Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Easy Money, Wild Times, and Hot Women! (Or Lack Thereof)

Date: Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Venue: Denim and Diamonds, shithole cowpoke bar to which we swore never to come back after playing our first show there, Temple TX
Bands: PainFilledSilent, Hexlust, Zero and Falling.

Yes it's a bit late (a week actually). Here is the long-awaited blog detailing Hexlust's second show! I've been busy in the past week; instead of being able to knock this out in one sitting, I've been having to make a daily visit to a saved Microsoft Word file in the small window of time I have between school, work, band practice, social life, and this fucking site.

Anywho! Second show. Two months in the making. In that amount of time we've managed to get one original song show-ready (the just-when-you-thought-this-damn-song-was-over-we're-doing-sixteen-measures-of-solo opus "Tombs of the Blind Dead") with a couple more on the burner. In this time we've also been fine-tuning our covers, watching footage from the first show and laughing amidst good company and great pizza, and getting ready for two prospective Halloween shows that never happened. Yay.

So here's how it all went down!

PRE-SHOW
I know in the last blog I had a preparation section, but this time it wasn't as interesting. I'll sum it all up: I warmed up all day and broke my shit down. JT and James showed up around 6-ish, we left at 7:30. There ya go.

So we get to Denim and Diamonds around 8 and meet up with the very cool Branden of Zero & Falling. Head inside the place to find it empty and... P.A.-less. It seems the place is under new management, and the new guy was not aware of the old manager's tradition of renting out a P.A. for the bands playing. So there's a lot of scrambled phone calls and finally a nearby band whose name escapes me is tapped for use of their stuff.

Tony arrives around 8:30 and the situation is explained to him. He is, like the rest of us, a little weirded out by the setback but still nervous and excited about the evening's events. So we wait...

...and wait...

...and wait, while playing pool with (and by "playing with" I mean getting our asses whipped by) JT's mom...

The P.A. arrives with the hour of ten. By now we in Hexlust are mildly annoyed by the holdup, but eager to play anyway. We're the second band to play tonight, and technically should have been soundchecking by this point, so hopefully setup doesn't take too long. PainFilledSilent can do their thing, we can do ours, and be home by midnight. So we wait...

...and wait...

By 10:45, JT's mom is falling asleep in the corner and we're getting pissed. Half of whatever audience bothered showing up in the first place has left, thank the fuck Christ this was a free show. If this were a Friday/Saturday night, it wouldn't be so bad. But they weren't even done setting up the equipment yet, so at this point we're long away from playing, JT and I have school the next morning, James has work, and we're all tired and grumpy from our respective days. We're not even nervous anymore, we just want to play and go home. But we wait...

PAINFILLEDSILENT
...for twenty more minutes, in which time PainFilledSilent soundcheck and fly into action. Their set is short and someone hurried, and as a result I don't remember much about it at all, but they pull it off with pinache. I'm very impressed by their drummer, who held it all together very well while pulling off some impressive weird-time-signaturey stuff (can you tell I'm a well-trained musican? Lol).
Somebody shake JT's mom awake, it's 11:40 and time for us to go on! We all shake the frowns off our faces and the bags out from under our eyes to snatch up that last bit of energy and enthusiasm to pull this show off. Setup and soundcheck takes about twenty-ish minutes and then we're off!

HEXLUST
...into one sad spectacle. "Wasting Away" comes off well enough, although I showcase my brilliant ineptitude by dropping my stick not even halfway through the first verse. I think here's about where James' amp started fuzzing out, but more on that later. We finish with that song and the "crowd" is mildly enthused. So far, not so bad. And then it happens.

James starts off "Chainsaw Gutsfuck" and isn't two notes into the beginning distortion riff when his amp cuts off. What the hell? Try again. First two notes, and then once again sudden silence, like we're playing fucking Musical Chairs and it's time to take a seat. One more try with the same result; the distortion's thrown out and we continue anyway.

I forget if it was during that song or the proceeding "Evil Dead", but somewhere during the rest of our D set JT's amp started cutting out as well. And James' amp wasn't being any more committed. The only members with consistent sound were me and Tony, and my bass drum was gradually slipping away from me so I wasn't sure how long that would last.

So we change tunings up to standard E and begin our second set. JT will have to remind me exactly when it happened, but somewhere either before "Troops of Doom" or "Sodomy & Lust" his amp head decided to cut the foreplay and just died. Kaput. Sputter, gasp, and croak. In a way I saw it coming, since he always had to use something with considerable weight just to hold his cord in the input jack, but it was the timing of his head's demise that made me realize that God is real and She has a sense of humor that's not for all tastes. Branden, being the cool guy he is, was generous enough to lend JT his head, and we continued.

