Monday, October 31, 2005

Spinning in the wind

Seriously, there's just a feeling on Halloween thats fun. I mean thinking back to ye old days it was the anticipation of getting dressed up with your friends and running around like a bunch of crazies telling jokes and getting free candy. Of course you'd get the occasional creepy old lady with a bucket of pennies she'd be giving out. And then there was that big "let's be safe" campaign in the early '90s because some nutty people would start fucking with the treats and taint the spirit of free candy mooching. But on the whole it was a day like no other, to be revered and held as high as Christmas in some people's minds. It was a celebration of friends and free shit and dressing up in spooky outfits and sometimes chasing around Joe Schoen until he went running home, truly scared.

I don't know if its just me but I love the fall. I mean you've got your nature enthusiasts and hippies who would praise the glories of summer and how the earth is in it's prime in the summer. But I say fall is where it's at. Autumn, it has a nice feeling to it. Tranquility, peacefulness and calm, a coming dormancy. The colors are more vibrant and clear to me when they turn in October and fall from limb to ground. And there's that familiar autumnal smell, you know- the smell of earthy, leafy textures in a brisk chill morning that takes you by surprise. Spinning in the wind, the leaf fell from the limb.

Scary days at UMSL

So far since being on campus for 15 minutes I've seen a handful of people dressed up to celebrate Halloween. It seems rarer and rarer to see "adult" type people dressed up, but it's good to see some people are still young at heart, or perverts. There was this guy dressed in drag Rocky Horror style here in the computer lab. At first I thought it was a girl, then I saw his goatee, and you know, his junk. Fortunately there was a sexy devil girl walking around here looking sexy and devilish...

I gotta study for this Comparative Criminology exam I have at 1 now, but I'll have to keep an eye open for that sexy devil girl...

Sunday, October 30, 2005

Some funny anecdotes from last night

Julie's Halloween party was so much fun last night. Tim and I were the only ones who didn't dress up. But really Gary only wore his werewolf costume for like 30 minutes because it was so hot. The best part of the night I recall was the 11 of us playing Scategories....dirty scategories. And I think Rick had some of the best answers. He gets the prize for best answers on the letter 'R' when he answered:
  1. A scary person: Ravishing Rick Rude
  2. Something under the bed: Rick Rodemacher's Red Beat Off Sock
  3. Magic: Ripping a girl in two, in a box... I swear we all died laughing when he read this one

The runner upgoes to Julie's sister, who on the 'S' category answered this:

  1. A Villian: Snakeman

Last night was great, up until my allergies caught up with me. I forgot to medicate myself with lots of allergy pills and after about 4 hours my face was starting to drain. Julie does have 4 cats and 2 dogs, not to mention other animals. So I'm happy I lasted as long as I did.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Attack of the First Show

What a great first show, I mean unfreakingbelievable! There were over 100 people there by the time we finished playing at 9 and it was standing room only. We played over an hour, running through all of our music to rounds of applause we've never heard so loud at a show we'd played. The show wen't so well they asked us back and we're playing at Smiley's again on Friday November 25th. We made a ton of money, sold a ton of cd's and at one point our booking guy Daniel came down because he said he heard the club was so full you could barely move throughout the crowd. I think he was impressed.

The guys from Rusted Shine were very cool as well. They did an acoustic show but brought their own PA system that they were even louder than us! I thought their drummer was pretty good, but Gary said, "You're just impressed by flashy things. Hey look it's a light (and he was moving his hand around in the air.)" Their singer had amazing range for a guy, and overall they were awsome doing their acoustic set, so I bet their electric set is even better. They warmed up doing an Alice In Chains cover that was just unbelievable how well their singer sounded like Layne Stanley.

Gary commented to me on the way home how good it felt to play again, but not only play again but to do it right. To do it when we all feel as a whole in our commitment to the music. Yes, last night was a groundbreaking mark for us, and great things are soon to come. Heather is in the process of setting up a show at the Way Out Club, and we're already going back to Smiley's. Things just seems to come together easily when they are right.

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Second verse, same as the first

In an update pertaining to shows, Not Just Noise will be playing our first and second show consecutively at Smiley's. We are now playing at 7pm, and again at 9pm at Smiley's Pizza Pub. That's right, two shows in a row for our insane fans. Why, why would we do something so crazy? Because thats the way we roll, fucker!

Feeling hungry? Feast your eyes on this! The 30,000 calorie sandwich!

Thursday, October 20, 2005

....

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Home Improvement

Last night was our first night of real work to sound-proof the band room since Gary's neighbor decided come over and start argueing about how it was so loud last thursday. It all seems kinda pointless because Gary will be moving in the spring anyway, but he figures the less trouble he has in the meantime the better. We shot up a framework of 2x3's and filled them in with multiple layers of fanfold insulation that should provide a pretty thick and dense barrier. We also stuffed the window and all the cracks with home insulation and then even covered the windows with cinder blocks. Then stuffed blankets and layers of fanfold insulation in the wind and finally boarded it up.

Either tommorow night or friday Gary and I will cut and set the 1/2 inch drywall we bought and we will be almost complete. Fortunately my dad was able to score us some quality high density audio deadening material. This stuff is super dense, in that a 1 square foot section weigh like 2 pounds. We've got like 5 sheets of this stuff, each one about 5'x5', so we're going to save some of it for Gary new house, because this stuff is expensive and hard to come by. So by saturday we'll be jamming again in our new soundproofed room.

