September 6 - The Fuze Box - Albany, NY
KEN: i remember reflected spangles, shiny discs all over every surface, a stuffy sparkly leopard disco room. the floor was a black-and-white checkerboard. broken antique radios on ledges between booths. the stage floor looked like a bowling alley lane, or maybe an elementary school stage; it was narrow, mysteriously installed on the side wall rather than the back wall. there was a balcony with tables and a sound guy/DJ booth, like a secret treehouse. large martini glasses made out of shiny stainless steel rings hung jauntily from the ceiling. by the bar, set up like an old diner with a drink ordering/pickup window from the live music side, there was a cigarette ad mounted like a piece of fine art. it was the most spotless club i've ever been in -- even the bathrooms were clean, well-lit with stall doors that shut securely and locks that worked and a solid supply of paper towels. the place was empty and silent when we arrived, except for a bartender who was blaring sloan's live CD in the front bar...a good omen, yes? well, in a way. sloan's CD finds them in front of stadiums full of screaming fans ("this sounds like more fun than "cheap trick at budokan!" said brian). the school for the dead show found us playing to, at most, eight people. one of whom was sleeping. pre-show we set up and waited. no opening band yet. apparently we were very early. seamus the soundguy eventually showed up, saying "shit" a lot. like he surveyed the room with a withered, weary look, a cigarette in his mouth, in a monotone muttering, "whoever set this shit up in the room was pretty stupid" (meaning the room designer: the harshness of the acoustics in the room, the placement of the monitors/main speakers, etc.). but he was very nice. there was maybe ten minutes of an ear-piercing, squealing attempt at a soundcheck -- during which henning and then i stood at our mics, hands over our ears, endlessly repeating "check check check chiggity check..." etc. while there'd be silence, and then a deafening, molar-rattling shriek. one-by-one, each member of STFD wandered off the stage and sat down dejectedly in a booth. after balancing perilously on stools and studying every nook and cranny in the rafters and room, our man henning troubleshot the system and fixed everything, making it possible for the bands to actually play and have the vocals heard by the audience. (and later, during the opening act's set, he went up and worked the lights like a pro, making the band look like they were on "austin city limits" or something. ning mos def gets the MVP award for the night!) during the long, long wait (and after henning drove off to pep boys to replace the oil cap --and subsequent oil -- he lost on the two-hour drive to albany), eagle-eyed tony and max went off to a local indian eatery to get a "light snack." thirty minutes later their fuze box booth table was strewn with aluminum foil, paper bags, plastic carryout containers and a ton of food. they looked very happy. a barroom banquet. opening the show was "naked fruit," a symbiotic duo of jamie and courtney with amazingly well-matched vocals -- they must practice a ton. they sometimes sang as if they were chewing their vowels. jamie smiled and laughed a lot and played funky acoustic guitar, sometimes pushing a wah-wah pedal to the metal. they had the biggest crowd of the night: the five of us schoolkids, plus six folks from the front bar. i could definitely see them opening at the iron horse for kim zombik, or erin mckeown, or some other funky/folky vocalist. they were pros. so then it was time for our set. the naked fruits didn't stick around long (courtney was zonked out in a booth with a friend during our opening songs, and then i looked up and they were gone). the remaining audience guys yelled things at us like "rock out!" and "wow that was GOOD" and i almost felt like they were taunting us. tough love? yet most of them stayed 'til the end, and one even asked if we'd like to play a big show in albany in a few months for a benefit of some sort. so they must have really like us after all. so: why was the fuze box show such an excellent time, then, despite the shrieking sound/miniscule audience/debilitating late-night drive home (i got home at 3 a.m.)? 1. crown's fried chicken (conveniently located next door to the club) had aMAZing french fries 2. more importantly, we played great. (like brian already said, much more succinctly.) "pick a gripe" sounded the best it's ever been, we really laid into the clomping feel of the "build-up" part during the verse, and brian's fills (during the song, but also all night long) were wilder than normal and totally inspiring and cool. "soup of the moment," during the stops, we stopped and started perfectly like we had ESP. even though i was wedged in the corner behind the edge of a curtain, i felt more a part of the band than ever before -- like we were more of a band than ever before. "wichita train whistle" ended the set and it had such a hot-shit-kickin' drunken hoedown groove (again, brian's drumming was firing on all cylinders, giving the couple of guys in the room the "rock" they kept asking for). playing was a blast! our first-ever full-band out-of-town set probably couldn't have been better! well, i mean, except if anyone had been there to SEE it. i had a great time. don't kick off that amp! hey! just don't kick it off. hey. hey! did we get any cool pictures of the evening?? BRIAN: Preliminary gig diary for the Fuze Box: Everyone there was very nice--there just wasn't a lot of them. The best part was actually worth waiting (and waiting) for; the playing. Once we began playing, it was a lot of fun and we sounded really good. We should book an Albany gig for the weekend after we play on WAMC. Possible? Tony and Max finally had their romantic Indian dinner date!! TONY:Ken did such a succinct, writerly job