Pickles!

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.

Douche Your Delusion, Part 2 (Recording)

DAY TWO: Saturday, February 9, 2008
The first order of business should have been Sodomy and Lust drum and bass tracks, but the drummer wanted to get some food in his stomach. So Sodomy was put on hold to allow Dart to munch on some Chinese food. In the meantime…

JT's guitar tracks were given the green light. I sat in and watched while Tony and Keith went into Damiyan's old room to warm up on 10-watt practice amps. Now that most of the rhythm parts and even some of the solos were already laid down, JT had little to no trouble blazing through the first two songs.

The highlight of those first two songs would definitely have to be when I went into the adjacent bathroom to relieve myself. I could hear him do his solo for "Toxic High" and was utterly floored. Well, as floored as one could get while holding his dick. I came out of the bathroom giving him major thumbs-up; it was just so… damn… *imitates JT's "excited" voice* awesome!

I must say I'm glad I stuck around to keep an eye on things; I was able to catch an instance in Tombs where JT's playing wasn't matching up with Tony's. I even had Tony come in to compare, and sure enough they were different. Trouble is that "different" is what JT had grown accustomed to playing over the past four months, so he had to pretty much re-learn the chorus and try and lay it down correctly in the same night. All this is addition to the eighteen bars of rhythm guitar he had to lay down for the middle solo section (Oh yes; his arm was tired too) His long solo for this song was a crazy heap of awe-inducing sweetness as well, so now the whole middle solo section really doesn't feel that long at all.

Well, we put it off as long as we could, but there was no delaying the inevitable: Sodomy and Lust drum and bass tracks were next on the agenda. After going through a practice run, Keith and I laid down a take that was almost perfect. Almost. Coming out of the guitar solos, the fill I executed messed up a little. I missed a tom and ended up rim-clicking it, and accidentally hit a cymbal in there, but I came back in on time. The rest of the song went off without a hitch, and when I thought about it, I wasn't going to try and run through it again. I had it 90% perfect, and if I were to try it again, chances are I wouldn't be able to get it as right as I had it. Besides, we were pressed for time, and Tony assured me that the rim-clicking sounds cool in some odd way.

Stepping up to the plate next was Tony with his sodomizing and lustful guitar tracks. The rhythm track went mostly fine. As with the rest of us, I think Tony needed more takes to get this one down than the others he did, but once he had it, all was gravy. His solo for this song was pretty much the only one he played "by the book", as in "true to the original version." That song has a very distinct solo, like "Love Song" by Tesla or "Am I Evil". Mess with it too much and it just doesn't sound right. Not like Troops of Doom; Jairo's intent with laying down the original solo for that song seemed to be "shredding in the key of spaz" so Tony was pretty much free to do whatever he wanted with it.

Finally, we had six-string thrashing from the J-Tizzle. And once again JT learned to play a part differently than how he'd been playing it for the past… forever. This time it was the verse part of Sodomy. By himself, without the other instruments to mask his playing, JT's riffing just didn't sound right. He had the correct frets and everything, but somehow it wasn't right. After going through a few takes like this, he ineptly stumbled on a way to play the riff which was… well, perfect! It sounded exactly like the version on the Sodom CD I have! After that, a couple more takes was all it took to put the rhythm track to rest.

Of course, we still had JT's solo to contend with. Like I said before, doing the solo to Sodomy and Lust requires a bit of loyalty to Frank Blackfire's original vision. We went through quite a few (Ten? Fifteen? JT's a picky bastard) takes before he finally settled on a solo he was happy with; it's not as thrashy as what you'd expect from us but it gets the job done while still sounding like the Sodom version. Huzzah!

JT, Keith, and I took off to Little Caesar's so Tony and Michael could set up for recording Tony's vocals. I tells ya, at five bucks a pie, ready made, you just can't beat Little Caesar's for convenience. It's not the best-tasting, and is only pepperoni or cheese, but when you've been building up a sweat all day, don't have that much cash, and are pressed for time, Little Caesar's is the way to go.

Gratuitous, shameless product placement aside, Tony's vocal tracks were probably the only thing we recorded outside of the main studio room. Which wasn't to say it was far away; he was positioned right outside the room, at the intersection between the empty, tiled hallway and the empty, tiled living room. "Lots of natural reverb" supposedly.

This part of the recording also bears the significance of having the biggest enforcement of the Uncle Bob rule. The mic Tony was singing into was very sensitive, so everybody had to shut up and sit still while it was going on. Kinda made me feel like Anne Frank, making nary a sound in an attic during the daytime while the factory workers downstairs recorded a thrash metal album. One peep and the Nazis'll get ya!

