Premier Rock Forum

Oh Man.

10:00pm
Our worst show was at a coffee house three or so years back. The sound was shit and we couldn't hear each other. We vowed never to play at a coffee house again (we'll see..) Anyway,we've found that when people aren't drinking, it makes them enjoy us that much less. I don't think we suck, but it's kind of like playing a show at a Limited Too when there's nothing to do.

12:00am
After this craptastic show, we went to load our stuff into our shitty rehearsal space. This was before we got a van and we were using John and my cars to lug stuff. We got back down the elevator after a quick ten minute load in to find that both of our cars were gone.

12::15am
Panicked, we called the cops and went to the impound lot by the space for our vehicles to turn up. For an hour and a half, nothing showed up. We waited and waited and waited. Finally, we decided to go get something to eat. We made a few more phone calls and it turned out that both of our cars were towed to the opposite end of the city by a private tow mafia that worked that particular area.

2:00am
We grabbed a cab over to the place where they towed us. E & T Towing are a bunch of fuckers. They operate out of this steel fortress on Cicero and Sacramento that looks like a Mad Max battle bunker. You don't actually come face to face with anyone, but instead talk into a intercom with some faceless silhouette and there's a chute that they drop a clipboard attached to a rope and you clip your ID and money on it and they pull it back up. While waiting for them to get off their asses, you will be surrounded by very irate people who are even more angry than you that their cars are "stolen" by these unscrupulous twats.

2:45am
After we both get buzzed through the giant "prison-style" turnstile into the impound lot in the pitch black to get our cars back, it turns out that the E & T fuckers had ripped a huge hole in one of my tires. After getting the tire off to change it, it appeared that they had fucked up my rotor and I couldn't get the spare on.

4:00am
I had to call AAA to help me with the tire and the truck he brought was a pulley-style tow truck. Upon being unable to get my tire back on the car, the AAA dude said he couldn't tow my car with the truck that he had so he'd have to drive an hour out and an hour back to get a flatbed truck to move my crippled vehicle.

6:30am
The driver gets back and loads my hobbled car onto the truck. We drive the vehicle back by my apartment, but the radio dispatcher thinks we're in some city other than Chicago so we get directions to an auto shop that isn't there. We drive around looking for this phantom shop for an hour and a half.

8:00am
Finally, when we realize that all this driving has been useless because we're looking for a place that's in some other city, we take the car back to my apartment and slowly lower it to the curb. By this time, I not only have no car, but I'm out several hundred dollars.

8:45am
I walk into my apartment and look in the mirror. It appears that I have smeared grease all over my clothes and face and have spent the last several hours in "blackface."


Faiz

Two words (for the Chicago crowd):

Big Horse.

Never ever never never ever again. Really calibrated my "acceptable show-o-meter." I have used this calibration with vigor in the many years since I last dragged equipment into that dump. This broke me of my youthful "Sure, we'll play anywhere, anytime" power of positive thinking.

Worst show ever:

My buddy from Austin, Chris, came up to Minneapolis to visit, and it just so happened that he came the day that I was playing drums for this singer/songwriter chick that I go to school. Not my favorite genre of music, but she had a good draw, and said that I could have 25% of the earnings...

So Chris, my wife and I went out for some drinks before I had to be at the show, and I got a little buzzed. After we got to the show, which was at the Blue Nile, I find out that we are going on an hour and a half later than we were supposed to. So the bandleader, Laura, the bassist, and me and my accomplices drank another 3 drinks or so each. By this time, we were all definitely impaired, but we set up, played, and everything went pretty damn well, except that the fucking soundguy, named Joth(antagonist), a 50-or-so long haired-bearded burnout, didn't know how to set up a monitor mix worth a damn. So when I asked him to turn up Laura in my monitor, he said, "She's cranked all the way up! You're playing too loud!"

While I may have been playing a little loud, for it was a small cafe, he had miked up my drums for some ridiculous reason, and all i could hear the whole show was my kick drum in my monitor.

This is where it gets crazy, we end our show, and got a nice applause. When I start taking my drums away, Joth comes up to move the mics and says, "man, that fucking drummer was horrible!" I chuckled thinking that he was being sarchastic, yet he continued, "that was a great show except for that goddamn drummer, couldn't hear shit!" So I went up to Laura, who was friends with this guy and asked her, "is this guy being serious?" And he kept it up, "that was a great show except for the drummer" and on and on.

I didn't say much too him at first because I was in such disbelief at what I was hearing and was so enraged, on top of being mildly intoxicated, that it was hard to think straight. Everyone else there was trying to cool me off, but I snapped. While he started getting sound up for the next band, he let the mics feed back, and I yelled, "MAN, THIS SOUNDGUY FUCKING SUCKS, LISTEN TO THAT FEEDBACK!" he tried to shrug it off, and he fedback the mics again so I kept up, "Whoa soundguy, you sure you know what you're doing?!" Before I took my first load of stuff out to my car, I got up on stage and said,

"HEY EVERYBODY, make sure you show you're appreciation for this WONDERFUL soundguy by giving him the finger as you walk out the door tonight!" I then flicked him off, called him an asshole, got some laughs and an applause from the audience, and Chris and I grabbed a handful of drums to take out to my car.

Then, he and the bouncer ran out after us, telling us to get our shit and get the fuck out and if we didn't leave he'd kick our ass. So when I tried to get back in to get the rest of my drums, the bouncer grabbed me and Chris, and I saw Joth grab my wife and pull her to the door , and I yelled something to the effect of get you're fucking hands off of her!

I thought that I was going to lose the other half of my set, but fortuately Laura, who I find out later Joth has a hard-on for, brings them out and is very sorry about what happened. She's really shy and reserved, so I could tell that she was really uncomfortable about the whole thing.

I ended up ripping up the garden outside as I walked to my car, told Laura that I was very sorry, and left without any of us ever getting paid.

I then told Chris after we got into the car, "Welcome to Minneapolis."