Okay, so we play originals. Trying to make it, rather than trying to make a living, as it were. We're back at square one, having canned our recording from last year - it's just not good enough to get picked up by the local media. Okay, also possibly not vanilla enough either, but let's just assume it sucks. Ergo, we suck.
That's been the nagging doubt for the last few months. So, thursday we get a call from a friend of a friend's band's friend, asking if we can fill in for a cancelation on friday night. Not a problem. The gig's at a suburban lawn bowls club, we're on second after an energetic but shambolic (and very young) post-hardcore band * (see note below). 3rd band up is melodic rock, the headliners play straight-up old school punk.
We've been using our down-time well, and air a couple of new songs at the gig. There's only about 60-70 people there, and nearly all of them have never heard us before. They all cheer after our first song, and the next - if we hadn't run the rest of the set together with echoes & randomness (to cover tuning changes), well, you get the drift. After the set, all three other bands and even the soundguy come up to compliment us - particularly the young punks who were up first.
To cap it off, the gnarled, punk-as-all-f*** dude organising the night comes up to us later to hand us our cut of the door take, and _apologises_ for only having $25 to give us. The guy had been swearing a blue streak at his drummer for their entire set
I really like it when things like this come out of nowhere, and it was really nice to have what we do validated in some small way, even by guys who are maybe a little easy to impress!
* amusing note: first verse, first song - bassist breaks E string. I ponder loaning him my SSD, decide against it. Turns out he's had those strings for 5 years, been boiling them monthly!