As you may have gleaned from what I've written so far, this recording experience was very "learn-as-you-go" in some places, some very apparent in the final product. As long as he's been the vocalist for this band, Tony's never really had a "defined" vocal style. Since all we mostly played were covers, he just changed his voice based on the song we were playing. This evening, Tony did come to a final vocal style that fit him, and you can actually hear the process through the recording.

In Troops of Doom, he sounded a lot like Max Cavalera. This hurt his voice a little, so he tweaked it for Toxic High, on which he sounded like Kurt Brecht from D.R.I. This suited his personality more but was not quite as comfortable on his throat. Finally he decided to see what it would be like to imitate Schmier from Destruction, and the result was that which we hear on Tombs of the Blind Dead. If you haven't listened to Destruction before, I would say think Joe Elliot from Def Leppard if he were to drink a bunch of root beer before performing. This style suited Tony the best, and was also the style he had the most fun with. On Sodomy and Lust, he was way into it, throwing in bursts of King-Diamond falsetto and "sex breathing" in with his Schmier-isms.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
As we were packing up to leave, Michael connected his console to our PA and let us have a listen of the un-mastered finished product. I cannot adequately describe the happiness I felt at hearing it; we actually sound like band! Not only that, but a better band, thanks to the little imperfections we focused on and corrected along the way! Which isn't to say it is perfect, are quite a few mistakes throughout, those both really obvious and those only obvious to us.

Maybe if we had stuck with only recording two songs, or had five days to record four songs with no work or school obligations, we would have been more nit-picky and the final product would actually sound… well, consistent, but I think the little flubs give the recording its own special charm. This is the sound of a very young, very raw band, still working out the kinks as we get ever closer to realizing our dream: an endorsement deal from Little Caesar's.

Michael said he's have it mastered and ready to go by sometime this week, at which time Tony and I shall receive an e-mail containing the finished product. When that happens, we shall put the music on the band's official MySpace and also be making hard copies to pass out to those who want them.

For this, another step in Hexlust's unrealistic conquest for the rock star life, I would like give a big warm thanks to my parents. Long after they were through making mortgage payments on the house, they were generous enough to allow my band to continue using it as ground-zero for noise every weekend.

Big thanks to Michael Barton, who was generous enough to lend us his equipment and patient enough to put up with our inexperience.

And thanks of course to Tone-deaf, Tarzan, and the J-Tizzle. Without you guys, my Friday and Saturday nights would be just another painful reminder of my never-ending single status.

Douche Your Delusion, Part 1 (Recording)

DAY ONE: Friday, February 8, 2008

First day recording our first demo! Yesiree, things were all set: Record two songs (one original, one cover) over a period of two days in the empty house from which my family had just moved (hereafter referred to as the "HexHouse") using Tony's friend Michael's recording equipment. The master bedroom was chosen as the main studio, with my drum kit in the middle of the room, Tarzan tucked away in the computer nook, and Tony's and JT's amps set up along the opposite wall.

Well, now that we had everything set up to record our two-song thingy, a dialog occurred:
"How many songs are we gonna record?"
"I thought we agreed on two!"
"Yeah, but are we really just gonna do two? I think we could do four."
"Four?"
"Totally, four."
"Alright, let's do four!"
"AIDS."
Four it is then! Two covers (Troops of Doom, Sodomy and Lust) and two originals (Toxic High, Tombs of the Blind Dead), the order being Troops, Toxic, Tombs, and Sodomy.

Well, now that we had everything set up to record our four-song thingy, we went on to the first order of business: Bass and drum tracks. The way it worked was that Tony would play along with me and Tarzan, with Michael recording all three of us. The bass and drum parts would actually be laid down while the guitar would later be discarded, serving the purpose of being a "scratch" track that Tarzan and I could follow.

So we get to work on Troops and guess what? The drummer can't play the song! I've been playing Troops of Doom since October '06, and for some reason I just cannot keep the rhythm today! After a few flubbed takes I relaxed, told myself I was just nervous about recording for the first time, got myself in the "it's just another practice" mindset that helps me not throw up all over my kit at shows, and went back to it.

This time I got it right. Yayz! Everyone celebrate! Oh noes! Our immediate celebration is caught on tape! So unless we want the sound of JT going "That was pretty damn good!" on the end of every track on the final result, we're going to have to keep quiet until Michael hits the button stopping the recording process. We christened this new rule the "Uncle Bob" Rule*. Since Troops is not a song that typically has cymbal decay, we were able to move on without doing another take.

