CJ, 1/23/2013, HNS

I'm feeling hollow this morning. It is because I'm thinking about how I spend about 20-40 hours per week learning, practicing, rehearsing, and performing music...plus many more hours distracted when I ought to be doing my day job researching music...and no matter how hard I work or how much I care, nearly without exception...performances do not go well. I mean, they go OKAY...but there's always more flubbed notes than in rehearsal, there's always some sound issue that makes things sound sub-par, or there's some total technical breakdown. It is just disappointing to work so hard and for the final product to nearly always come up short. I'm bummed.

So last night CJ played a happy hour show at HNS. Two sets...just us on the bill. We haven't had a Pixies show since last August. RS has been struggling with a sinus infection for like 6 weeks, and he just got his full voice back a week or so ago. Our last rehearsal went really well. I was looking forward to the show.

It was sparsely attended...until later on...but I think the bar was filling up because of some "Nerd Night" event that was to happen after our show. I have conflicted feelings about a sanctioned "Nerd Night" event. Not to be a snob, but if you didn't attend NMIMT or similar than I bristle a bit at you calling yourself a nerd. I know real nerds...and you, sir, are no nerd. There is some level of "otherness" to being a nerd...so the idea of filling a 400 seat venue with them...I don't know...if felt like the term was being co-opted by the mainstream. Being a nerd can't, by definition, be trendy...ya know? I know I'm being judgmental and a bitch. Maybe these were the true 400 nerds that live in Madison. Not my business. I digress (did I mention that I'm in a bad mood?)

During set up there was some funniness. I couldn't get any sound and at first we thought it was my amp and then a cable and then everything seemed fine except for some buzzing and some vibration sounds.  Shrug. Oh...and RS found out a speaker on his VOX amp was blown. Other weirdness...I was getting lots of microphone shocks...so they gave me an "Afro-Jack" style mic cover and all was well (except it was hard to get used to the cover). Oh and I didn't have any guitar in my monitor, which seemed fine during sound check, but then I realized that I had to stand in front of RS's amp, not to the side, or else this weird sonic thing happened where I was getting all CT and no RS and it made the songs sound unrecognizable.

So we played. I played ok. I was feeling oddly paranoid about forgetting parts...the dread of too much muscle memory. But when you've got almost 70 tunes memorized (well...more than that if you count the tunes I have memorized for other bands) there just comes a point where you worry that your wires will cross and you'll go blank. Just such a thing happened to me during D=RxT.  I was really looking forward to the tune and then when it came I blanked the third note. I probably had 20 shots at figuring it out during the song and missed every single one. What a weird fucking song to forget. Anyway, it was an exercise in getting off the wrong note and trying out others. Bleh.

That said, I felt ok about the first set.

Second set I forgot to take off my tuning mute so missed first few notes of Crackity Jones. Whatever. Something weird happened during Debaser...I think I was right on but maybe RS didn't go to the outro at the right time...I dunno...we fixed it, probably no one noticed. Alec Eiffel sounded horrible to me. We made it through 6 songs and then Nimrod's Son started. Half way through my amp made a loud noise and then I had no sound. The boys kept playing the song. I remember that I had bass during the first chorus...but during the second chorus I sang without bass. The sound guys scrambled.  After some testing the diagnosis was that it was my bass...a loose wire. The sound guys took the bass away to look for solder and I grabbed CT's backup guitar and played it through my amp. We skipped There Goes My Gun and played Hey. No luck finding solder so the sound guys switched me to DI in the house and we did Gigantic.  CT's guitar sounded super distorted through my amp, which I didn't understand because I had no effects on. I wondered if I'd blown my speaker too. It was unbearable so I stopped us a few bars into Bird Dream and had the sound guys put me all DI and in the monitor. The sound was the same. We played BD. It sounded really weird. I was super loud in the monitor and had trouble communicating it to sound guys, so I turned down, which of course annoyed them. After the song I explained to them the situation and they adjusted.

By now we were way over time. We skipped Allison, Wave, Isla, Vamos (CT always gets screwed out of his solo...see the first paragraph above), and dropped Tame. We played Where Is My Mind (sound guys made me sound like an angel on that) and Gouge Away and we were done.

I had two beers during the show, the first I've had in 3 weeks. I do not think this contributed in any negative way to the situation, but it did make me feel like an asshole the whole time (perhaps self-conscious and paranoid a bit) and meant that I didn't sleep all night. I don't like having to second guess if substances are contributing to problems. It's hard to take total responsibility for every thing I say or action I take (because I always feel like I say and do the wrong things)...but that's better than not knowing if I am in control or not. I think that I am always going to have this weird brain fart kind of feeling at a show. It just isn't like rehearsal unfortunately. But better to know that it is just what it is and not something else...if that makes any sense. I shouldn't have drank. That was stupid. I don't think it hurt anything in reality, but I didn't like the way it made me feel.

I think I know what happened to the equipment, but I haven't taken a look yet. Hopefully the amp is fine (though I really think something is loose inside that causes a rattling noise at high volume) and the loose wire in the bass is an easy fix. Lesson learned...always bring a backup instrument.

CT said he wants to debrief about all that went wrong. I get the sense he was struggling last night, though I didn't notice other than him mentioning it. What is there to debrief ABOUT really though? Apparently playing out just sucks. It just isn't as awesome as sitting in a closed room together just the 4 of us.

I feel really discouraged in general at the moment. I plan music to challenge myself and because it is fun. We play these shows though and they nearly always go poorly. They are a pain in the ass logistically and we don't make any money at it. Very few people come out to listen. It just feels like a stupid thing to do, playing out. I've always said that I only play out to force my bands to play to a higher level than people tend to attain if they stay in the basement. But I have two start-up bands that want me to book shows and I feel like...really? Why the fuck would we want to play out?

Sometimes life is just a struggle ya know? Where are we going and what are we doing? And why? And what difference does it make?

The sad footnote to last night's show...it was professionally recorded. What a frickin' waste of 1's and 0's.

Set 1:
Bone Machine
I Bleed
Motorway to Roswell
Navajo Know
Ed is Dead
Build High
Dig for Fire
Letter to Memphis
Dead
Monkey Gone to Heaven
La La Love You
Winterlong
Subbacultcha
D=RxT
Lovely Day
Manta Ray

Set 2:
Crackity Jones
Debaser
Alec Eiffel
Holiday Song
River Euphrates
Here Comes Your Man
Nimrod's Son
There Goes My Gun (skipped for time)
Hey
Gigantic
Bird Dream
Allison (skipped for time)
Wave (skipped for time)
Isla de Encanta (skipped for time)
Vamos (skipped for time)
Where is My Mind
Gouge Away
Tame (skipped for time)