Monday, September 22, 2008

"flippin' wigs @ the fairmount" #1 postmortem

PFFFFT! played the fairmount last night and it felt, as thurston moore would say, like we kinda suqued les beeg deeque. actually, matt's listened to the recording and sez it wasn't all that bad, but there were definitely communication probs happening in the second set -- he 'n' i were just a li'l bit out of synch with clay and tony, which woulda been cool if we'd a planned it that way. i think part of the prob was that matt was set up on the far side of me from clay and tony. tony complained later about not being able to hear matt (altho matt said his bass was "too loud" on the recording), and matt mentioned that he likes to be able to cue visually off clay using his peripheral vision, which he couldn't do with me in the way. lesson learned: a bifurcated ghostcar/stoogeaphilia stage is not a good idea. altho i don't think it's necessary that we change our methodology. other possible contributors to the subpar outcome: fatigue (matt played four gigs and three rehearsals this past birthday week, and sat in with the opening bill pohl trio); clay was coming from a rehearsal in dallas and needing to cut loose; tony was having equipment probs; and i had an annoying light in my eyes the whole evening. it didn't help that all six ppl that came out were there to hear bill, and cut out soon after we started. (saw bill at the market today and he said kind things, as one would to marginally talented children or lunatics.) two out-of-the-ordinary occurrences during the set: clay got on the mic and declaimed some free-form spiel (as he did at the kamandi show once he realized brett wasn't going to back off), and a kid who came in during our second set played tony's synth and got us started in a direction, but after that he didn't seem to be able to listen and respond to what was happening (altho from what matt sez, neither did we). just part of the fun of doin' it the way we do.

2 Comments:

Blogger Grubbermeister said...

Goes with the territory, especially with improv. Sorry to hear all was not well. Make the next gig "The Vengeance Show". This time, it's personal...

2:10 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'd like to know who the guy was who wandered in to play w/the synth, because some of the stuff he did was kind of cool. The recordings (which need to get uploaded, lazy-ass-matt) do not lie: it did spark us to move in new directions, but I'm not exactly sure where we _ended up_ :-)

11:31 AM  

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