The World is Full of Noises

Show last night. Was alright. Good, not great, as Mission of Burma would say. Speaking of Mission of Burma, during the show, one of the things I said was, "Our name is Mission of Baltimore; this next song is called 'That's When I Reach for My Crack Pipe.'" Only Sterling got the joke, and all he said was, "boo!" Oh well.

Granger came to the show, again; I suppose they must really have nothing to do in Silver Spring on the weekends. He crashed on my couch again.

Amazingly enough, Adam showed up, and not only that, he brought an entire posse of Naval Academy kids up from Annapolis with him. Then again, I suppose one could only expect the unexpected from Adam. I don't think he came with us when we went down to Mary Washington for Zach's birthday in October 2005; if he didn't, then I hadn't seen that guy since we visited Andrew and Nick at Columbia back in October 2004. Well over two years since then. Lord. Anyway, they had to leave after our first song, because they had curfew. Still, that made my night.

Show itself though...three acts opened for us, I can't fathom why Neil would make that kind of arrangement for a band who's only playing their third real show. First act, Tom Fogarty, did some sort of singer-songwriter, Dashboard thing; guy's yuppie-looking friends showed up, and most of them bailed after he was done, the bastards. Giving Chase was a real energetic, post-hardcore sort of band with a slick drummer; I liked their act a lot. I didn't catch a lot of The Swellers, because I was talking to Adam, but they were energetic, if a little pop-punkish.

We played last. Took forever setting up. The other bands all ran guitars directly into the backline, and not only did we use our own amps (they didn't offer us the use of their amps, anyway), we had to go get fancy with pedals and shit. But that's just the way we do. Someone didn't bring a cord for the synth (not my jurisdiction, in any case), so we just didn't use it. Set up, Lisa couldn't figure out why her guitar wasn't giving signal (it wasn't plugged in). Played "Disregard, Again" and nobody could hear Lisa's vocals; Neil came over, checked the PA to find it was cranked, and decided the problem was the band was just too damn loud. I turned down, but Miguel didn't really do so, and Steffi certainly didn't play any softer--I was getting drowned out, so I just turned up the bass on my Sterling, knowing that it would sound muddy, but at least it would be audible, and the extra volume wouldn't cut into the vocal range, and thought fuck it all.

I'd resolved beforehand that, this time, I would try to calm down the stage antics, and try to keep the songs together, but a couple songs in I realized that no one else in the band was going to do anything remotely interesting, or talk, or do anything, so I fell into the stage clown role again, making bad jokes (like the aforementioned Burma one), telling people to waltz, and so on. I do that every time we play, but it's always weird, because that's not really what I do--I just do it because I'm the only member of the band who remotely has the motivation to do so. During the last song, "Small Town," which I haven't really liked for a long time, Zach started doing some silly jitterbug dance--I guess it was because the song sounded like The Smiths--and I walked right up to him, and we had us a dance-off in the first row of the audience. I think he won, but I was playing bass anyway. My guitar on "Some Sunny Days" sounded good, though, if only because I cranked the hell out of my amp, 8 on the clean channel--didn't do that the last two times we played sets with that song, and ended up being drowned out completely--and proved I could make more weird noises with 4 pedals than Miguel could with 10. I don't know what I would do without my DE7.

Still, somewhere in the middle of the set I got the old "what the hell am I doing" feeling--I realized that all I was doing was playing notes, the exact same notes I play at practice (give or take a few slip-ups), and that I was slowly losing the ability to see the point of it all. When we play that fast and that loud all the time, there's just no room for improvisation, no room for subtler textures, just hard and fast, note for note and try to keep the same tempo, and I know that if Miguel had his way, we wouldn't even talk when we were tuning up between songs, and just go directly from the end of one song to the beginning of the next. I also know that if we keep writing songs the way we have been, they're all going to sound like this, and the more songs we write like this, the more they'll all sound the same.

We have two more shows coming up in the next month. I don't feel at all excited for either of them; all I want to do is make weird noises with pedals and laptops (still have to learn the latter). I feel burned out on rock and roll. I feel that for all the time and energy I'm putting into music, I'm making nothing interesting or beautiful, just a lot of meaningless catharsis that feels less and less cathartic every time.

This isn't fair. I was supposed to at least have a few years of enjoying rocking out before I got disillusioned with it and wanted to make "experimental" "art," right? All the hardcore punkers were allowed to kick ass straight-up for a career or two before getting old and bored and making more sophisticated music.

This isn't fair. I shouldn't be growing so old so fast. People keep telling me I'm ahead of my years. I keep trying to tell them what a pain in the ass it, if at all true, is.

Party tonight at John's. John spun, and Sterling projected processed footage of military aircraft and cardio anatomy on the wall. Not sure people realized how ironically "artistic" it was. A bunch of girls from Kappa Kappa Gamma were standing around when I got there; eventually the room became so crowded that John stopped the music, and called for all the people who had not been invited, or know someone who was invited, to "please bounce." Since when did apartment parties become this exclusive? Not saying that wasn't the right thing to do--though I have my doubts--but somehow the entire situation seemed to become quite absurd.

Later some cops showed up and asked us to tone it down, but left us alone otherwise--theory being the Kappa girls, scorned, called them. Who knows if that's true.

Beach House and Mojave 3 late at night is soothing. Rachel Goswell's voice is like a drug to me, especially when she sings things like, "a bottle of wine is all I have to hold." Downloaded a bootleg video of one of Slowdive's concerts from 1991 or 1992. Probably immediately after Just For a Day--they didn't play any songs that I knew to be from Souvlaki or later. Even though there were 5 members in the band, I'm pretty sure the photographer must have focused on Rachel at least 70% or 80% of the time, even when she wasn't singing. Who filmed that show? Did they have a crush on Rachel? Did their breath catch the few times she seemed to stare directly, unblinkingly, into the lens? Were they also mesmerized by the way she swayed gently back and forth in half-time, whispered heavily British-accented "thank yous" between songs, and tilted her head to the right when she sang? Did watching and filming that show make their heart skip, and melt a little, like watching the footage made mine?

Now it's 15 years later, and I don't suppose we'll ever find out. But I guess that, in a world indifferent to romanticism, one has to compensate somehow. Right?