Back to the songs, "Troops of Doom" was probably our best song of the evening, with the fewest mistakes or technical difficulties. When it came time for "Sodomy & Lust", however, it was business as usual, with JT having low volume (even with his spiffy new head) and James' amp picking just the right spots to die out and then come back to life.

Looking back, I wish we had discussed our set list before the show; maybe I would have had the foresight to express the wish for "Sodomy & Lust" to go at the end of the set. Not only is it my favorite song to play, with me holding a steady-but-gradually-increasing tempo from the beginning and then really unleashing the speed as we come back in from the solos, but it has a hella great stinger at the end. Since this song was, in fact, merely second to last, the stinger was cut off, which was kind of a letdown at least for me.

To conclude the set we threw out "Tombs of the Blind Dead". Our chubby-faced first-born had a screaming birth amidst a politely lukewarm crowd and continued technical difficulty, but ended with a whimper, for which I take the blame. The song goes into its final seconds with just me playing, and I could have easily set up a stinger; instead, tired and disillusioned, I just hit two of my toms simultaneously, abruptly ending the number. The audience were quiet for a sec (once again, my fault; a stinger is usually the indicator of end-of-set applause) and then politely applauded us offstage.

ZERO AND FALLING
We packed our shit and went home. As grateful as I was to this band for giving us an opportunity to play, it was 1 a.m. and I was dealing with a combination of exhaustion and embarrassment. I wanted to get home and into my bed with a fiery quickness. I didn't even stop to thank those of my firends who bothered showing up, so for those of you whom I left in the dust, stick around for my thanks at the end of this blog.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
So what the hell went wrong? Well, we're not sure what exactly happened to JT's head, but Tony wants to take a look at it and see if something can be fixed before it gets thrown out. James, upon closer inspection of his stuff, surmised that an aging cord was the possible perpetrator of his yo-yoing sound. I would have benefited from making sure my bass drum was more anchored onto the carpet, although thankfully this time my toms stayed right in place.

Well, for everything that could have gone wrong, we had a great first show, so it should have come at no surprise that our second amateurish step into the world of live playing would kick back and hit us right where it hurts. In a way I'm glad it happened; it definitely kept our egos in check, lol. We're going to be more careful from now on, and if anything this disaster only served to make us more prideful of our work and more willing to step up to the plate and deliver a blistering third show. I know it did for me!

Thanks goes out to those who showed up: Rendell and his wacky group of friendly curmudgeons; Warren and Kelly for showing up towards the end of the set and sticking around anyway; Jade, Cody, Tom, and the other punkers who definitely stuck out amongst the jeans-and-t-shirts audience; JT's mom; Juan a.k.a. Devilboy from Mekanizm Loco; and of course PainFilledSilent, Zero & Falling, and the band who lent us their P.A., your name escapes me but your generosity never will!

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

NautiLust Slave!


Date
: Wednesday, August 29, 2007
Venue: Denim and Diamonds, cowpoke bar, Temple TX
Bands: Nautilus, Hexlust, Soul Slave


Well loyal readers, there comes a time in most performers' lives where they get the chance to strut their stuff in front of an audience of preferably more than one member in a venue other than their rehearsal place. Such was the case for me two nights ago on Wednesday, August 29. At least in terms of music; anyone who's listened to me babble longer than 10 seconds knows that I dabbled in theater in high school. So I'm no stranger to performing in public, I'm just not used to the lights being on.

But yeah, Wednesday August 29th, Hexlust's first show EVAR. An event almost two years in the making. Yes indeed people, two years. Pick a random band's MySpace and they'll probably say that they were together four months before they had original tunes ready and a string o' shows lined up. Not us. One year and nine months of lineup changes (both in terms of members leaving and us being unable to decide who the lead vocalist is), impeding school and work schedules, song and style changes, overall laziness, and IHOP putting fucking butter on Tony's chocolate chip pancakes passed before we finally took the stage at Denim and Diamonds and rocked the house. Here's how it all went down:

PREPARATION
James, J.T., and his friends Jen and... somebody else all showed up around the same time of about 6:20. After helping me load my Ludwig drum kit into my car, we took off for Tony's house, J.T. following James following me. Upon arrival we greeted Tony and Glen and got a nice little tour of Tony's hella sweet abode (a tour I took myself a little over a year ago and never get tired of taking again).

Then we're off!

Wait, no, sorry, Tony forgot his effects pedals. Halfway out of his neighborhood we turn around, park in his horseshoe driveway again, and wait. Tony comes back...
Then we're off!

We arrive at Denim and Diamonds around seven and immediately get to work unloading stuff. Back and forth, from the club to the cars and back to the club. Somewhere in all this my mom showed up. We set our stuff up offstage and started... waiting. During this time, I paced, greeted Dantrael, Stephanie, Kelly, and Warren, talked to my mom, and paced some more.

