Main Street Exiles played a gig last night at the Star Bar, opening for Nine Inch Neils. The opened for us.
NIN were really good. Much like Yacht Rock, they are able to use the kitsch factor to win the crowd over. I mean, they got the whole Star Bar to sing along to Sweet Caroline, I Am I Said, and Song Sung Blue.
Our set was kind of rough. We jumped up on stage, line checked, and started playing. No monitors or anything. Tony decided to leave the bass cabinet on the opposite side of the stage from where he usually is, so I flipped and stood next to Freddy. We used a different drummer (Donovan Babb, who played very well). Cox's microphone kept coming unplugged.
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| Chris Cox |
Here's the problem with all that--the songs are really loose to begin with, and Cox needs everyone to be in the right spot so he can be loose, and we need to be able to hear Cox clearly in order to know where he's going in the song. Instead, all I could hear was Freddy's guitar (which sounded great, but...), and the drums. I didn't hear anything of me through the monitor. Sometimes (in between songs!) I could hear it in the house. I think I was playing everything right. Cox got kind of frazzled and lost his place, and we kept dealing with drunk people putting their jackets over his monitor (at one point I saw the drunk guy take off his suit jacket and put it down, then untuck his shirt, then take off his belt, and I thought...ooooooohhhh, this is fixing to get weird!)
Anyway, it was kind of rough. No disasters where we had to stop, but plenty of moments where everybody had to tread water for a second before going into the next part.
Afterwards, the sound guy told me that me sax mic "stopped working altogether" towards the end of the show. I would have thought that's something worth mentioning during the gig. Even better, isn't that something worth trying to fix? I hope most of it was there. I could kind of hear the solos in the mains, so I think I was ok.
That's what kind of night it was. Once we got paid (pretty quickly), everyone went their separate ways. I wasn't the only one looking to get out of there.