Toxic High went rather swimmingly, Tombs came and went as well, I think we did maybe three takes max. The only problem came with how we were actually going to end it (Yes, you heard it folks, we've been playing that song for like four or five months, we even played that song live, and we didn't have an official ending!). We decided on some kind of gradual-fade-out deal that worked really well and moved on. And then came the bitch: Sodomy and Lust.

The most fill-filled song I play, not to mention one of the longest in our set list, I have to say ol' Sodomy was the hardest song in the recording process for all of us. And guess what? The bassist can't play the goddamn song! There are some parts of Sodomy that Keith just didn't know. Which is somewhat understandable, he's only been in the band a short time, so we took some time out to coach him on how the parts go, and we went at it again. Oops, Keith messed up the part before we go into the solos. Oh well, gotta give it the ol' college try, so hitch up and try again. Oops, Keith messed up again. Oops, Dart fucked up a fill. Oops, same mistake for Keith. Oops, Dart screwed up, different fill.

Tony eventually suggested getting food as it was now around 8:00 (I had been playing drums for three hours! Jesus.) So he and JT went out to What-a-Burger and Taco Bell while I did one more take with Keith, which astoundingly we got right! Well, I messed a little something up at the end, but who cares? I was just glad to be done with it! After that I sat in the kitchen with Michael and Keith, rubbing my very tired arms, trying to remember whose wise-ass idea it was to do four songs. Tony and JT got home forty-fucking-five minutes later. We pigged out and decided we still had time to take care of another order of business:

JT's guitar tracks. I would have gladly stuck around to watch him warm up, but I was helping Tony find his Zune. (A fine moment for any owner of a spiffy MP3 player: you lose track of it and can't seem to find it anywhere.) When Tony and I got back to the session room, I was surprised to find that JT was using Tony's Jackson guitar. Why? I dunno. He tried a couple takes with it; he may as well have programmed a wah pedal to say "ass" and kept it pressed down the whole time cause that's what it sounded like. Let's face it, Sweet Lady Jackson is Tony's guitar, nobody can make it sound good but him.

Sensing the same problem, Tony had JT switch over to Tony's LTD guitar, which more closely resembles JT's own Jackson in terms of pickups and string distance from the neck… or some such guitar shit. Except this one has a whammy bar, which JT's own Jackson doesn't (which, come to think of it, may have been the reason JT was using it). Anywho, he tried that a few times, and his riffing was definitely improved, but still something was off. It wasn't that his playing was bad. I've known JT eight months, from the very moment I met him he's had a guitar in his hands, so I can assuredly say that the J-Tizzle doesn't suck. We eventually surmised that he was having trouble just following the bass and drum tracks, so we decided to go ahead and greenlight…

Tony's guitar tracks. And guess what happens? On Sodomy and Lust, that totally awesome "final" take Keith and I did, I forgot to count off the beginning! And the guitar is the first instrument you hear on the song, so Tony has no idea where to start so that he'll match up with the drums and bass coming in a few seconds later, and the whole effort's shot to pooh. We say "Dammit!" and move on.
The account of the recording of Tony's rhythm tracks is pretty boring to anybody but Tony. He's been playing the cover songs much longer than JT and wrote most of the riffs to the original songs himself; laying down his rhythm tracks was nothing different from any other practice, requiring no more than two or three takes at a time. Watching him do Tombs was pretty amusing; the rhythm for the middle solo section requires Tony to play the riff twenty times, and I could not only see but feel the dude's arm getting tired. And I was starting to think "Good lord, eight bars of solo per guitarist, what were we thinking? How tedious can you get?"

His solos for these songs were something to behold: faster, crazier, more whammy-bar abused than any I've ever seen him do for these songs. In Toxic High, he even threw out the solo he'd originally written (due to a certain part he kept messing up) and made up a new one on the spot, which of course came out reeking of awesomeness. In Tombs, the lead he performed for the "long" solo section seemed to go by in an instant, and suddenly the section overall just didn't seem as long. Amazing what a good solo can do.

By the time he gets his rhythm and solo tracks laid down, it's around 10:30 or so and we decide to call it a night. Overall not a bad day at all, but one thing's for sure for the next day: We're gonna have to start all over on Sodomy and Lust.

*"Uncle Bob" Rule: In the movie "That Thing You Do!", the drummer's uncle (Bob) is recording the band's first record. After they complete a song, Uncle Bob uses the finger-to-lips indicator of "Shut the fuck up!" to keep them quiet until he hits the button a few seconds later, allowing the track to "die out" instead of just ending abruptly with the song or "dying out" with their voices in the background.

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!

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!