describing all facets of this show that I only feel the need to add a few cents here and there to his already mapped-out relay of events. All night things zigzagged from hopeless to wonderful. Despondent feelings of "Why are we here doing this?" to "Wow, this is turning out spectacularly!" Directions to the place had me, Ken and Brian in our car taking turns all over Albany getting lost and disoriented only to somehow end up on the street we were looking for, completely where we did not expect to find it. Then we'd get disoriented for another few minutes and take a random turn and voila there's the club and here is a parking space opening up directly in front of it, boys. Henning and Max show up minutes later and easily pull in right behind us. Well, load-in will be easy! Uh-oh! What's this? Oil running all down the front of Hen's car. It's 8:30 pm in a town we don't know and our singer has to desperately find an oil cap (and replacement oil) somehow to ensure a wory-free ride home. So he takes off and returns a while later and slides right back into his parking space having coughed up a mere 6 bucks for everything he needed. The significance of the ease of finding parking spaces will later mean that this club is nearly empty all night, however. Anyway, we're early and I walk into the club alone to find out where to set up our equipment. There's one lone bartender there and he is blasting this heinous ear-splitting White Zombie-like music so loud we have to nod our introductions and questions and answers. When I reenter the club a minute later, this time with Ken and Brian and our first haul of gear, all of a sudden we're greeted with a live Sloan concert playing inside on the sound system in place of the lousy nu metal. (Don't worry- the loud crap rock will return later- it'll mysteriously show up in our monitors as we're beginning our set). Later on, our Albany-based opening act introduce themselves to us and they are extremely friendly and welcoming to us and seem like they will be a treat to see perform. But when they do start playing, I realize their brand of music is not my bag- it's from the Ani DiFranco, Teaghan & Sarah new folk school that doesn't do anything for me melody-wise. However, these two singers are so good and so perfectly complement each other and Jamie's guitar playing is so funky and confident, that I stay riveted and enjoy their whole set nonetheless. I can't say I would listen to an album of this at home but I'd heartily recommend them to our hometown, where I'm certain they'd go over smashingly if placed in front of the right audience. Unfortunately, they disappear partway through our set and I don't see them again the rest of the evening. Yes, Max and I did treat ourselves to a fantastic spread of Indian food (we had a tandoori meats sampler, Kari-cho (a vegetable appetizer made up of chick peas and potatoes and flavored mainly with strong mint chutney), basmati rice, lamb vindaloo, nan bread, and rice pudding, all for $22. We'd have paid 13 bucks alone for the vindaloo dish back in N'amp. However, our meal was interrupted by constant returns to the stage to try to soundcheck, a perfect epic nightmare, one of the worst soundchecks I've had to endure as a performer. Things went from non-functioning microphones to sinus-searing feedback. When we tried soundchecking a song as a full band, Brian's drumset sounded louder than almost everything except the piercing ping of Hen's acoustic guitars in the monitors and the intermittent zaps from the faulty input on my guitar; Max's bass was also loud but curiously did not sound like a bass, the vocals and Ken's keys were absent in the mix and when we stopped playing, we heard metal playing in the speakers plus the agonizing screams from our flustered soundman Seamus in his soundbooth in the sky. He was tireless in trying to get things to work right but walked around the club the entire night swearing and bitterly complaining about the idioitc setup, which had ruined his own band's set over a month ago and had continued to sound like ass ever since. However, our hero Henny climbed onto stools and used all 6'3" of his lanky frame to reach monitors and speakers all over the celings and walls and somehow fixed the system so that both bands sounded completely pro by showtime. And when we did play, we sounded better than we ever had before. Each song featured well-balanced sound, great performances and for the first time, I felt comfortable enough in my own playing that I could stand back and appreciate how good we sounded, almost as if I wan't part of the band. Brian was indeed hepped up (he asked our bartender for a coffee when we arrived and received a Red Bull, which amounts to 10 coffees, as he put it) and his playing was all the better for it. My ears also happily devoured Max's insistent, pulsing bass, most notably in "Soup Of The Moment," then there was Ken's sprinkling of riffs in "Pick A Gripe," Henning's and my voices (get that, Hen? "Henning's and MY" voices; sorry, just an in-joke) blending nicely in "Wichita" (and I even noticed Max looking at me and grinning as he and I both shared the rapture of realizing and appreciating the very same thing at the same time). And although our audience was indeed tiny, we may have won out in the end by being offered a much more lucrative future gig by one of those few audience members. HENNING: Tony and Ken's summations of our journey to the Fuze Box were so good and detailed I don't feel that I need to say anymore. Except that I didn't single-handedly fix the sound system - I was just very persistent and unrelenting. Seamus, the sound guy working was actually the one who plugged the one thing in the other place. We did it together, man. Ride the wave. MAX:	Pick A Gripe Uncomfortable Soup Of The Moment V-66 1,000 Times Omnivore Rock & Roll Camper Everybody Loves Martha Wichita Train Whistle Sings