Heading out to go load gear soon, so I'll make this quick.

We're a 2 piece instrumental metal band, I like to call our genre "Cthulhu doomnoise." The guy who does my tattoos put us in touch with a bar owner who was trying to put together a metal show to benefit a friend of his who was in a motorcycle crash. Cool, we're in! Show is in 2 weeks, short notice, but whatever.

No fucking word from the venue owner until 2 nights ago, and now we're the ONLY metal band on the bill. Before us is a folk/jazz group, and then a party rock rent-a-band style group is doing 90 minutes before us. Nobody wants to bring their own gear, so everyone asked us for drums and amps. We got so fed up with waiting on show details from the owner that was said "fuck this." Owner has done 0 promo or anything, I can't even find websites for the other bands playing.

Now we're just gonna show up with 2 guitars, no drums, and play some Sunn style shit. OR, if the vibe is really bad around 1AM (when we're supposed to go on), we'll just plug our pedal boards into the drummer's switch and play Mario Kart on stage and fuck with the noises from that and call it art.

Fun times.

Update: first band is on and they're a Chicago style blues band and I have no idea what we're doing here.

  • john_browns_beard [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    It me

    I don't really have too many horror stories, mostly people don't know what they actually want and you have to explain why playing bagpipes in a bar or restaurant for an hour straight without breaks is a terrible idea, even on St. Patrick's Day.

    For weddings and parties there is a very fine line between playing for too little time and too much time, it usually goes from "that was fun" to "holy fuck make it stop" in one tune. You have to read the crowd and get out of there while they are still enjoying it.

    The worst gig I've ever done was a traditional Indian wedding where the family wanted a pipe band for some reason. The entire crowd of like 200 people was emotionless the entire time. Not bored or anything, they just stared for fifteen minutes while we played. I tried walking around and dancing a bit while playing to get them into it, which made it even more awkward.