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Waffle Shop report
(15 Apr 2009 at 20:15) |
As foretold by the bards, we played our show at Waffle Shop. This was awesome. It's a totally cool place. The folks running it were super friendly and helpful, like e.g. offering to brew me coffee and tossing us free shirts (seen above), and serving our custom waffle, the "Twix Ridiculous and The Sick Bisquickulous". Lots of people came out, sang along, and even people wandered in from the street, maybe on purpose. We unlocked an achievement: Our Facebook page now has 1 fan that is not already our friend. I don't know if it's related. What you see above is Waffle Shop standard operating procedure, which is that they in addition to serving fresh, golden-crispy waffles, also film a reality show on the premises, which mainly means interviews with patrons but in our case interview with the musical guests. More lovely pictures on flickridiculous, courtesy Maja. There are some muy bueno pictures of us playing too, courtesy some dude née drxiv. Overall a great experience. I think Waffle Shop was happy too, like they kept our setlist to display in their tool shop / kitchen and seemed pretty impressed with the crowd volume. In fact if you go to waffleshop.org right now you will be greeted with manifold splendour. I dunno when video will be available, if ever. I hope eventually so you can see my dancing, which was very popular. We decided during the interview that the right way to describe it is "aggraceful."
I recorded the show: Sick Ridiculous Live At Waffle Shop, in which you can hear us embarrassingly call the place "Waffle House" several times. Even more embarrassing is that the levels are way too high in the recording, though it gets a bit better once I turn my guitar down. Sorry for always blowing the MP3 version when I do line-in; I thought I was correcting for having this same problem last time by turning it to the lowest setting, but evidently I need more.
We have two shows coming up. Art All Morning on the 26th in some warehouse in Lawrenceville will be some kind of acoustic oddity, but is at 10:30am. I am just telling you, not inviting you; 10:30am is a crazy time to go to or play a concert. Especially if you go to Cortney's birthday party at Gabe's house the night before, which we'll also be playing at! Expect new material and Febreezed classics.
Fact: I did my Federal taxes like a month and a half ago, and saved my state and local for the last minute, giving me the worst of both worlds. It could be worse, though: this page has a 600 page PDF with all people and entities that are delinquent on their taxes, and some people are dozens of years late. |  |
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Excellent as always. The distortion isn't too bad, makes it nice and lo-fi. The only bad part (which you are probably already very aware of) was that those sweet high-up Nels solos were too low at first. Tom, you rock too hard.
Also, I never expected to hear some 12-bar blues in an SR song. Good job.
Also also, Leave No Song Behind was new to me and I love it. Semper lo-fi indeed. |
| I am listening to this recording now, good stuff as usual. The 10:30am show sounds great, I've long thought there should be morning shows. Why's everything gotta be at night? |
Thx you both.
A: Huh. We play that one almost every time. I love it but somehow it often doesn't come out well live; I thought this was a particularly good one. I know that I rock too hard. Somehow it's a hard habit to shake, but I'm cognizant and working on it. Obviously in the mix I was way too loud. My new guitar has much hotter outputs than Nels's, like he was turned up to 1.0 and I was at like 0.3 and that was still outrageously me. We're gonna figure this out soon. It does get better for sure after the first couple of songs.
S: Well uhh.... 10:30am on a Sunday is still pretty rough. No? And people feel pretty dumb drinking beer at 10:30am too. Not to say that beer is a necessary part of enjoying Sick Ridiculous (and in fact Waffle Shop has no liquor license) but it does help, sometimes, particularly with the dancing. I think it's going to be a fun experience for us, but I don't want to make anyone feel like they should come, even less so than usual. |
| Also, explicitly yeah, Nels's solos are great and do not deserve to be buried in any W, S, or F. |
Tom, I had this dream where you opened your own little restaurant like Waffle Shop, and an entire section of the menu was devoted to waffles containing pot. Now I have actually never taken an illegal drug in my life so don't get the wrong idea, but maybe there's your answer for how to enhance morning dancing. (I was reading about Amsterdam coffeeshops before bed.)
10:30 won't be easy if you, say, are up till 2 the night before, but then isn't it the staying up till 2 that's rough? If you can stay up way late to enjoy music, why not get up way early? My secret fantasy is to like hold pre-dawn shows with the headliner going on first. It's just stupid enough to work. |
| I can't listen to it because the very first thing that happens is that I mess up my lines... Frown. |
| Nels, I didn't notice, if that's any consolation. In fact I was listening for you guys calling the place "Waffle House" but I guess I missed it. |
| Okay, yes. To be honest, I only rearranged the lyrics, which means that unless you really listen to the recording a lot you probably won't notice, but still, I like to get everything right... |
S/G: Was it called Pots and Pancakes? I also don't really have experience, but I think you'd want a stimulant or something like MDMA to keep the kids up all night. But like I've said in previous posts, I do not support giving drugs to kids.
And no: staying up to 2 is easy! :)
N: Yeah you were fine on the lyrics. Didn't you actually repeat, not rearrange? (It was a good save, "I just want to reiterate that...") I think the worst thing in that song is when I get lost and stop playing for a few chords and we find out that my guitar is 10x louder than yours. How can we make our first song or two more grippy? We need some warm-up song or plan or some shit? |
| My favorite song by you guys is the one called "Muse or vampires are going to be pissed that we stole their shit (rec demo)". Do you play that one live? I mean, you must, right? Since playing things live is the whole point of the band. Anyway, um, yay, music and waffles. Two of the finest things in life. |
| Yes, we do. It's actually on the second lowest tier of songs (Tiers are: Always play, only skip for one concert, don't play in consecutive concerts, and never play.) so it doesn't come out often. I'm glad to hear you say you like it because we like it too, it just never seems to go that well live. We're working on it. |
guys,
can you send me the audio file of your performance? Apparently, when we were rushing around redoing all the audio cables we removed the audio input to the video recording deck and thus have a weekend full of silent tapes, including yours. Woops.
Thanks,
Jon Rubin
jonrubin@cmu.edu |
Tom, did you do this ^ ?
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| Yes Jon and I have communicated over e-mail. The MP3 is linked form this post above, in case anybody has the same question. |
I wish I could have gotten a better shot than this, but this little girl was super cute at the art all night show:
www.flickr.com/photos/pepperedjane/3512019810/ |
| I remember her. :) I felt a little bad that some of our songs have swear-words! |
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