Nowhere Band News

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod it’s about to start!

I guess the only thing I really have to add to that is that sound guys often do seem to have really strange nicknames. I’ve never dealt with a Switchblade, but we did work a bunch with a sound guy at the Terminal who was called Iron Lung.  Also, at other bars, Snax and Taco, and some British guy with a crazy nickname that I forget because he was so forceful about telling us about Black Sabbath that all other details have faded away.

Ever wonder what a band does all day before playing a scuzzy bar show? Here’s your chance to find out.

Actually, the day my first band played its first show was a little more eventful than the one the Boys are having; I ducked out of work early, nearly died on the freeway home (the car I was driving then had a shitty engine that would just cut out for like five seconds and then roar back to life), had a really foul let’s-get-psyched meal at Embers with my friend/bandmate Erik (the woman who served us literally had no teeth, and stuck her thumb in my potatoes),  drove to Guitar Center and did a last-minute trade-in for a new amp, drove to the 7th St. Entry (we were playing New Band Night), found that we were missing a crucial piece of the drum set (that would be the “beater”), and wound up being lead all over downtown Minneapolis by a dude who called himself Hardcore Dave. Parts of this will probably show up in later Nowhere Strips, but I figured we’ve taken long enough just to get to this first show.

Strip was colored and lettered (and otherwise digitally-produced; Dan’s check of the City Pages music picks took fucking forever to mock up) in gate 63 of Kansas City International Airport; any mistakes are due to travel fatigue. Big, big points to KCI for having free wireless in the terminal.

Yo,

1. So, the travel delays on NW48 are turning out to be severe (I meant to get a bunch of it done on the flight down here to KC, but sat next to the most talkative man in the Western hemisphere, so it didn’t happen; I did learn a shitload about Harry Truman and the Korean War, though). 48 will go up by Thursday, and it’ll be pretty awesome. So there’s that.

2. I guess there’s something in the water in Lawrence, KS; everyone I know who lives or lived there is unbelievably cool. It might be nature’s way of balancing out the awe-inspiring suckage of rural northwest Missouri, though.

3. Before I skipped town in Mipples, I handed in this review of a movie about one of my favorite bands. I’m pretty happy with it, as reviews go. I meant to post a lot more about Low when I linked to this story, but the truth is that I’m too dog-tired after driving through rural Missouri all day. I’m serious, it’ll suck the life right out of you.

For no good reason, I scanned in a bunch of pags of my sketchbook and posted them to Flickr. If you’re a glutton for punishment, go take a gander. More might go up in the next few days…

I’m convinced that this is how most practice spaces work. If you’re in one for a very long time and have a great deal of patience, you can fine-tune things a little, but for the most part I think this is how things are… although I guess the one thing I should have added is to mark the entire room as the “PA system feedback pain zone,” in addition to “lesser drum ear pain zone.” Because let’s face it, when the PA starts to feed back, there really isn’t a safe spot in the room.

My friends the Harvey Girls point out that the other universal practice space thing I’m missing is a cat litter box; and, weirdly, they’re right. Most of the practice spaces I’ve used _have_ had litter boxes, or at least cats who liked to pee in gig bags. Huh.

The timing on 48’s a little uncertain; I’m travelling for work next week, and that’ll throw a bunch of curveballs into the mix. If 47’s inked before my flight leaves, and if there’s good internet access at my hotel, 47 should be up next Monday or Tuesday. If no to either or both of these, well, I’ll be back in Mipples by Thursday…

Even Josh has limits to who he wants to come to shows. Can you blame him? Getting grandmotherly huggles after a show is about the least-rocking thing in the world. During the heyday of AC/DC, the Young brothers kept their grandmother chained up in a basement just to prevent such an occurrence.

Other notes:

1. I learned the hard way that changing your wife’s ringtone to “Cotton Eye Joe” will provide much hilarity and leave you perilously close to sleeping on the couch. Being single, of course, Josh has no one but himself to blame for his ringtone.

2. Josh’s all-beige apartment is pretty typical for your cheaper Minneapolis rentals. I lived in a bunch in my 20s, and the weirdest thing is that they all had the exact same floor plan.

3. The hardest part of the coloring process for this strip- by a long shot- was Josh’s shirt, which is really fussy and has a lot of little nooks and crannies and isn’t even the shirt I meant to draw to begin with. This is why so many NB characters wear blank shirts. Ugh.