazing anyway and talent-wise you deserve to be famous. The reason you're not yet is most people like bad music. Others haven't found you yet. I wish I realized you would have Starlet Scarlet with you. I want to buy ittt!
    Do you ever want a label? It's clearly a matter of not wanting one rather than can't get one, so I assume the reason is to avoid bullshit.

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