Show Journal 2000-07-12
Those of you who came out to the show tonight know that we dedicated our set to our friend Myong who passed away recently. Dave said some nice words about him at the show and rather than repeat it all, I just wanted to remind everyone that you should always make the time to stop and just enjoy the time you spend with your friends, family and the people you love. Friendships and families can’t always last forever, but your memories can. Later Myong, we all miss you. Thanks for listening … ok, here’s the show review. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to play a really good show. We’ve played some big shows in the past for some ok sized crowds, but I mean a big show with a national touring band who you actually look up to. Well, after almost 7 years of watching and wishing we finally scored the incredibly rare and elusive “really good show.” We got to open for All! If you don’t know All maybe you’ve heard of the Descendents? If you don’t know them just stop reading now. (What’s funny is that I actually remember Dave and I listening to All for the first time back in ’91 with Bryan … too bad he couldn’t be here for this!!!). So here we are all these years later playing with (and I apologize for having to use this phrase) one of our musical influences. Needless to say I think we were all a little nervous before the show. In fact at one point Justin was actually shaking. I think it was excitement more than anything. Case in point — when we walked in with our stuff to set up the bass player for All was sitting in the back of the club. I’m trying to act all cool and pretending like it’s no big deal and continue to unload our stuff. As soon as he leaves I find that I have somehow turned into a 12 year old girl who just saw N’Sync for the first time. I’m running down the hallway towards the others saying “Oh my god it’s Karl Alvarez” … “Oh my god it’s Bill Stevenson.” … “Oh my god look at their guitar amps” … “Oh my god did you see the drum set” …. “omigod omigod omigod.” I was by far the worst off but I did get a few glimpses of the others being star struck as well. I caught Jim staring at the All drum set a few times. At one point Justin had to move one of Stephen’s guitar amps and he looked like he could have been handling the Mona Lisa while he was moving it. Dave held out on the cool guy routine the longest, but the brother was hungry, so you got to be cool when you got burgers on the mind. The show went great. I thought we played well. Everyone seemed to like us, we got a lot of compliments and even got to sign a few things! A bunch of people bought our CD which was even better! The highlight though was when two of the guys from All told us we “rocked.” Amen. The crowd liked us, the other bands liked us, and at least half of All said something positive about us. From there on out the rest of the evening was as perfect. Special thanks to Zack for helping with shirts, Thrasher for the show and the sound guy for finally deciding not to kick us off the show!