Date: Saturday, November 8, 2008
Venue: Music Vault, Harker Heights, TX
Bill: Hexlust, Burying the Trend, An Hour to Kill
OOPS!
This show… didn’t happen! We got to the Music Vault, started setting up our gear, people started showing up… and we got called into the manager’s office. Turned out one band’s singer was sick and the other band hadn’t been in contact in recent days. One band with forty minutes of material equals not worth the time. Plus, each band sold tickets for this show. One band equals a third of potential money, which means not enough to pay security, lights, and sound people. Show cancelled.
I felt pretty bad for our friends who drove up from Belton, and I felt very bad for my friend who had already made it all the way from Lampasas. To those not in the know, Lampasas is about a forty-minute drive from Harker Heights, if traffic is ideal. Tickets were refunded or held until the date of the postponed show, which was set for November 21.
Date: Friday, November 21, 2008
Venue: Music Vault, Harker Heights, TX
Bill: Robots Are Evil, Hexlust, I Deal Suicide, Escape the Night
PRE-SHOW
We spent the next two weeks selling more tickets, getting other bands to play, and promising our friends that this time, an actual show would happen. And what a show it was going to be! We had our friends in Robots Are Evil opening the show, an awesome duo consisting of a bassist and drummer (good buddy Frank, who worked in the drum department at Guitar Center at the time.) We would go on after them, and then I Deal Suicide and Escape the Night would close out the night. Both of these bands were from the Burnet area and had a pretty well-established fanbase which they brought with them, so this would have been a great chance for us to grab the attention of their fans and vice-versa.
Notice I keep saying shit like “was going to be” and “would have.”
ROBOTS ARE EVIL
Robots Are Evil were on first as scheduled and they were awesome. This was my first exposure to them and I was hella impressed, especially when they opened with an instrumental version of Primus’ “Here Come the Bastards.” From then on it was an awesome batch of guitarless slap-pop groove with awesome beats and fills.
HEXLUST
We were on stage next and we were ready to impress. We had learned from our experience with Exmortus and were more than warmed up. We had rehearsed our set that day and had definitely practiced the shit out of our cover of Death’s “Open Casket,” which we were debuting this evening. It was gonna go Intro-Troops-Toxic-Hellhammer-Tombs-Open Casket-Sodomy and it was gonna be fuckin’ magical. There was even the pretty-woman factor! The object of Tony’s October-11th game-spitting was there, as was my friend Sheila. And let’s face it: when a pretty female is in the audience, you strive to play better. Again: fuckin’ magical.
The intro was great. Troops of Doom was solid. Toxic High, still going strong. By Hellhammer, though, something was up, and that something was Tony. Something happened in front of all those unfamiliar faces and he lost all his pizzazz. Normally very good at crowd control, Tony started hiding behind his hair and looking straight down at his fret board when he was playing. Announcing Hellhammer though was the straw that broke the camel’s back, when only a handful of people cheered when he asked if anybody in the audience was a fan of Celtic Frost or Hellhammer. From then on, our mighty frontman was a stuttering mess.
Not that that would have affected us that greatly. He’s had a few bouts of confidence crisis before and we soldiered through. This was only our… fifteenth show, and there were still a few times when stage fright got the best of him. No problem. The problem started showing its face during Tombs. My bass drum started creeping away from me and almost slipped away entirely, taking my toms with it. I thought it was simply a matter of it not being anchored down enough, so when the song was over I dragged the thing over and drove the spikes on the pedal a little deeper into the carpet. Then came Open Casket and POW! It was all downhill from there.
Those who know the song knows it starts off with a horrendous amount of double-bassing. I flew into it right on time and was pounding my heart out when suddenly… nothing. My feets were moving pedals, but the pedals were hitting air. It took me a few horrible stage years (read: about two awkward seconds) to realize that the problem wasn’t the anchoring; it was the grip my pedal had on the drum itself! By not tightening the grip and making the pedal more stable, I kicked the drum right off the pedal! Oh it was embarrassing. I spent the rest of the song pulling the drum up in front of the pedals whenever we had a sustained note and even took a few extra seconds to try to put the drum back into the grip in time for the second round of double-bassing, but that eventually failed. The song was a disaster and I was panicking.
Funny thing about panic: if you don’t get it under control hella soon, you start lashing out at people, even when they’re just trying to help. When Open Casket was over, I went right to work pulling the bastard bass drum onto the stupid pedal and tightening the grip as hard as it would go. JT (poor JT) came over and generously asked if I was OK and would I need some time to fix my problem, and I responded with “SHUTUP!!!!!!!” Boy am I proud of myself. I found out later that Tony then told JT to leave me alone, and the thoroughly hurt and humiliated JT had considered quitting the band right then and there. So, to recap: You had a front man in a self-esteem crisis, a guitarist ready to throw his instrument down and run out the door, and a drummer ready to kick his kit over and just have himself a good hard cry. And we still had one song left!
I wish I could say there’s a huge void where Sodomy and Lust went but I remember it very well. My pedal continued slipping. It turned out there are two points on my pedal which control the grip on the bass drum, one on the side which you crank with your hand and another right on the gripper which you turn with a special L-key. I serviced the former, which at least kept the drum from slipping all the way off. Also, Keith may think he was immune to screwing up, but he spent the last half of the song one fret above where he should have been. Fucker.
EVERYTHING ELSE
I spent the rest of the show taking my kit apart, loading it into my car, and hanging out with my bandmates and friends outside talking about the show. I kept telling myself that in ten seconds I was gonna go inside and check out the other two bands but it never happened. Sheila gave me a hug and assured me that it was great and she had a good time; normally I would say bullshit but I’ve known her to be an honest straight-shooter type so I was willing to think she actually enjoyed it. Eric, also a non-bullshitter, gave us the WTF we so rightly deserved.
To be honest, we didn’t and still don’t know exactly what went wrong. Probably just one of them “bad shows” that come along for no reason, even when you’ve already had a performance which wasn’t so stellar. On my part, it was simply a matter of not familiarizing myself with new equipment, as my double pedal was still new at the time. I spent time after that examining every part of the thing and experimenting with the grips to get the best possible anchorage, but we played no shows for the rest of the year. Finals came, as did the Christmas holidays, and we hardly practiced at all. We had a show set up the second day of the new year, though, and were hoping it would go better.
Hint: it did 
