Last night NJN played the local show at Pops. What can you say about Pops besides it's lovely location of Sauget Ill, population 250 and dropping. Pops, sandwiched in between 3 titty bars and the sound guy apparently doesn't know how to properly mix a cd. This is the second time we've been burned with getting our stuff recorded at bars and the cd quality is horrid.
There were five bands and at least 150 people there. We sold 43 tickets, but another band sold 100 and another sold 60, so there were a freakin ton of people there. Many people to fuck up in front of. And while we botched one song so incredibly bad that we could automatically count ourselves out of the competition for Pointfest, the rest of the set was mostly error free.
We got to play Sunshine live on the radio, with introduction by Point DJ Cornbread, all 95 pounds of him. The one good mark on the night was that our radio sond sounded really good, at least to us. Then we got the cd and heard how bad the mix was. Later when we got home, my sister recorded the live track on her radio and you could barely hear the guitar. I don't know if that was Tim's fault of the bars. Because Tim fucked up bad.
Tim has this rule he ingrained in us going as far back as when Mike was playing with us, I'm sure Mike even remembers the rule he made: that you never stop playing if you make a mistake, you keep going no matter what, you keep playing at all costs. This is his rule and last night he fucked up. He messed somethign up and decided to just stop playing, for like 35 seconds. For an entire second verse he stopped playing, dead air from him. And as soon as I hear this I immediately think they are stopping us to do our live song (Tim said they would stop us for our local song when they were ready.) So at that point, I stop and it's only Heather and Gary...and Gary starts slowing down, almost stopping...and then I come back in because I didn't know what else to do...and then Tim finally comes back when he feels like it. It was the worst thing that could have happened in front of the most people we're ever played in front of, all because he didn't follow his own rules.
By that point I was pretty dissappointed with the night, only on the 2nd song. Regardless of whether we played the rest of the set, and regardless of us playing our live radio song well, I was pissed and wanted to just end the night. All because of that fuck up in the 2nd song. I looked at Tim, and he looked back at me when I stopped playing, and he didn't even try to say, "keep going." All manner of thoughts entered my mind, like he broke a string, or the bar lost power (its happened before), or his amp blew, or, or, or, or, or.... But it just came down to him thinking he'll just wait awhile to come back in, because I guess you wouldn't notice something like the lead guitar, just dissappearing.
Last night was good and bad, but I'm mostly dissappointed.
