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!
