| Poet (Who Didn't Know It) | Modern Day Fairy Tales | Vacation to Oblivion | M'Lady | Destiny, She Drives a Rolls | Casanova | I'm a Bad Mamma Jamma (Who Works at Wendy's) | I Am the Walrus [The Beatles] | Crossroads | Jumpstart My Rocket | Sledgehammer [Peter Gabriel] |
This was our first show at the legendary 7th Street Entry at First Avenue in Minneapolis. We saw it as kind of a big deal. First of all, doing well at the Entry is capital toward someday playing the Main Room. The Main Room is where Prince filmed Purple Rain. So you get the idea. Secondly, this was the first show since we've started working with Student Run Records, and there were going to be people from the label there. So we wanted to impress. Like I said earlier, it was kind of a big deal to us.So it came as a blow a week or so ago when our bassist, Brandon, sent us an email saying he wouldn't be coming back to Minneapolis after his summer with family in South Dakota, though he would play the show at the Entry. It came as a bigger blow when four hours before load-in before the show, I received a text message saying he wouldn't make it after all. That was a major bummer. Major.
I made a quick call to Anthony and sent a message off to Dustin. Unfortunately, the guy we've been looking at to fill the bass position had a previous engagement tonight. So Anthony said he had a short list in mind of two or three people he could call to fill in tonight. The gentleman who answered the call was Anthony's friend Josh Carlson.
As soon as Josh got off work at 6:00 p.m., he headed over to Anthony. There they crammed on a pre-determined and revised setlist. Josh and Anthony went through all the songs and Josh took copious notes. I sent Anthony a text at some point in the evening asking how things were going. "We got this, dawg" was the reply.Meanwhile, at the venue, Dustin and I had loaded in. I met a few Student Run Records people at the door and they helped load some stuff in. As soon as I set down all the merch, they went to work, counting, sorting and creating an inventory. It was strange, but cool. It was something we didn't have to worry about at all. We had enough to focus on with the strangeness of what has happening. It was nice to have some help.
Anthony and Josh arrived and some of us grabbed some food next door at the Depot. The show started with Young & Tender and we chilled in the basement greenroom. I kept thinking that it was super cool that at this venue, in this greenroom had also chilled such acts as Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, and Husker Du at one time or another. I was daydreamin'.
Chiefs of the North then rocked the stage as we got ready to go on ourselves. Downstairs in the greenroom sat Josh like a champ, doing some last-minute studying.
Chiefs of the North ended, and we set up. (I, the drummer, was the first guy completely ready to go, by the way.) Since the setlist was revised sort of last-minute, I didn't have any printed out for myself or the band. Anthony had texted the set to me earlier in the evening, so I found a setlist from one of the other bands and I wrote our set on the back of it. It was too dark to see on the floor, so I impaled it on my hi-hat stand. It worked surprisingly well. I may end up trying it again.We got the set started and Josh completely fell right into our groove. Occasionally, he would crouch down by his bass amp so he could better hear himself as he glanced at the notes in his notebook. But usually, he was grooving and feeling our flow.
The strangeness of the whole situation continued through the set. Anthony's effects pedal stopped working properly, so he bypassed it, playing everything dry. And it was loud. Not only that, but he broke a string and didn't have a spare. Dustin worked it out for him, though. Then there were tuning issues. At one point, Anthony turned to me and said, "This is a train wreck." It wasn't quite a train wreck in my estimation, but it certainly wasn't our best showing.
Furthermore, it seemed that most of the crowd that had been there through the night had been there specifically for one band. As it turns out, we shouldn't have played last tonight. But when it's all said and done, we had fun. It was the Entry, and I had decided that in spite of everything, I was going to enjoy this gig. This I did.
At the end of the show, I realized that the "Who the Hell is Junebug?" sticker that I had carefully affixed to the urinal in the men's room had been removed. I found this to be odd, since the entire rest room was covered in band stickers. One more obstacle to overcome.
At the end of the night, it turned out that our pal Cody managed to snag the poster which hung outside the door advertising the show. He wanted us all to autograph it. I told him that would make it worthless. After I had a little trouble with the marker he handed me (it was a calligraphy marker, it had an, angled flat edge) he made me sign it again, directly underneath. He made the others double-autograph the poster as well. To which I replied, "double-autograph equals double-worthless."
I do hope we get a chance to play the Entry again relatively soon. Though those present all said it sounded good and it was fun, I feel like we somehow need to redeem ourselves and make it a good show. Maybe our CD release show. There's a thought. Let's think about that.
