4/07/05
We had shown up two hours late to El Torreon, where we were playing one night during the summer of 2001. Those two hours and about four before them had been spent constructing our cardboard robot army. Needless to say when Brian, the manager, saw Chris, Flannery, John and me trying to sneak by him while carrying gigantic cardboard boxes and trash bags full of junk he was pissed.
“You guys are two fuckin’ hours late!” he yelled, sweat gleaming on his forehead. We really didn’t want to piss him off, but we were young and incosiderate. What could we do? El Torreon was the only club in the city that still allowed us to play. Several other punk venues were weary of us after hearing that we “incited riots” and “started fires” regularly. Being banned from two clubs in St. Louis had given us a reputation back home in Kansas City.
“We’re really sorry, Brian. We’ll play a short set” we begged, running by him.
We rushed to the back area of the club to get ready. We were pretty excited because there were about 200 kids there. People who I had never seen before. Our cardboard army, consisting of several boxes spray-painted silver to more resemble robots, were worn by about seven of our friends.
“Okay,” I coached one of them, “When we start playing, you just go nuts. No one will fuck with you, you’re a robot!” Bad advice, but we all knew what was going to happen.
Other props we used included a fog machine, which dispensed very large amounts of synthetic fog from a plastic skull with glowing red eyes; several balloons shaped like aliens (or ‘metroids’) with cardboard teeth taped to them to be thrown out over the crowd; and fake blood. Lots of fake blood. Too much fake blood.
We played a form of fast punk rock called power violence. At the time, not a lot of kids coming to shows really knew what it was and we used that to our advantage. We could fuck up entire songs, all playing at different speeds and ending at different times and no one watching would know the difference. We were a live band. A so-called ‘gimmick’ band too, I guess. People came to our shows to go nuts, and tonight was no different.
We had difficulties with El Torreon's sound guy because he always wanted us to play on the stage (imagine that!). We had tried it once, but none of us really understood how to use the monitors correctly so it ended up sounding terrible. No one in the audience minded, but we did. We asked to play on the floor right in front of the stage. We liked being mixed in with all the chaos.
After the first band, who were actually playing in our place, had finished so we started to set up. We didn’t need any kind of sound check; all we had were three vocal microphones. We started our set. After our short introduction, our secret weapon emerged from the back room.
A giant, twenty-foot robot, comprised of two refrigerator boxes stacked on top of each other and taped together, about ten feet of metal tubing for it’s menacing tentacles, and two of our friends inside the thing, running it around, Flintstones-style. The Robots eyes were spray-painted a piercing dark red. All in all, it took us six hours to create our masterpiece, and about two minutes for it to be completely destroyed.
At first, the audience seemed shocked. A lot of them had come from the suburbs to see what a “powerviolence” band was all about. I’m glad that their answer was a giant cardboard juggernaut coming right for them accompanied by four kids who could barely play together.
We started a fast song and the robots all went hurdling into the pit. The giant had a few moments of glory circling around the pit before the kids started to gang up on it and pull it to the ground. As the towering monster started falling, I remember feeling a serious sense of dread. It was so tall that as it was falling it took one of the club’s large, plastic light fixtures with it. Thankfully though, it landed clean on the floor and no one was hurt.
If there hadn’t been any more than five kids at this show, I’m sure we would have attempted to do the exact same stunts. That’s just what we were into at the time. The band progressed musically from this point into something that can only be described accurately with a dumb name like ‘Crust Funk’. The music stayed original until the end of the band though, that's for sure. The robots and most of the stage antics (besides the fog machine) were phased out over time. The only reason for this was that we were spending way too much energy on showmanship and not enough on musicianship. In hindsight, the best thing about this band was that we always did exactly what we wanted to do without fear of criticism.
We were allowed to play El Torreon again only because we got a great response and we cleaned up after ourselves. We are forever in debt to Brian and Allison Saunders for this! Thank you so much and sorry about the light.
No comments:
Post a Comment