Date: August 18th, 2007
Venue: El Mocambo
Series: In One Ear Throwdown Showdown
This is a text message I received on my cell phone from Blythe at 2pm, the day of the show:
“Yo I am so sick. I have been puking all night and morning. This is the first time I have been able to open my eyes. My head is pounding and I can’t get out of bed.”
I swear, it’s almost as if the only thing that is unfalteringly consistent with this band is how often fate shits on us. On the day of the show, every single one of us was either plagued by allergies or infected with some bug – this was going to be bad. I woke up feeling half-decent and somewhat ready to perform. My condition worsened greatly over the course of the day; I think at some point I actually had a temperature thrown on top of my sore throat and runny nose. Everyone felt like shit, and Blythe not being able to reach didn’t make matters any better. We kept Conor posted about our situation, and he told us not to worry: worse comes to worst, Soul Plane could just wing it. Thanks, asshole, I love having no idea what the fuck I’m doing in front of a crowd of people for an hour – I’ll just blow my nose into my polo shirt all night.
On our way to soundcheck, Dan came up with the brilliant idea of getting a hotel room downtown
The plan was to get plastered at the hotel room before the show, play the set, and head out of the venue to party at another club. What unfolded was that we ended up cancelling the hotel room because Gideon couldn’t stick around for the afterparty, we played the show (Conor damn near single-handedly saved us with his scratching over what Blythe was supposed to sing), and then we sat around smoking weed and getting progressively sicker for over an hour because we promised the band that was playing after us that they could use Aaron’s drum set. It was not a fun night, but the show must go on.
There really isn’t much else to say about this show – individually, we all felt differently about the way things worked out that night. For the most part, everyone loved it; the cheers were loud, the venue was pretty classy (we were on the main floor), and even Conor (who has standards high enough to make birds look up) said that he thought we threw down one of our better sets that he’s seen since he’s been managing us. Whatever, we were too sick and tired of being sick and tired to care – at that point, we were just glad to have gotten the damn thing over with.
One thing I find commendable in our band work ethic is our perseverance. I would grow a beard in the time it would take for me to tell you about each instance where we’ve had to overcome ridiculous adversities. Read any of the previous blogs I’ve been putting up – virtually every show, nay, every practice we have to deal with some shit God’s pet gorilla decides to fling our way. One time, and I swear to anything you want this is 100% true, we were supposed to have our last practice before a huge show (I believe it was the semi-finals of the Band on the Run series) – and Dan’s house gets struck with a power outage. Any less determined of a band would have given up and fucked practice, but not us; we toe-punted misfortune in the tits and started jamming acoustic. Upon realizing we were not in the mood for its bullshit, misfortune quickly assumed the foetal position and surrendered – power was once again restored to the Paiken household and we carried on with business as usual.
Soul Plane – like I told you… we’re playing for keeps.
