Date: July 11th, 2008
Venue: Holy Joe’s
Series: n/a
It was one of those gigs we completely forgot (didn’t care) we were playing up until like, four days before we were to play it. Kick Ass Concerts got in touch with Conor after Soul Plane’s Opera House gig on June 19th and invited us to play at a show they had set up for the evening of July 11th at the Kathedral. I believe Conor may have briefly mentioned it to me (and probably everyone else) way back, but the whole MuchMusic thing came up a week before showtime and blasted the entire gig to the Soul Plane backburner (see “MuchMusic (yes, THE MuchMusic)” blog – July 8th, 2008). Even before MuchMusic took over our entire lives, we knew we had a huge gig scheduled for the following night, July 12th – the Toronto Night Market (an event we later found out that MuchMusic wanted to cover). By the time this whole MuchMusic fiasco was worked out, it meant two back-to-back gigs, one Friday night (the 11th), one Saturday night (12th), with Much coverage at the one on Saturday night (Toronto Night Market). Soul Plane was also to release pressed copies of the Black Box demo and put Soul Plane t-shirts on sale (all courtesy of Machinehead Studio) at the Toronto Night Market.
Despite this insanity overload, we accepted the invitation to play the show at the Kathedral. The reasoning for doing so was three-fold: 1) Luke had never played a single gig with us as our bassist, and if he was going to play with us at the Toronto Night Market (originally, it was going to be Patrick, but once the MuchMusic thing fell in place we opted to put our new and hopefully permanent bassist forward for the reality series), then he’d better have some stage experience with Soul Plane as a band. 2) Everyone else saw it as an opportunity to tighten up performance-wise before the Toronto Night Market, especially once we found out that MuchMusic was making moves to crash that party. 3) At the end of the day, it’s a show, and it adds to the experience those label executives told us we so desperately need.
Because the two weeks leading up to this gig consisted of Soul Plane members collectively dropping every single thing (including vacations planned for months with friends and family – they now hate us, as well as our 9-5 day jobs – they now fired us) to shoot with Much, we did absolutely no promotion for this gig aside from sending out Facebook invites to everyone that is part of the Soul Plane group and sending out information via our mailing list (see top right corner of website for details). We expected a total number of 0 people in the crowd, and considering the intended purpose of this show, we gave less of a shit than constipation.
When Friday rolled around, we found ourselves looking forward to Saturday night. We didn’t even bother going to soundcheck for the show was to happen that night. To add to our lack of spirit for this show, as we were playing hooky on soundcheck, I got a call Friday afternoon from Conor:
“Yo guy, apparently the concert’s been moved up to Holy Joe’s. Don’t ask, I just found out myself.”
If I didn’t care before, I cared even less now. Holy Joe’s is a much smaller venue than the Kathedral, literally its attic... the most optimistic would label it “intimate and cozy.” I personally like to think of it as a prison cell, except with worse acoustics and less room to manoeuvre. Definitely not the most fun place to play. Katherine (Soul Plane’s official blog reader and number one fan) was the only person I bothered text-messaging to let her know about the change of plans. Everyone else would just have to find out the hard way. It’s not as harsh as it sounds, considering no one was coming.
Although my indifference screwed my passiveness and conceived a contemptuous pessimism towards the show, this bastard foetus was quickly aborted as we prepared to get on. As the band before us walked off stage, I noticed that most of the audience didn’t budge from their seats (usually, at these type of shows, people come to see their friend’s band and then leave once the set’s over). As I glanced at towards the entrance, people were making their way in, lining up for security pat-downs. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Then again, I should always know better than to underestimate Mel’s crowd-pulling power. Her family (sister and brother) brought out at least a dozen people. Kevin had a surprise crowd coming out, too, consisting of about 15 people. In total, including the randoms who came originally to see other acts but stuck around for us, we had about 30-40 people in the audience rooting for Soul Plane that night. At a venue like Holy Joe’s, that’s quite a heavy number.
Our set went real well. Originally we were going to stick with tracks off the demo (for Luke’s sake), but then the crowd forced us into encore, and so we had to oblige by throwing them a rendition of “Welcome to T-dot City.” Despite not knowing the music, Luke destroyed it. I have no complaints about the set itself; we played tighter than dykes. My chief problem was with the sound engineering... as usual in venues such as these (and also because we completely blew off soundcheck), the sound quality was ass-tastic – Mel and I were not pleased that we had to yell our way through six songs because we couldn’t hear ourselves, thereby nearly annihilating our vocal cords at a show we were only supposed to be playing for practice (the real deal was to happen the following night). Despite constantly asking to have our monitors and mic volumes turned up throughout our set, we still ended up spending most of the next day trying to rest up and let our voices recover for the Toronto Night Market.
All in all, though, we were just happy that we didn’t have to play in front of a vacant space. On the way home, Gideon made an interesting observation: “Yui, I think we’re past the point of playing for no one... like, this isn’t what we were a year ago anymore. If we’re putting on a show, people are gonna come out if we put it on our website.”
I hope to God he’s right.
