Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!

 The show was fun. No, the show was a blast. Club was a beautiful setting, with books from floor to ceiling and old beaten-up typewriters everywhere.

Stage was asymmetrical but TINY. I had no idea how we were going to get this six-piece on it. So, we didn’t. Bob and Mike played on the floor; Charissa, Greg and Sebastian played behind me. Lighting was both terrible and perfect. It gave the whole club this ethereal yellow glow, unless you were to one side or the other of the one light and then you were in almost complete darkness.

We got on stage late, way past when we were supposed to go on. Band before us took too long getting on stage, too long playing on stage, and too long getting off stage. Whatever. It happens. It’s at worst annoying, and can be pretty par for the course in Hollywood. The problem is when the club finally decides to implement their “strict time” rules only on the last band:

Us.

And no one let us know about it until it was too late.

Show went like this:

• Man on a Mission
• Tell Me Another Story
• What Happens When
• Picture Day
• Solitude
• All Wrapped Up in a Bow
• Over My Head

and >>cut<<.
What??!

I turn to Charissa who is motioning me that the club just said, “That’s it. They just said we’re done.” Charissa, in only her 2nd show, was NOT happy.
Saw two frantic and unhappy men off the side of the stage giving me the neck cutting motion. I started to say, over the mic, “wait, that’s it? We have tw….” And my mic was cut.

hahahahaha

Oh Hollywood.

The crowd went ballistic. “Booooooooooo!!!”

Sound guy (very cool guy named Daniel) just had this look on his face that mixed “I’m sorry, dude” with “they said no more songs.” He immediately began pulling microphones from the mixer, tearing down his gear in the process. There was no negotiation here. We were done.

While we broke down our gear, the club went dark and immediately turned into a DJ’d disco. I think the funniest part of that is that it actually thinned out after our show (at least temporarily.)

The promoter of the night was very apologetic, and I knew her hands were tied. She promised make-up of some kind. That mattered less to me than the fact she went out of her way to apologize. Goes a long way.

Worst part of it all?

The next song would have been a new song. I may have been most most livid about that, with perhaps the obvious exception being about basic human communication:
They could have said “hey, one more song” or “hey, we’re running late because of the fucking band before you.” Anything like that would have given me an opportunity to move our songs around. Hell, one more song would have been another 3 minutes of all of our lives instead of a club full of people pissed off and feeling that their parents walked in on them having sex.

Ce’st la vie. Funny thing is I woke up both feeling incredibly incomplete as well as wanting to play the club again. It was a cool venue. The good outweighed the annoying.

So, next time it is. Except next time….we open with the new song.

Chance