The Twilight Hayride is gearing up to be one bad ass show at Smiley's. Our booking agent has us playing with two pretty big bands in St. Louis, Driver and Rusted Shine. He said he expects there to be quite a crowd and for this being our first show it will be a lot of exposure. Now we have to write our setlist. We've been writing new music faster and better than anything we'd ever done with Silent Q. Over seven years with that band and we'd written some 20-25 songs, even though we regularly only played the same 12 or so. We've already got 13 songs written and there are no signs of it stopping.

Monday, October 17, 2005

flyer

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

tickets on sale

Thursday Rocktober 27th Not Just Noise is playing at Smileys in soulard for the Twilight Hayride. This even involves 18 bars and each bar will have 3 bands playing throughout the night. We go on at 7pm-ish and will be playing with Driver at 9pm and Rusted Shine at 11pm. We are selling tickets for $5 but we don't have many left. After they are gone tickets can be purchased through metrotix.com for $10 in advance and at the door for $15. We will also be selling our first demo cd at the show for $3. Included in this event are horse drawn hayrides that shuttle you around to all the bars participating in the event.

Monday, October 10, 2005

Beating the man

Lately some of the cds I've been buying have been "copyright protected" with a data protection program encoded on the disc that prevents you from copying, ripping or doing anything but listen to the cd. Now I dont know about you but I like to rip my music onto the computer to listen to without having to pop the cd in everytime I want to hear it. Thankfully there are some programs out there that let you stick it to the man and reclaim your dominance over the digital media you so desire.

I used the Isobuster program to "recover" this "lost data" on my brand new Taproot cd, and I can report that it works pretty good. I had tried previous cd copying programs but this is a different program. This program actually treats the disc as if it were damaged and you were trying to recover lost data, bypassing the security that keeps you from copying the tracks. I've read that similar success from the Audiograbber program. Both of these run in the freeware mode, which is what I used.

Finally one last note. I came across the music section of Downloads.com recently and discovered there is a plethora of unknown musicians, in every genre of music you can think of, who post a handful of free .mp3s here. Check out Music.Downloads.com for more info and a shitload of free, albeit unknown music. And really there is a ton of good stuff in there if you look for it.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Canoeing in Kirksville

Family weekend has ended at Truman U and now I'm back home. It's been a fun weekend but I'm beat and ready to get a good nights sleep in my own bed. I went up on friday night to pick up my sister with my family. We stayed at a hotel a few miles away from Truman and went to some big craft festival in the town square on saturday morning. I got some hot apple cider that was delicious and kettle corn. Everyone had their dogs with them too, which was neat. If my dog was there she'd have gone crazy and try to run after everyone and when she realized should couldn't sniff everyone, then she'd just squirt diarrhea everywhere like my computer room.

It was great seeing my sister. We went to lunch at Thousand Hills S.P. resturant and afterwards my sister and I took out a canoe on the lake. For the first few seconds I thought we were going to bail into the lake and it was going to be a cold drive back to the hotel. But intsead the water was calm and we got to work off that lunch on the scenic forest lake.

We even saw a horse drawn carrage that was carrying a bride to her wedding at one of the pavillions on the waterfront. Everything was decorated in autumnal colors, orange, browns, yellows of all kinds were streamed from the pavillion and the little gazebo they were getting married under. Even the brides maids had fall colored dresses.

Now I'm going to debate on going over to Beth's house tonight or not. Night.

Friday, October 07, 2005

The jokes on me

So after I got my new car home and I was looking at all its neat features I realized what was missing that I so convienently didn't think to look for when I was buying this car. I bought a car that doesn't have fucking ashtray or cigarette lighter! I thought this is like standard on all cars! You know, engine, transmission, steering wheel...ashtray/lighter! I guess Chrysler is trying to be the first with a line of non smoking cars... Oh well, I'll just deal. Maybe get a big ass orange ashtray and glue it to my dashboard like a hoosier or something. And hang some thong panties from my rear view mirror while I'm at it...














And when I got home from the car dealer I was greeted by the smell of shit because my dog apparently just had to squirt diarrhea all over the floor of our computer room. The smell nearly knocked me over, and then my mom started puking while cleaning it up. It was that bad. Two days later it still has a slight tinge in the air of something that came from a dogs ass...

But the good news is that Not Just Noise will be playing the Twilight Hayride on October 27th at 9pm at Smileys down in Soulard. Contact us for tickets (we only have a few) or go to metrotix to buy tickets!

I hope you all had a good end to september and made it up to the Hard Liqour and Porn festival in Toronto!

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

floating

Well what was my cold last week is now just a slight cough that I'm trying to shake. I dont have the congestion I had last week, or the sore throat, or the runny/stopped up nose, but I've got a slight cough. Dad started worrying me because he said some friend of his said she had her cold turn into Bronchitus...I do not need another trip to the doctor. All in all I'm feeling mucho better compared to last week. That may also be due to the fact that I finally bought a car and had been worrying about the whole auto situation for awhile now. But it's all good and done with, I'll be picking up my new car from the dealer tonight.

Our booking guy is taking his sweet ass time in figuring out where we're going to play. Two weeks ago he said the bands would be posted on the next monday. Nothing. One week ago he said it would be posted on monday. Still nothing. So I guess we wait some more.

Oh yea, I saw another hilarious commercial by Burger King today with some lumberjack fellow int he woods cutting down a tree. When the tree starts falling the King is standing there and holds out a BK breakfast sandwich and is this earie disembodied hippie voice the king says "It's Meat'normus!" Holy shit, I about fell out of the chair laughing.