Things That Must Be Said

It is not always easy being in a band. There are the usual difficulties: personality conflicts, creative frustrations, technical problems, etc. Carrying heavy equipment up a flight of stairs at 2 in the morning. That's a fucking problem. Usually, the problems are totally outweighed by the glories of playing music, either at practice or at a show. On the night of our last show, March 31st, the frustrations almost got the better of us.

We were going to open for Matt and Kim, an actual band that people like - they've been mentioned in Spin, have a video on MTV2 (what's the point of that? Is anyone watching?), etc. Whereas many of our shows are, shall we say, audience-challenged, this show was going to be a good chance to (hopefully) play in front of some people who don't know us. The day before the show, on my birthday, the promoter calls me to say that Matt and Kim have had to cancel, since Matt fucked his back up.
My first thought was "AAAARRGH! The curse continues!" For some reason, the big shows are usually disasters, while the little shows where we play to seventeen people are totally great. Then, we find out that not only is the headliner a no-go, the entire show is now canceled. Maybe you don't have kids, maybe you don't have a silly job, but for many of us in Squeaky, that show was sorely needed in our lives. And the thought of not playing a show was just... terrible.
We had practice that night, during which Danny hatched a plan to play a free show on the floor of Common Grounds, the site of the canceled show. Being old farts that we are, most of us had never heard of such a thing. A show on the floor? What? Uh, ok! Danny called the promoter, then he called his buddies in Laserhead (sorry... he texted them), and suddenly the show was on! Soon Facebook was positively aflutter with the news—Squeaky was playing anyway, for free. The next day, the day of the show, Steve and I made fliers and dutifully put them up all over downtown. How else would anyone know? We felt pretty good.

Until, that is, we rode home from work only to discover that all of ouf fliers were now covered over with new fliers from, you guessed it, Common Grounds (see my rant about flier ettiquette here). We were pissed. Our cell phones were hot with the expletives that were flying across the microwaves.
When I left my house for the show later that night, I was positively surly. I had had it with shitty clubs and shitty shows and I was already plotting the demise of the band. So was Steve. Until we got to the club, and it was set up really cool, everyone was nice, and... and... there were people there! We had a civilized dinner, got our attitudes right, and guess what? We had a great great show. There were a lot of people there, we played great, and I was really proud.
The lesson? Well, it might be that people don't really like our band, and that the only way to get them to come to a show is to not advertise or charge admission, but that's not the lesson that I took away from the whole thing. It was an affirmation of what I think is our band's demeanor and the fact that it really is fun to be a band and to play our version of the rock.
Smell you later,
H/SQ