Date: November 26th, 2008
Venue: The Kathedral
Series: n/a
You know it’s all about the music when Mel drives all the way back from London, Ontario, to Toronto on a Wednesday to play a gig on a dingy-ass stage in front of literally four people. But we knew what we were getting ourselves into: we knew three weeks ago when we booked this show that after having done the Opera House on Friday night that we’d be too promotionally exhausted to drag out numbers for tonight.
You’ve seen (actually, likely not) the fruits of our labour when we give half of a damn about pulling a crowd out. They’re meandering, to say the least. In fact, if they were real fruit, it would be the Department of Agriculture’s top priority to put a product recall on them.
Tonight, our land was plagued with locusts. No fruit for anyone.
It’s cuz the farmers are retarded.
This became apparent when everyone in the band and then some came over to my downtown residence to session and get smashed before getting on stage. It is, at this point, worthy to note that we have never collectively gotten this degenerated as a band. Not even for MuchMusic. And that was ridiculous, even by our standards. We were barely coherent by 9pm, and when we arrived at the venue around 10 15pm, most of our cognitive abilities were a cause more lost than feminism. Mel was so destroyed that she forgot her lyrics as she was rehearsing them to herself in the car, and she started begging me to ask the promoters to see if they could pull our set... 15 minutes before our set was to begin. It was hilarious.
The worst part of tonight was that I almost chopped off my crotch, thanks to Soul Plane drummer Aaron Mellet. Literally 5 minutes before showtime, this guy realizes that he forgot the noise-cancelling headphones he needs to hear the metronome he needs to keep the band together in Kevin’s car, parked at least 10 minutes’ walk away from the Kathedral. It was unanimously decided that I should go fetch – their reasoning was that I had no equipment to set up. For definitely not the first time ever, I hated rapping in a live band. After some obscure and ambiguously babbled directions from a very distracted Kevin, I smelled like team spirit and bolted out the door. Down Queen St. I flew, past at least two parking lots that were closed down – just my luck. I duck right on a street that looks like lots of people get raped on every day, and somehow, I see his silver Passat station wagon just sitting there under a streetlight.
You know how when you’re in a rush, and you’re running, and you see your objective destination from afar, you start picking up speed towards it, right? Right. So I’m probably running a healthy 15km/h by now towards the car when suddenly I get this sharp and rapidly increasing pain in my scrotum, as well as the wind knocked out of my chest. But who gives a shit about wind when your balls are getting cut off. I look down to see this thin-ass chain-wire barricade that these low-rent lots use to seal off their property wedged into my legs and dick. I had run nuts-first into this thing and not seen it in the dark. It hurt a lot. My skin, the cotton fabric of my boxers, and Rocawear denim have never gotten to know each other so intimately. Seriously, I almost cried. I was, in all honestly, way too terrified to do a feel-check. But who cares about never being able to have sex again, because we had a show to do.
When I made it back into the Kathedral 45 seconds to show time, I was in pain, out of breath, and sweaty. Usually I save the “just-had-a-miscarriage” look for after the show.
When we got on stage, for the four bars of the intro to “Soul Playin’,” the first song of our set, I actually managed to do a headcount: our crowd consisted EXACTLY of two bouncers, one bartender, all seven people on the promotion team from the high school we were supposedly fundraising for but really just losing money on behalf of because we brought no one, our (potential) new bassist Alex Lam and one of his buddies, one of my roommates, and Jade.
Our set saw more debauchery than I’ve ever been associated with in my life. Mel was forgetting lyrics, Luke was playing the wrong bass riffs for songs we didn’t write, and everyone just plain sucked. It hardly mattered, though, because we kept it gangster and played our hearts out. We had the time of our lives.
Along with gangster, the other thing we keep it is real. This MSN conversation between Gideon and I sums up the evening comprehensively:
- www.soulplanemusic.com [UPDATED] says:
Yo we are so bad
Golden Giddle says:
yea i knowwww
- www.soulplanemusic.com [UPDATED] says:
How did we even make it through that gig
- www.soulplanemusic.com [UPDATED] says:
Without having something thrown at us
Golden Giddle says:
there weren’t even people there to throw something
I don’t give a shit about anything but our Spring Break Tour in Panama City, FL. right now. None of us do. Let me make this real easy: if you’ve made plans with Melanie Goldman, Gideon Litvin, Kevin Nanni, Luke Rust, or Aaron Mellet between now and Feb 21st, you are wrong. They will be learning songs up the yinyang and having exactly not enough time to see you. They are to officially reappear in the public eye on Feb 21st, on the tour bus. Find out how to join us – see UPCOMING EVENTS section for details!
