Giggity!

ok, so i did ok at the gig. :)

in fact, it went really well! the guys in aubriot are good, and it was good to play with them. sound was surprisingly good for Grog & Tankard, as well. and a lot of peeps came out, and showed their love with applause, and there was a photog there, and all-in-all it was pretty exciting, in that calm exiciting kind of way.

i showed up almost on time, and the guys at Grog recognized me. i'm getting to be a regular there with my new bands always needing a place to cut their performance teeth, and the Grog always obliging. the door man (i keep asking his name and forgetting it... reggie? he looks like a reggie.) is fond of telling me how much i rock, even when the band i'm in stinks.

matt was already there when i arrived, so i pulled up and we loaded in the goods. he tells me there's a metal band on before us, but they'll be done by 9ish -- as long as it doesn't mess with our start time i'm fine. then i drove off to find my parking space, approximatelly 6.7 miles away.

so for a while i stood outside smoking (thank god for nice weather in the face of the damn DC smoking ban). i couldn't tell you if they were a good metal band or not, actually, cos i don't really know about these things. i believe their name was Lysergic Cross. the screamer was very angsty and occasionally sang a line or two, which were mostly inaudible against the backdrop of Marshalls, China Crashes and Screaming Guitars.

But No, Seriously! They were Very Loud.

after they cleaned up the excess Lysergy, we set up and did a quick sound check. Then we took a brief break (not even half an American Spirit cig) and went on.

now on to my critique of my performance. as usual, everyone else's performance was good :)

while my guitaring leaves a little to be desired (more on that later), my voice was actually in good shape. it only did a funny little break, once, and that was early in the set, so hopefully everyone forgot it by the time we were done. also, i had to ad lib some lines because the songs are new, and i had literally just written some lyrics that week. but i pulled off some stuff (i think) that i hadn't managed in practice, so i was pretty psyched.

since i don't ever play guitar with a capo, i promptly forgot to capo for the first song, and matt had to remind me. mostly my guitaring was ok, if a little stilted, and i didn't hit many off chords. the vox came through -- i was really worried about being heard because it's such a little amp but i cranked it and immediately turned it down. it really does go up to eleven.

i forgot to capo for the last song, too, so my first chord sounded like this: "WRANNNGGGGGAAAAAAASS!!!!!" pretty awesome. two hits and i realized it was all wrong, so i just turned the volume down on my guitar to try and look like i was still playing but not completely ass up the joint. i think i pulled it off, managing to appear only mildly constipated as i continued singing. i figured out what happened after a few bars, but was unable to compute a save whilst still singing... so i left it on 'mute.'

i also got to tell a joke, my favorite joke. you know the one.

maybe i'll get some pictures of the gig soon.