Public humiliation...

As I wade through this wonderful thing called existence, I have become accustomed to the occasional mishap, hiccup, faux pas, and various assorted brain farts. Last Saturday night was one of my most bothersome events in a never ending string of uncontrollable situations resulting in huge amounts of embarrassment perpetrated on my person. AND AWAY WE GO!!!

My fellow homies and I (see Stone Down link to the right) were booked into a wonderful establishment in Arlington Texas called The Phoenix. Having played this particular hole on two previous occasions, we thought we had a pretty good handle on what to expect. WRONG!! This was one of those evenings where nothing short of divine intervention was going to turn the crapfest on stage around. As most of you know (who am I kidding, there might be one person reading this) I play an electrified bass guitar in the little group known as Stone Down. On this particular evening, my gear, which has never let me down in the past, decided to take the night off. Halfway through our opening tune, my bass starts to cut in and out. No problem, I'll just give the input on my guitar a little tap. No dice. After two more songs spent pounding on my guitar, one of my fellow brothers-in-arms from another band went backstage and produced his bass for me to borrow. Problem solved. Not. Still having the same intermittent response. Well, it MUST be my wireless rig. I know, I'll switch to a cord. I guess I should have specified that I wanted a cord that actually worked properly. My mistake. How stupid of me. Switch out the cords, junior. Well I finally discovered a bass, cord, spot on stage combination that seemed to be working, only now we've only got two songs left and I'm terrified to move since apparently I'm perfectly aligned with Jupiter while Neptune is in it's fall equinox at the same time that light that left star LX127-H 3286 years ago is reaching the infared scope on the Hubble. And this is just a description of the problems that I had.

Let's play a game called "Retardedly Obvious Answers to Amazingly Simple Questions". Here we go.

Question: You are a sound man working for a club. What is your primary function?
Answer: Run sound.

Question: Do you need to physically be in the room where the sound is at to properly engineer said sound?
Answer: Yes.

Can you tell where I'm going with this? The sound man at the club decided that he could run sound telepathically so he simply vacated the room. WHAT THE HELL?!!! If you're cooking a meal do you leave the kitchen? No, because if you do, something is gonna burn. In this case, it was OUR SHOW!!! After asking an apparently invisible sound man for monitor adjustments twice, we finally decided that we just weren't going to get anything we needed. Our beloved manager proceeded to then hunt down the magical powered sound man so he could end his life but, alas, the show's promoter found him first and prevented bloodshed. After switching out Bam's microphone, the show proceeded to do a complete 180, only going the other way in this instance was even worse than the direction we were headed to begin with.

Thankfully, the suckfest was almost complete. We're ending our second-to-last song which ends on a huge progression that is completely overdriven and jamming. KMO accidentally stepped on his footswitch and changed over to his super happy fun clean sound. That made for quite a raucous ending to what is normally one of our most well received songs. At this point we're all so far out of the zone that nothing was going to pull us back. We cut our last song short and then loaded out as quickly as humanly possible.

I must say that I haven't been that embarrassed in quite a long time. But hey, good news is that we've got plenty more shows on the horizon and any one of them has the potential to top this one on the turd-o-meter!!