The Show Must Go On

Static Republic decided to play an open mic at Subterranean last night. I ended up on guitar since our guitar player has been drafted to work almost every night this week, thus, putting a dampener on our rehearsal plans. We had a plan to rehearse a couple of hours then hit the open mic with 3 acoustic versions of our greatest hits. At least that was the plan.

We all ran late to get to rehearsal on time. I showed up first and noticed a brand new shiny lock on our rehearsal room door. I called my singer and asked him if someone installed a new lock on our door without telling me with the nagging suspicion that the management had locked us out for a perceived failure to pay rent on time. No one knew anything about the lock so I proceeded to play my guitar out in the hall until the showed up (I knew for a fact we had all paid rent on time but this company sucks our collective ballz by second guessing our motive). The rest of the band came and we started making phone calls to the management company to see what the mix up was. We couldn't get a hold of anyone so we relegated ourselves to ge tback to the singers house to rehearse.

We got back to the singer's house and we played through a number of songs. I liked being able to help interpret what the songs needed acoustically since they were now a bit more soulful and musical. It's something I would like to bring into our electric set at some point. While we were there, the management company called us and told us they only received 2 out of 3 checks (which we knew for a fact is a lie), hence, why they locked us out. Couldn't a simple phone call to us been a lot easier to do than to just lock us out? We then decided to run them a fourth check down there and told them that we're going to double check our records to see when stuff got cashed. Hopefully this check will go towards next month's rent. Anyway, we finished up our rehearsal and decided to book on down to Sub-T.

We were third on the list after Root Shoot Leaf played about 5 songs that evening. As we sat in the bar, we kept noticing that periodically the dim lights would flare up with light and then die back down to their original level of illumination. This could only signal one thing: bad power. Having played many a place with bad electrical wiring, I know the signs of it when I see it. So, as the guys in Common Shiner played before us, the PA cut out 3-5 times during their three song set. It was incredibly annoying but funny as hell at the same time. It was cool to see them struggle through it. I kept yelling out "THEY'RE REALLY UNPLUGGED!" Then it was our turn.

We played the three songs form our demo acoustically. The first song was a bit of a disaster as the PA went out on us as well. We stopped once to see if it could be fixed and once it was back up and running, we started the song again. Guess what. It went out again. This time I yelled out "Fawk it! Keep going!" So, we huddled closer together and sang together to bring up the amplification while Myong our bassist played air guitar on his lifeless bass (he was running into the PA). We finished the song and the PA came back on. Luckily, we were able to do two more songs with the PA intact. I feel we earned the respect of the crowd by playing through the adversity. The PA went out almost immediately after we finished our last song . Gotta love it!

Overall, we played well. I look forward to our open mic Wednesday night at Fearon's Pub. Hopefully we can play three songs uninterrupted.