6/27/09 - Twin Cities Pride Fest - Minneapolis

Set:
| I'm a Bad MammaJamma (Who Works at Wendy's) | Found My Boogie | Poet (Who Didn't Know It) | The Date | Last Night | Chosen Ones | Clone You |

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It was a beautiful day. The weather was perfect and there was love in the air. This was Twin Cities Pride '09 and Junebug was playing the main stage. The whole of Loring Park in Minneapolis was full of vendors, political action groups, church groups, performers, onlookers, and amazing and diverse people.

The Loring Stage, or main stage, was right in the middle of the park, so we had to find parking (which was intensely difficult) and haul our gear to the stage. Luckily (in this case) there was a house kit that all drummers would use and it was set up like mine. So all I had to bring were my cymbals and sticks.

The backstage area was barricaded and security was guarding the entrances and we had a nice little tent area with complimentary waters and sodas to quench our individual thirsts.

I (tony) arrived to the backstage area before my wife, Liza did. Therefore, I was talking to her on my cell phone, trying to give her directions to where I was. The problem was that my cell phone volume does not go as high as I would sometimes like and there was a band on stage. We could not hear each other well and I was apparently getting frustrated. She hung up and I looked up to see a man wearing S&M-type leather on the other side of the chain-link fence. He smiled and looked at me and said in a soothing British accent, "Oh, you're so adorable. All is forgiven. Marry me!" Sadly for him, I had to inform him that I'm already married.

This was a fun festival setup. There were a good number of people parked out on blankets and lawn chairs, while others walked past and filtered in and out. By the end of the set, probably about 150 had parked their butts in the general vacinity to hear the music. All together, there were probably about 800 to 1,000 people who heard us today. It all seemed to be a good reaction, too.

The show went smoothly. The crowd loved the "grab your ass" line in "The Date" and Anthony said that "Last Night" was our big hit in Sweden. I thought I saw a look of confusion on a couple guys in the crowd, as if they were trying to decide whether he was joking or not. And of course we were met with a positive reaction when Anthony talked about "peace, love and harmony" and mentioned menage é trois in conjunction with "Clone You".

Part of what made this show so good was the decent backline and the skilled sound technician. This isn't to rip on anyone we've worked with, but it was nice to play a show and have the sound guy know what channel to turn up during a guitar solo. No solos were missed by the crowd in this show. And I have to say, that drum kit sounded stellar. If I could get my snare drum to sound like that, I'd be a very happy little monkey indeed.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the fact that we had an American Sign Language interpreter on stage with us. It was fascinating to have this boisterous lady on stage dancing and signing the lyrics to a group of three women in the crowd. It's safe to say that this is likely the first time our lyrics have been translated into sign. And it was very interesting to watch.

Finally, when it was all over, I talked to our friend Cody (from Six-Ton Productions, one of the guys who shot the "Last Night" and "Chosen Ones" videos). He was very impressed with the show. Hearing us in a festival setting was something that he said we should do more often and he said that "Junebug sounds good outside." I loved it too. I could definitely get used to this.