Date: October 23rd 2008
Venue: El Mocambo, 2nd fl.
Series: Sophomore Productions Presents...
Sometime shortly after our “Disband” episode was aired on MuchMusic, a show promoting company got in touch with us to see if we were interested in being part of an event that would feature some of the bands from the “Disband” series. Andrew, our contact for the show, called me about a month ago to confirm the details of the show: it was going to go down on the 2nd floor of the El Mocambo. I was immediately alert – anything being held on the 2nd floor of the El Mocambo is 140% of the time a Supernova show, and I’d rather smash my face against Courtney Love’s vagina than play a show for those hacks again. Incidentally, I had also dealt with an “Andrew” from Supernova before. Upon doing my research and finding out that it wasn’t just Supernova pretending to be someone else trying to lure us into helping them capitalize on our recent success on MuchMusic, I decided (albeit cautiously) to open the lines of communication with Sophomore. Andrew informed us that we would be guaranteed a good set-time (9pm), and that we wouldn’t be responsible for promoting the event all by ourselves beyond bringing out our regular following – they had a team distributing flyers for the show all over Toronto’s downtown core. Seeing the potential promotional value in a show with bands that have had exposure on national TV on the bill, we immediately agreed to do it.
And so it was that Soul Plane’s fall comeback came to be. For some reason, we decided that we didn’t really have to promote it – it could have been that whole MuchMusic factor (I’m not saying we’re rock stars, but being on national TV definitely doesn’t hurt as far as getting exposure and bringing crowds is concerned), maybe it was the fact that we were assured a competent promo team was already on the job, or it might have been that it was just impossible to care about any show going down on the 2nd floor of the El Mocambo since like, EVERY night is pretty much open-mic night there anyway... I don’t know. Whatever, in any case, we just assumed, as usual, that life would work itself out and that a good turn-out would just fall into our laps. We always do this, and the strategy has proven to be effective none of the time.
It wasn’t looking promising when we walked in, I can tell you that. I had told only a few people that we were putting on a gig, and I’m not even sure an official Facebook event was created for it. As far as I knew, only two significant groups of people were going to contribute to the crowd size for the night: being that it was an all-ages event, Aaron and Gideon’s friends were going to be able to come through and show their support (these 15/16-year-olds get the wildest in the crowd – the great thing about kids is that they have inherently no shame), and my girl Jade had made a “girls-night-out” thing out of our show and invited a flock of her girls from Richmond Hill to attend. Despite this guarantee, it still only accounted for maybe 20 people in total. Oh well, at least only 20 people are going to hate us by the end of the night. Could be worse.
As we got on stage, the crowd still seemed sparse. I was pretty buzzed, but I recall jumping on stage before the band that went on before us finished cleaning up and addressing the crowd. Let me say right now I meant no disrespect (Kevin later reprimanded me for not exercising proper stage protocol), in fact, I thoroughly enjoyed Typo’s set – I was merely trying to salvage what was left of the crowd so that they wouldn’t go anywhere. This tactic sometimes works because usually everyone just ends up wanting to stick around to throw rocks and hurl insults at that obnoxious Asian guy who keeps trying to convince everyone to stay for what’s obviously going to be an almost unbearably-shitty act.
By the time we got set-up and tuned, we were standing in front of what was left of what was left of the crowd. But it didn’t matter, Jade’s friends and Aaron/Gideon’s posse were right up front ready to get down the minute we did. With that kind of enthusiasm being thrown our way, how could we not bring it as hard as we did? And boy, did we ever. I can honestly say that I haven’t had that much fun on stage since the MuchMusic show. Our set went real smoothly – considering we were utterly unprepared for the show to begin with on a musical level (we had rehearsed with the full configuration of our band ONCE before we actually went on stage that night), I was particularly pleased that we were able to add a new song to our summer repertoire. “Fly” made its debut again for the first time since Daniel Paiken’s departure from the band, and it was very well-received by the crowd. By the time “Impossible” came on, most of the crowd recognized it as “the MuchMusic song” and went bananas, and fortunately for us, we were able to maintain that kind of momentum and energy throughout the entire set. We stepped off the stage to deafening applause and felicitations from all fronts. What a great start to the fall season.
Speaking of seasons, Soul Plane has officially booked a gig in Panama City, FL, for Spring Break!! THE BEST PART IS THAT YOU ARE ALL INVITED TO JOIN SOUL PLANE ON THE TOUR BUS WE RENTED OUT FOR NEXT-TO-NOTHING PRICES!! See above flier and/or “UPCOMING EVENTS” section for dates and details!! EVERYBODY COME OUT AND PARTY LIKE ROCK STARS!!
But I digress...
Back to the matter at hand: big thanks to Sophomore for putting on a great show, big thanks to our fans for coming out and supporting us, big thanks to everyone who loved it, especially our groupie entourage trekking all the way down from Richmond Hill and Thornhill to bang with us!! Haters lick a nut.
