Date: July 4th, 2007
Venue: El Mocambo
Series:
I’m not even going to bother writing a review for this show. Not because I’m a lazy bastard – no, not this time: this time, it’s because someone else broke it down real nicely before I even got home from the show. Here’s Ali with a review straight from Supernova headquarters (don’t believe me? Read the review yourself at http://www.supernova.com/shows/1425):
“After the small prelude from the Johnshiltz performance, Soul Plane took the stage. The winners of the night… and they deserved it! By my count, they had the largest crowd attendance and loudest response! What makes this group so special is how diverse the group is and how well they blend it together. When I met the group backstage before their set, I thought they were two entirely different bands, as the group consists of many different musical cultures. They seem like a perfect mix of… Linkin Park,
That’s right; you heard it from the horse’s mouth: we rocked like retired La-Z-Boy employees. We won a whole bunch of shit that night, with prizes ranging from recording time to a feature show at the Playdium in September.
This set was hilarious: we only did it to get studio time. The name of the game was simple: scam friends and people close to you, because if you sold 40 tickets for the show, then you’d win 4 hours of studio time; 80 tickets, 8 hours, and so on, and so forth. We knew the grand prize courtesy of Redpipe.ca was a long shot, and besides, this was something we did more for our manager Conor than anything else, because his boy JShiltz (from the Smiling Buddha show) was headlining the night and wanted us to jam along with him.
Our intentions were to just play the set and then bounce, and we did just that – well, everyone except Blythe; she stayed to watch the band that went on after us, Tongue N’ Groove, the last band of the night. She was blown away by how well they played and part of her died on the inside as it became clear that the grand prize was no longer in sight (despite having been told as she got off the stage by Supernova staff that we kicked the most ass so far all night). They tallied up the scores and announced the winners of the show to what was left of the crowd: Soul Plane had won, and Blythe was the only one from our band there. Awwwkwurrrrd. I hope she was as gracious in accepting the prize as she was that one time she dropkicked Gideon during practice for using the words “testicles,” “pudding,” and “chainsaw” in the same sentence.
At any rate, she called and screamed into the phone that we had been victorious that night; apparently we had won $500 collectively, 12 hours of recording time at Machinehead Studios, a qualifying spot on the Edge102 Next Big Thing contest, and that feature spot at the Playdium show, all from Redpipe. We thanked her for the news; everyone had sex with each other to celebrate, and then we immediately started scheming on how to best spend the prize money without Blythe’s input.
Date: July 7th, 2007
Venue:
Series: n/a
It looked like aliens had landed in a big-ass section of the parking lot in
It smelled so much like shit that my eyes started to water, and you know how sometimes something smells so bad, you can taste it on your tongue? Yeah, this event was offensive to pretty much all five senses.
Note: most of the really old Chinese guys didn’t have a single fucking clue as to what I was saying in my lyrics, but they stayed, cheered, clapped, yelled, and spat in high spirits anyway because Blythe is hot and they are perverted – oh man, sexual harassment rocks!
Soul Plane would have played an amazing show (Aaron loved the drum set they provided, the stage was nice and spacious) had it not been for the fact that the power generators cut out in the middle of our last song, “Never Say Die.” For some reason, though, my own mic and Aaron’s drums could still be heard through the system, so we rounded off the set in as professional a way as possible: I freestyled eight bars, Aaron filled it out with a drum solo, and we called it a night. I don’t think anyone noticed – the crowd was cheering wildly.
The highlight of the night came after the show; once we stepped off stage, the staff thanked us sincerely for helping them cover up the technical difficulties and glitches, and expressed gratitude towards our enthusiasm for performing despite the show running so late. As I walked out back onto the fairgrounds from backstage, three girls I had never seen before came up to me to congratulate us. I was as receptive as possible, and accommodated their follow-up and autograph requests – the one girl had nothing for me to sign, so she had me sign a napkin she robbed, undoubtedly from one of the hundreds of street vendors stationed around the area.
It was definitely a proud moment in my life, not because these girls made me feel like Usher when they got in my face screaming in excitement, but because it was apparent that the music I was partly responsible for making was reaching across an infinite number of borders and boundaries, language barriers and cultures, and touching people on the other end: these new fans of ours didn’t speak a word of English, they had made all their requests and felicitations in Cantonese and even double-checked to make sure “PLANE” was spelled right in the web URL I gave them because they had heard that the English language sometimes had several different spellings for identical-sounding words.
Once I realized their love for the music was genuine, and that they weren’t just some retarded groupies trying to get at someone who was doing something remotely important, it occurred to me for the first time since being told forever that music was a language on its own, ethnicity and cultural backgrounds notwithstanding. It also occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I was starting to become proficient in it, to the point of fluent communication…
