Am I Rhino?

And so two weeks of terminal velocity came to an end this past weekend, and apparently when I told my mind I could finally relax my immune system was listening in, because Saturday morning I woke up with my throat so sore I thought I wouldn't speak for the rest of the day. That ended up not being true, which was fortunate, because I needed to sing backup on a couple of songs at the gig that night. I'm still coughing up a storm today (Monday), but with a bit of Ventolin I should make it. Ventolin's a funny drug; yes, it does make breathing easier, but it also makes you all jittery and your heart start pounding. Almost like a caffeine crash. As if I needed any more of that.

Speaking of the gig, though, it was pretty fantastic. The Ottobar is a couple of orders of magnitude above the Charm City Art Space (where we played 3 times in a row...Jesus), having a real PA and a real soundcheck. They even had a backline: I was able to use their Ampeg 810 (remember when I actually owned one of those?). The place was filled with displays, paintings hanging on wire frame barriers, shirts laid out on tables, stickers and pins covering every available horizontal surface.

We set up and soundchecked after The Mishaps did--first time I ever got told to turn up onstage--then piled into Monica's car, drove back to Hampden for chicken parms, and had a ghetto rockstar dinner with beer in the Ottobar parking lot (no wonder so many rock stars die young--no dietary standards) ten minutes before the performance. Due to the 2-drink rule (which is still very much intact) I no longer have any tolerance for alcohol; while I played pretty neatly, there were a few points at which I feared I was going to just freak out and start playing random notes. I calmed down a little after I chucked my pick at the crowd immediately after "Cure" (by now the only pickstyle bass song in the entire Trafalgar catalog). No more drinks 10 minutes before playing. Anyway, we were tight, even though the guitar was a little quiet, the Sterling-GK combo sounded fiercer than ever; Monica projected a silent, laconic kind of confidence, and I said enough dumb shit to fill up the rest of the time (once I pointed at Granger and shouted into the mic, "Look at that guy, he shaved his head!"). I saw a couple of girls dancing the jitterbug off to the side while we were playing "Waterfall"--paradoxically, one of our slowest songs--this tickled me so much I walked up to the mic while I wasn't supposed to be singing at all and yelled, "someone's dancing! someone's dancing!" and started pointing at them in between plucking chords, trying to get people to notice them. Nobody did, but it was still hilarious.

Shockingly, we even managed to sell a bunch of the CDs we'd burned for the occasion; a few people took some coaxing, and I had to spot a couple of them (I don't care if I have to lose a couple of dollars, I just want people to hear the shit we do), but they bought them, and I convinced them to sign up for the mailing list, too. We gave a CD to the guys from The Flukes, too, since they gave all of us CDs. I also ran into Brooks and Shawna from Avec; Brooks seemed really confused when I walked up to them, until I told him I'd seen them perform, and Shawna recognized the Forget Cassettes t-shirt I was (serendipitously) wearing. Managed to pass a CD to them, as well; I hope they like it, since they're one of the bigger rock acts around town.

Brian and Greg (this week's winner for most delightfully offensive sense of humor) as well as Marcelino from Mouth Curved Moonlike came out to see us. I'm really glad they did. We hung out with them Wednesday after the free show at Towson University; a few more times chilling like this and we might start a scene, whatever that is. They played with Furious Love Kids, whose keyboardist, Dale, is Monica's friend, and also on that bill was Faster Faster Harder Harder, who also played with MCM at Towson last Wednesday, whose drummer Sam recognized me from Jazz Band, because he is in the Jazz Ensemble, and they played with The Mishaps...maybe a picture will explain this better...



[Click for bigger. Yeah, I was bored as shit. Not included in this diagram: Snap Ending/Kick Church (ex-coworker and friend of me, coworker and friend of ex-singer Lisa).]

And then Paul, the promoter of the event, gave us $50 for no reason other than we played and were apparently awesome. My best guess is he's one of those people who likes to make art happen, no matter how unlikely it might be; I admire him for that. We gave him over a dozen CDs to distribute at will. And then Monica and I bought these grey t-shirts that had black outlines of construction cranes on them, and then we all piled into the photo booth to take blurry black and white pictures which made us look like early '90s shoegazer bandwagoneers--which, of course, delighted me greatly.



And then everybody, including Zach and Granger, funny-danced to The Mishaps' set. Sorry, no photos.

Oh yeah, and this is when we were actually playing music.



[Click for big.]

I also went to the Biophysical Society meeting downtown this weekend. But all this HTML bullshit has burnt me out for now. Maybe I will write about that later.