"What the fuck?"
"Someone left us some 'shine as a tip?!"
"How the hell did they do that?"
That's how 2009 started for me. Sitting in a truck with Matt, Nate, Jessika on my lap, and by some sort of strange mystery a bottle of moonshine in a 12oz. jar.
This story, actually starts two weeks ago when I had been trying to book the band for a December 26th show at Uncle Festers. I had friends from high school having a reunion at the bars, and I wanted to try and get a gig to play for the friends that never are in town to see us.
When that fell through, and my work schedule opened up a day on New Years Eve it felt like a gig would have to just fall into my lap. It didn't, but we did get one. Uncle Festers was happy to book us, but I could tell they were about as optomistic of a good turn out as I was. To keep it short, we ended up getting booked about 2 weeks before New Years Eve.
December 31st, 2008 started out like most days that our band gets together to play music. I woke up on someone's couch around 10:00am. Having fallen asleep around 8:00am I could see where this day was already headed. Another day of being awake for 30 hours with little sleep, and a lot of alcohol.
I had spent a few hours the night before at work making a flyer for the show. A lot of our usual fans were unsure if they were coming, and I knew we'd have to advertise to pull in the type of crowd that Uncle Festers(and ourselves) would want that night.
So Matt and I spent about an hour downtown hanging up flyers in about 5 degree weather. He was already saying he wasstarting to feel sick, and this didn't help either of us feel better. We stopped by CVS and got cough drops, but I didn't know how well Matt's throat would be able to handle the show.
But I was still really psyched for the show, and I talked Matt into going to a costume shop where we bought about 150 martigras' beads. It wasn't much, but I knew the crowd would eat it up. It also gave me a chance to let Matt rest his voice if it started to hurt.
So all of this took up most of our morning and around 3:00pm I dropped of Matt, and met up with Jessika to get our hotel. By the time I met up with Matt again, he was laying around his house watching Rush Limbaugh get interviewed on CSPAN or something. We didn't stay long as it was time to go gather the equipment and make the trip downtown to Uncle Festers.
Packing didn't take long, and we were meeting up with Eric at Uncle Festers at 9pm for the load in time. We were running late, but we had planned it that way. In fact I had put an earlier time on the flyers because I expected people to show up late.
So we're still setting up, the sound guy hasn't arrived yet, and people are already at the door trying to get in. Some people are just walking in and sort of hiding out in the bar (waiting to see if they get by the cover?). Here it is 10pm, and people are actually showing up on time. Friends of ours, and others that have just come down to hear some music.
We finally get to playing around 1045pm. It didn't start off that well. We had been practicing a lot of new material. Some new White Stripes cover songs but mostly some new material of our own, and because of this we had slightly neglected our "older" songs.
But this is where those cheap martigras beads I had bought actually saved us. Not only did I use them as a way to get people more into the show, but I actually used them to pause the show, and allow us to catch up with ourselves.
I don't know if it was nerves, anxiety, lack of sleep, lack of booze, or just lack of a really good practice the day before, but we were definately off on more than a few songs. But no one seemed to notice. Everyone stayed in great spirits, and even put up with us when we were a little behind on our New Years Eve 10 second countdown.
I've never been one for being center stage, but this was one time I forced myself into taking that role. It's hard being behind the drum set, and pulling this off, but I think I actually did pretty well. While tossing out beads I'm pretty sure I took out a few lights and a ceiling fan, but no one's eye balls, or alcoholic beverages.
Thanks to:
2008,
Uncle Festers,
The inventor of the martigras beads,
Whoever left that lovely jar of sweet corn liquor, and
the lady at the dollar store with the "yes we did" obama sticker
that gave Matt and I a much needed laugh.
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