Date: Saturday, March 1, 2008
Venue: Area 51, Harker Heights, TX
Bands: Hexlust, Black Hymns
PRE-SHOW
After a quick run-through of the songs at my house, we broke down and headed off. We stopped off at the Mickey's across the street from Area 51 and had ourselves a quick bite to eat while contemplating the evening ahead of us. Our third show, our first in about four months, at a venue to which we've never been before. We found out about this show five nights prior, on Monday at 10:30 pm. The manager of the club, Alan, has been calling Tony all week in a not-so-calm mood, making sure we're on top of our game, making sure we have a "press kit" (whatever the fuck that is) and, on Wednesday, informing us that the cover charge shall be an arrogant $15. So yeah, there go any our friends who may have been attending. Needless to say, we're not in the most optimistic mood.
We load in at Area 51 for our seven o'clock soundcheck, at which time we're informed that we'll be going on first, since the other band playing, Black Hymns, has a broader sound that appeals to a wider audience. Cool beans, the sooner we get this fiasco over with, the sooner we can go home. We set up on one side of the stage, do a quick run-through of "Troops of Doom," and proceed to do nothing.
Around nine o'clock, the club actually opens, and anybody who already arrived has to go back outside so they can pay to get into the club in which they just were. The already-there include Russell, his wife, and my parents. After the process of finding out just how much they have to pay to get in, only my parents come back. Well, that's a lie, Russell came back in to get his "special" bottles. After apologizing profusely, we sit down and wait for things to happen, feeling a little worse about the evening already.
HEXLUST
Ten o'clock rolls around. After an hour of hob-knobbing with the Charmed Ones (a local modeling group for whom this shindig was apparently a showcase of sorts) and meeting a very outgoing man named Johnny (whom you can now see livin' it up in our top friends list), some song I've never heard comes on, which signals us to take to the stage. We get into position, take a deep breath, send the drummer a telepathic "Well, take us there, Skitch," and we're off.
I wish I could give you a song-by-song run-through of the entire set, but even if I had written this blog the morning after my memory would have been foggy; things just happened that damn quickly. I remember the audience singing along with the idiot-proof chorus to "Evil Dead" and some major headbanging going on during the last part of "Tombs of the Blind Dead", but everything else is a blur.
Alls I can really say is that our dire predictions for this evening's performance turned out to be utter hornswaggle. I think about the only things that went wrong were that somebody's guitar was obnoxiously louder than the other, nobody could really hear the solos that well, and my bass pedal started slipping around the third song. The guitar problems are pretty much "same ol'" by this point (for some reason no soundman we've encountered yet has been able to get our two lead guitarists balanced out just right) and my bass pedal problem can be attributed to a stripped screw.
Ya know, looking at our setlist (Intro, Troops, Toxic, Evil Dead, Tombs, Sodomy) I think that's why this performance went so fast. The first four songs in our set were, at the very longest, thirty seconds shy of the four-minute mark, and that's when we play them at "practice" speed. Throw in some on-stage adrenaline and you've got a group of dudes just blazing through these songs.
Anywho, we bring "Sodomy" to a close and the audience is literally chanting our name. I am in heaven, yo. I'm so high up I don't remember much of anything from the time I stood up off the drum throne to the time I slammed the last door of my car, all of my equipment safe inside. Oh, wait, I don't remember much cause I didn't do much, I just loaded my stuffs. Dur.
BLACK HYMNS
After that was more hob-knobbing, this time more congratulatory than last. Of course, I'm not a very social creature, and my adrenaline high died down pretty damn quickly, so I got tired and bored quickly. I stuck around for Black Hymns out of bill-sharing politeness (and the fact that the guitarist is my brother's friend's older brother), but I couldn't fully commit; I just wanted to get home and get to sleep.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
I think it was something like one o'clock when Alan, in a significantly better mood since our set finally kicked off, gave us our money and an assurance that we will be invited to play there again. We made $120, yo! Hells yes, I was in very high spirits indeed. I left that place, met the rest of the dudes at my house, said later, and settled in for the evening. Compared to that last outing at Denim and Diamonds a third of a year prior, this was a night to remember. I want to personally thank everyone who came out, braved the horrendous cover charge, and made a quirky little thrash band feel like it was all worth it.
