Troutmouth Goes Down in Flames
Well, Troutmouth was more or less tricked into our first live show at a Halloween party of a friend’s, and I have to say my first experience performing for a crowd was an unprecedented failure. Let’s go over the events of that fateful night:
The guy that was throwing the party rented a hall, actually acquired a special limited alcohol license (basically a BYOB license for a large-scale party), and held a big fat costume party with live music. The format was simple: Leave the equipment set up and bands rotate, playing a couple songs at a time all night. Well, we decided that since it was mostly friends it wouldn’t matter that a couple of our songs don’t have lyrics yet, or that a couple songs are very new and still rough around the edges. I also decided it would be a good ice breaker for me to get used to playing in front of an audience.
Well, I learned of the show about 2 weeks in advance, and it just so happens that my job requires you to request time off two weeks in advance. Amazingly, though I was a couple days short of the two weeks, my Saturday off was approved. Unfortunately, about four days later, we learned the show was ACTUALLY on a Friday, and it was too late/too much hassle to bug my boss and switch the Saturday to a Friday off. Our first plan was to not play, but then we decided the party was probably running late enough that we could get a couple songs in late, even before midnight (I get off at 10PM). So 10PM rolls around and our drummer is waiting out front to run me to my house to grab my bass and head out to the show. When we arrived, I immediately noticed there were a LOT more cars than I was expecting. We were told this was kinda a “private” party, and that we’d mostly be playing for friends, but friends tell friends and they tell their friends…eventually you got a pretty good size crowd. Of total strangers. I was a little intimidated until we pulled up and got out and I saw that the party was basically a dud. The band that was playing right before us is one of the most popular in town, and even THEY weren’t getting a response. I could tell this wasn’t going to be easy. Fortunately, Bonnie came to the party as Little Red Riding Hood, and she had a magical bottomless basket full of beer. We met up and I immediately cracked one open, hoping to relax before we played. She asked “Are you nervous?” and confidently I replied, “What? No.”
I guess the moment I realized I was lying was when I went to take the second drink of my beer and the can was empty. I immediately grabbed another, thinking that if I drank two beers fast enough I might just be comfortable enough to play. The band before us had finished, so I didn’t have much time anyway. Terrified, I watched as the previous band packed up their stuff and Shawn went to his car to get his guitar to begin setting up. It was close to 11PM at this point, and the party was dying early. Only about 40 people remained inside, with another group of about 20 smoking out front. I was already self-concious, and I was just setting up. Since they were leaving all the equipment set up, we were playing on unfamiliar (and very different sounding) amps, and Justin (our drummer) was playing on somebody else’s kit. Shawn and I tuned, and while he set up his pedals, etc, I asked Justin “Hey, can you get sick on that set?” Justin said “What? Of course.” I guess the moment I realized he was lying was when he went to actually prove to me how sick he could get on the kit and played an extremely simple beat. The kit had about 8 times as many toms as Justin normally uses, but probably half as many cymbals. He messed around on it for a bit, and the combination of the bored, disinterested crowd, the foreign equipment, and the fact that I had never played in front of people was really starting to set in. I wanted to grab another beer from Bonnie’s basket, but for some reason was too terrified to move. I glanced up a couple times to see Bonnie and Shawn’s girlfriend MALLROY smiling and waving at me, and it just made me all the more self-concious. I started plucking a little bit, terrified that I would play the wrong notes on songs we had run through a million times before. Well, I’ll go ahead and spoil the punchline now: I did.
