Show Journal 2008-10-31
Halloween. We have a long history of dressing up for Halloween. Zombies, skeletons, bloody priests and other bloody delights. This year we figured we’d throw everyone a curve ball and dress as the Blue Man Group. We all had solid black outfits, appropriate bald caps, spirit gum and gobs and gobs of blue makeup. We were stoked because it was 1) totally unexpected for us and 2) should be pretty amusing. On the ride up we meticulously trimmed our bald caps (except for Dave of course who has been prepared for this moment for a few years) and formulated a plan on how and when to complete the transformation upon arrival. We arrived to the club, walked in the door and guess what the drummer for the first band is dressed as? An f-ing blue man. Seriously. Our hearts sank. No bald caps, no blue makeup, no “blukkake” jokes and a waste of $50. The guy was nice enough but he single handedly sank our big plan and we chose to resort to plan B which was to predictably just douse ourselves in fake blood. I guess we could have gone through with it, but we didn’t want to be those guys who were second on stage to be blue. The show itself was pretty solid. Aside from being a Halloween show it was also the wedding reception for our friends Jay and Jolene who were nice enough to invite us to play. Honestly we didn’t see a whole lot of the first few bands as we had a congratulatory bombshell dropped on us by Kevin and Sam who revealed that their decision to dress as Bleeker and Juno had a special meaning behind it! Our long time friend and old drummer Bryan made it out as well as well as Chris, Al, Todd and a few others. Another highlight of the evening was playing “I’ll give up a dollar if you stand in the bathroom for 30 seconds”. Everyone failed. Some things at that club never change. We went on pretty late and after three months off it was nice to play again. Real nice. In fact I’d go so far as to say this was one of the best shows we’ve ever played in the past year or two. If you were in attendance you may or may not agree with that assessment but with all the drama of the last few months, including finishing up the CD artwork, production, van problems, the show cancellations, Justin’s knee problems and the late nights of practice this show felt extra good for us. We opened with a cover of ‘Halloween’ and kept it to a full set of monster songs which we can now finally do. We thought we got everyone moving but were quickly shown up by The Schmidfits who treated everyone to a full set of Misfits covers plus a few extras. I was a little bummed they opened with ‘Halloween’ but they quickly redeemed themselves by played some of the faster Misfits songs off of Earth A.D. Very cool set. Anyway, if you need to be thanked for this evening pat yourself on the back. Congrats to Jay and Jolene as well as Kevin and Sam!