Part Five: Battle Of the Bands!

A short seven days after our first show, we were asked to play in a battle of the bands at a little place known as the Modesto Virtual. A bar located in the downtown Modesto area thats main attraction is its Battletech computer games, and a decent sized stage. To start off, we knew this battle would be impossible to win, but our hopes were high, we had a large crowd, and our last practice had gone a lot better than our first show had. no Mackie PA blowouts or anything of the sort.

As you know in a battle of the bands, the bands playing are usually unknown and fairly inexperienced when it comes to live performances. we were all battling for a chance to play with the metal gods known as Cattle Decapitation. if you have never heard of these guys, well then eat your heart out, and go buy one of their CD's. Unfortunately, the show was rigged from the start, but thats something ill get into in a later post.

So our turn comes up, and as you would guess, as were getting ready, we have a bunch of onlookers with dubious looks on their faces. we had spent the majority of our time conversing with the soon to be fans, and drinking at the bar. for 5 dollars there you can get a mini pitcher, thats basically the equivalent of 4 beers in an easy to carry pouring container. screw cups, we drank right out of the pitchers! we were excited, because we had gotten a good time slot, where the crowd was hungry for the music, and everyone was feeling the vibe.

Anyways, sound check is complete, and Brian starts his usual crowd gathering  introduction, (this works really well. almost none of the other bands get people psyched up for the performance) which right away had a lot of giddy kids ready to mosh their hearts out. And we're off! we start off with our usual set-list order, which we painstakingly put together in practice over a mass montage of cigarettes and Pabst Blue Ribbon, and from the first four count, things went out of control. Right off the bat we had people trying to do stage dives in a venue that due to its lack of a dance permit didn't allow moshing.

(see the guy on stage right? he shouldn't have been there. *grin*)

so while we are doing our damnedest to keep straight faces while we totally destroy the other bands that played before us, there was mass confusion in the crowd. People having a blasty moshing, and head banging while security tries to break up the pit, and other people jumping out of the way to avoid getting dragged into the debacle. I have to give the security there props, they succeeded in breaking up the pit a few times, but after a certain point, it became a useless endeavor.

In my opinion the response from the crowd was more than enough to put us on the winning list of bands, but as i said before it was rigged. and the added effort security had to make in order to maintain some semblance of order apparently hurt us more than helped.  Heres a few pics so you can see for yourself a bit of what it was like.

 

Moving right along, the performance went very well, and we got a lot of new die hard fans from it, but of course, we didn't win the battle. instead, we won the peoples admiration for letting them go all out on the floor, and taking a hit of sorts in the contest so they could have a good time! I suppose that is a better thing, especially since it set us up for our next show, which i will be bringing to you guys soon!