We are so excited to see all of our Sacramento friends the day after we see all of our San Francisco friends next month! On Wednesday, July 14th The Gentry and I will be performing at Blue Lamp in Sacramento, California. Come get loud and wild in the SAC with us!
Here we are rehearsing for tour at The Odditorium last week. Oh, and just so you know: It’s not lost on me how fucking cool it is that we get to do stuff like this in the Warhol palace. I have much to be grateful for by way of awesome stuff happening in Musicworld these days, you guys.
Last week my band and I drove to Olympia to perform at the 2010 Capital City Pride Festival. We had the best time on Friday night dancing ’til the wee hours at Jake’s On 4th, then got up really early on Saturday for our 9am soundcheck where they had me sign a piece of paper saying that we would not use profanity on stage. Needless to say, that’s when things kind-of went South.
Whatever talentless old fart the nice folks at Capital City Pride had hired to run sound was a dick. He wouldn’t listen to any of us in the morning during our check and was blowing us off like “how dare these kids tell me what to do” so we didn’t push…but I knew something was going to go terribly wrong for us almost as soon as we met his dumb ass.
When The Gentry and I took the stage, Mr. Sound Douche had completely changed the board and none of our in-ear monitors worked so none of us could hear ourselves or each other, basically making it where we had to all play by memory and just hope for the best. Here we are doing just that with “Smoke Rings“. Considering we can’t hear a goddamn thing we are singing or playing, what key we’re supposed to be in, or where we are at in the song, I’m proud of us. My attitude changes about halfway through this song, though…to pure, red-headed EVIL.
I tried to be professional and communicate with the engineer via the usual hand signals and stage cues at first, but he wasn’t paying attention so by song 3 I started calling him out in the hopes that someone from the festival might be able to go back there and save the day. I proceeded to do this for the next few songs, slowly becoming more and more frustrated with his not fixing the problem.
I honestly never do shit like this and I’m a little embarrassed about turning into such a dick myself on stage, but it was a nightmare so I just decided to make it a TOTAL nightmare and fight with the sound guy like some kind of out-of-control pop diva. He was making me sound like an amateur, so making him my bitch seemed like the right thing to do at the time, as witnessed in the video of us performing “Come Home” like angry young gentlemen below:
Evidently, the event sponsors and coordinators weren’t digging our psychotic dance rock and bad attitudes any more than we were digging the sound guy fucking up our show and them telling us not to swear, because they cut my set short after the 6th song. Oh well!
I think it’s funny that we got kicked off the steps of the state capital…and I partially blame Kimya Dawson (from the “Juno” soundtrack) and Coyote Grace who played for a full hour before us. They are both very soft and sweet and had a very positive message. We are dark and dirty and sing songs about getting fucked and doing drugs. Basically, we might as well have been eating the faces off their children up there following those two acts.
In other words…IT WAS FUCKING AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!! My favorite part of the day was when Gino jumped off the stage and started dancing with the cracker in the turquoise tank top. It made my day and pretty much summed up Olympia Gape Ride for us all. ha ha ha