The sound guys didn't show up until close to nine (which was when Nautilus were supposed to go on, a harbinger of the hijinks we were to encounter with the Laurel-and-Hardy sound team with whom we were stuck). We launched into setting crap up onstage and getting everything mic'd, and finally, sometime after 9:30, Nautilus took the stage.

NAUTILUS
Problems from the get-go. They kicked things off with a cover of Napalm Death's "Scum", which started off awesome, but somewhere along the line started falling apart. Confuzzled, I went off to greet Remo and Sue and came back a couple songs later to find things consistently unravelling. John couldn't hear shit out of his monitors, Zach I guess was jumping ahead riffs or something, and everyone was overall confused. They took a break to figure things out with the sound and that just ended up being the end of their set. Befuddled, we in Hexlust started preparing to perform.

HEXLUST
After a quick sound check (we shared equipment with Nautilus) and a warm-up using the theme from a MegaMan game, I got some advice from Dantrael about what to ask for in my monitor, took a deep, nervous breath and went into it. "Wasting Away", "Chainsaw Gutsfuck", and "Evil Dead" went swimmingly, with pauses between songs to re-tune and allow Tony to check how we were doing as far as time (which started to get on my nerves but we've discussed this already). At some point inbetween songs, we relented to an audience request for "Raining Blood" and played the first thirty seconds of that oh-so-recognizable song. Hey, cheers are cheers, lol.

After a minute taken to unleash hair and change guitars, we kicked off our E-tuned songs with Possessed's "The Exorcist", which we somehow made it through but not without some confusion (that song's hard to play, lol). "Troops of Doom" merited us the first moshpit of the night, which I couldn't fucking see due to the fact that I'm hidden behind drums and cymbals. Another significance of this song is the fact that I dropped a stick twice and grabbed another without losing rhythm. Woot!

Our final song of the evening was "Sodomy and Lust", which was undoubtedly our finest performance of the whole set. Irony? It is not recorded. The battery on Tony's camcorder ran out, and my mom ran out of space on the disc in her camcorder. But yeah, speed, speed, speed, nice breakdown, flawless solos, fiery last chorus, and huge stinger. Then Dart falls over dead, lol.

Like I had fucking time. Immediately started breaking stuff down to make way for Soul Slave's stuff while talking to Sue. I even recruited her to help us lug my shit out to my car, about which she (jokingly) griped the entire way. Chicks.

WHAT-A-BURGER
As a way of showing respect to the band who gave us a chance, Tony stuck around to watch Soul Slave's set. I couldn't be fucking bothered; besides, I had no idea how to get home from the bar, but Stephanie did, so James, Remo, and I followed her (riding with Kelly and Warren) back to Killeen. We first were going to eat at McDonald's on 440, but their dining room was closed. So we went next door to What-a-Burger; they were closed for painting. Finally we made our way to the What-a-Burger by H-E-B, which was able to accomodate us. There we scarfed some food bought by the ever-generous Remo and talked about the show, among other things.

The night concluded at close to one. I went home, unpacked most of my drum kit, chatted with Tony, and passed out after a quick texting relay with Sue.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
I'm very proud of us; after almost two years spent slaving away in my garage (and Tony's music room, and J.T.'s garage/barn thingy) full of false starts, unmet deadlines, basically us going "Ok, by this July we are gonna be ready!" and we're not, all culminating in one almost-totally awesome night.
Except. EXCEPT. Those fucking sound guys. Not only did they screw Nautilus over, but they fucked with us too by turning J.T.'s amp down (apparantly due to excessive feedback, a problem which I'm sure could have been fixed but no, they elected not to).

I'm no sound guy, and this is my first show, but I've been to shows before and I've observed sound checks. Sound people are supposed to ask the band members what they want in their respective monitors so everything can run smoothly; I had to ask Tony to ask them to turn down his vocals in mine. Hoargh. Thankfully this didn't turn out to be too big of a problem (although in the footage of the show, you can't hear J.T. solo) and hopefully in the future we have the good fortune of playing with competent sound people at the helm. Overall, though, I'm very happy with how the night went off. Hopefully our next one's even better!

I wanna thank all the people I don't know who came out, Soul Slave for giving us a chance to play at this show, Nautilus for being our friends and being kind enough to share a rehearsal space, and all the people I know who came out: my lovely mom, Dantrael (who was playing at the first non-Kritickill local show I ever saw), Stephanie, Kelly, Remo, Warren, and Sue.

I'd like to thank Tony and James for being the best friends and bandmates a guy could ask for, and I'd especially like to thank J.T., who has been officially with the band a scant three months, but not only picked up on the songs with a blinding quickness, but also fit in with us as our friend better than anyone else we played with. Here's to this show and the many more we shall hopefully play!