Tied For Last

Only band of the night. Two sets.

Backstory:

I work in the offices at Iona College, and some of the people on campus know that I’m in a band. In early January, one of the folks in their student activities department called me to say that they were looking to have a party on the Friday night of the first week of classes, and wanted to know if we could play. They were offering money, so we jumped at the chance.

Iona students are notorious for not participating in non-basketball related campus events, and, as part of the contract, we’re not really allowed to bring non-Iona people to the gig, so we suspected that the crowd would be small. We were right.

The activities staff had requested and received promo material from us (photos, logos, etc) so that they could make posters to advertise the gig. Unfortunately, they never got around to making it. Not only that, when we got there, we found that we were scheduled at the exact same time as the first basketball home game of the semester. Of course.

Because we weren’t allowed to advertise the show, the promotion was strictly in the activities department’s hands. They had warned us that there wasn’t likely to be many people there, but they hadn’t said that they weren’t going to let anyone know about the show at all. When we got there, we surprised the staff of the campus venue, who didn’t even know we were scheduled to play. But they were paying, so we were happily playing.

The Show

Lucky for us, we had a few students come in to check us out, and they stayed for nearly the whole show. I also had a few cool co-workers show up, some other on-campus friends, and Jane and Rev Caroline, so we weren’t playing to an empty room.

We set up with the intent of using the venue’s PA. We had been warned that it wasn’t wonderful, but that it did have monitors. Monitors are the only way that singers can hear their voices onstage, so we figured a crappy PA with monitors would be better than our PA without them.

Because we were doing two sets to people who weren’t familiar with our originals, we decided to play all of our usual cover tunes, and added the rarely played “Creep” (Radiohead) and “Santa Monica” (Everclear).

As we started to play the first set, we all realized that the stage monitor for the vocals weren’t working. Because the actual speakers for the audience was over our heads and in front of us, none of us could hear ANY of the vocals. This made it really tough to sing in tune, it made it very hard for the other guys to know where in the songs we were, and it caused Tom and me to have to sing much louder than normal, which resulted in our straining our voices.

The first set was tentative to say the least. We were frustrated with the vocal problems, and during “Achiever” it had gotten so bad that Geller lost his place in the song and we had to cut it short.

We’ve been doing this long enough that we can play through crap like this without too many problems, and I think we did okay, though it was possibly the weakest set we ever played. I like to think we were at least entertaining, but it’s impossible to be objective about it.

As soon as the first set ended, I made the decision that we were gonna hook up our own PA so that we had control over the vocals. We wouldn’t have any monitors, but as long as we put the speakers on stage, we would be able to pick up some of the ambient sound. Also, the folks in the audience wouldn’t have to hear the music coming from the stage with the vocals overhead.

We hooked it up very quickly and even had time to hang out with the folks in the audience.

Our own PA was a great move, and we improved significantly by the second set. We were so much tighter and that gave us so much more energy and enthusiasm. However, we were a little tired and raw from the debacle that was the first set that we still weren’t at 100%.

The second set just whizzed by, and the audience that remained seemed to enjoy it a lot more as well. I was able to move around a lot more on and offstage, and we even had the chance to re-do “Achiever.” This time we nailed it.

Iona is a fairly conservative campus, so we had to cut “Bloody Tuesday” and “Lesbian Circus” from the set. I also had to cut the curses out of the songs that we did play. We were able to sneak in “A Song for the Ladies” because no on ever listens to the words.

Even with the promotional and PA problems, we ended up having a really great time. If they ever ask us back, we’ll do it in a heartbeat. But again, we won’t be allowed to publish it on the website until after the fact.

Set List:
Set One
STAY UP AND TALK TO ME
SHE WAS JUST A GIRL
ZIGGY STARDUST
BEAUTIFUL IN BLACK
BAGHDAD
AMERICAN GIRL
PARTY DRESS
ACHIEVER (aborted)
RAVE ON
LEAD YOU ON
GOT NO LIFE
BURNING LOVE

Set Two
SANTA MONICA
SAILOR
EVE OF DESTRUCTION
SUPERSTAR
WE’RE ALRIGHT
SWEET JANE
I’M NOT FINE
CREEP
WASTED
A SONG FOR THE LADIES
ACHIEVER (again)
BEST FRIEND’S GIRL
TAKE JANINE AWAY