Shawn turned the mic on and asked “Are we good to go?” The guy running the party gave us the go-ahead, and Shawn began a little bullshitting. He says “Well, this party has died, so fuck it: We’re playing a full set.” In the back of my head I thought “No, Shawn…4 songs…just…3 songs…” (Nevermind that our “full set” is only about 10 songs, and on an adrenaline rush can be blasted through in about 25 minutes) But he had already started playing the song we normally start out with. It’s an intro comprised mostly of feedback and scratching on the guitar (which we refer to ‘the whale noises’) and the bass doesn’t come in for a while. Frozen solid, I just watched Shawn, dreading the moment when I came in. Well, the intro goes directly into the song, and when we had all come in, I realized there weren’t really any monitors, and I could not hear Shawn at all. I kinda stayed in place by following Justin and watching Shawn’s hands, but it was clear that Justin could not hear either of us. Desperately trying to concentrate on Shawn’s hands, I invariably played a couple wrong notes, which scared me even more. When the song ended, there was sporadic cheering from the audience, but I didn’t dare look up to see who was actually clapping and/or whooping. I stayed focused on my fretboard. The first song was kinda a test run, and some final adjustments were made to the amps/PA, but I could still just barely hear Shawn, and with Justin even further behind us, I’m sure he could hear even less of both of us. Staying together was based solely on how well we knew the songs.
The real trouble began several songs in, when I realized I was concentrating entirely too hard on my bass. You know when you hear a word a bunch of times and it begins to lose its meaning, becoming a comical nonsensical word? That’s basically what happened with my bass playing…minus the comical part. I realized sweat was dripping off my forehead, and that my hands had developed a thick sweaty sheen as well. The fingers holding my pick became extremely slippery, and my focus had to be diverted from the fretboard to making sure my sweaty fingers didn’t let my pick fall. I was soon mesmerized by the way my strings looked in the light, and eventually I quit picking so much as just rubbing the pick on the string. Panicking, I tried to correct my picking, but my brain wasn’t letting my fingers work correctly. I could not keep the picking perpendicular to the string, and could not understand why. All the while, the hand on the fretboard had become so slippery, the neck of my bass began to feel like it was bending; as if my bass was slooooowly melting in my hands all together. All-in-all, the entire experience transcended surreal into an almost all-out hallucinogenic, throat-clawing panic attack, though I was too terrified to show my fear.
The entire show was spent looking down at my bass except for moments where I lost my place (to my credit, I wasn’t the only one fucking up; both Shawn and Justin made several mistakes as well…mostly because of our inability to hear each other). I would then briefly glance up, share a look of concern with a bandmate, correct the problem on the fly, then fix my gaze back on my melting bass.
To compound the problems, we’re all very aware that Troutmouth is the type of band that generally most people aren’t going to “get” anyway. You know when a band lists their “influences”, and it spans every genre of music, regardless of whether or not those “influences” can actually be heard in their music? Well we’ve managed to join a bizarre hodge-podge of country, punk, surf, thrash, metal, and prog rock in unholy matrimony which we have unofficially dubbed several things, one of which being “Viking-core”. Several songs are full of in-jokes, or are just plain jokes, and I think we would do a pretty good job of alienating even the most welcoming audience.
The highlight of the night surprisingly ended up being our cover of Black Flag’s “Six Pack”, during which the second mic stand was stolen from us, and several people in the audience joined in unison to scream “SIX PACK!!” at the end of every line. Unfortunately, right at the end of the song, I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I think in the chaos Shawn played an extra verse. Keep in mind he had been drinking for nearly 3 hours before I even showed up.
After the show, I was literally shell-shocked. Bonnie and I left early and I stared straight ahead on the entire ride home, without saying a word. It felt like I had been there for about 5 minutes. Fortunately, I heard afterwards that pretty much everybody that played that show didn’t sound good, and that the party was basically dead from the get-go. I have yet to decide if this performance did its job as my ‘ice breaker’, or was more counterproductive in that it ruined my opinion of live shows early.
Oi…
October 30th, 2005 at 6:38 pm
What a pussy…sorry dude, you’re a pussy.
October 30th, 2005 at 6:49 pm
Hmmmm…sounds like something TIM would say…but this guy’s name is clearly miT. Who would say such terrible things? I guess I’ll never know…
November 29th, 2005 at 1:20 am
Jesus fucking christ, no one can magnify tiny little moments the way you do… I can vouch for the fact that everyone there minus the NA people had been drinking for about 4 hours before you played and were probably unable to even discern individual chords/notes/people/songs for ANY band. Lighten up man…
November 29th, 2005 at 1:51 am
Good show by the way… not that I could hear individual notes/chords or really see straight at the time.