I came pretty close to having a Christian Bale moment at a show last night with my new band. The guys we were playing with wanted to improve the "ambiance" of the place, so we waited around for an extra hour while they drove back to their studio to get a light rack. When they finally arrived with it, they realized they didn't bring the pedal for it, so there was no way to control it. Also, since they didn't bring an extension cord, the only place they could plug it in was into the power-strip I had running to my amp and bass cab, which also put the lights at a maximum distance of about a foot and a half in front of me and dead at eye level due to my height.
A quarter of the way into the first song, the lights managed to trip the reset switch on the power strip, so the stage went dark and half of our sound cut out. I unplugged the light rack and switched the bass cab to standby before hitting the reset button and getting back in business... then they wanted to stop us again so they could work on the lights some more, which included wanting to plug it right back into my power-strip. With "It's fucking distracting, oh good!" looping in my head, I said over the mic, "Not to be a dick about it, but I'd rather have sound than light. We'll play like this, you guys can work on the lights when we're done," then we went into the next song.
The show was set up where both bands would play two alternating sets. The event was kind of a bust, because it butted up against about five other things going on in town at the same time, so our second set was basically played to about six people, and maybe another ten or so that were smoking outside of the door. Since they had managed to get the lights working again, I performed in sunglasses. We cut two songs because my band mates were just about fresh out of "give a shit". I'm of the school of thought that even if you're only playing for two people and a bunch of empty bar stools, you should put on a show, so I just went fucking nuts on our last song including feedback storms and the utilization of drumsticks as guitar implements. Somewhere around the part where I was sitting on the floor and doing keyboard style chord shapes on the fretboard while smashing and sawing away over the pickups with a drumstick, I started directing the others with head nods to tell them where I wanted them to accent. We read each other well enough that we were able to keep the chaos contained to the point where we could slip back into our original ending for the song, only with the other guitarist and I spontaneously swapping our parts. The lucky few in attendance ate it up like it was an unexpected airdrop of candy into a fat camp. It actually brought a few people in who had just been walking by on their way to other events, which was nice.
Vagrancy - Be careful who you wake up in a twenty four hour parking lot.
His name was Not Johnny - A young man becomes a sort of superhero after a crippling injury. He
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