scrummmmmage

April 29th
Detroit, Michigan
Lager House
w/ elusive Parallelograms, Cetan Clawson, Tone and Niche

Allen showered at Jenna's and we left about noon to head towards detroit. Before we left, Luke suggested we walk to Sultan's for falafel. It was a good call.

Northern Indiana is a wasteland.

We thought we got to Detroit kind of early, but it turned out we missed a time change and we were right on time. The bar was open so we went in. The owner was one of the nicest guys ever. He and his bartender were working on a book of shots, they were making a shot named after every headlining band that played at their bar. He gave us what he was calling the "Spidermum Shot". It was kind of nasty, but it was free. It was whiskey, tequila, and hot damn, yikes.

We had another pissed off sound guy, his name was Creggers. First he wanted us to load into the back, then he wanted us to put only small stuff in the back and everything else behind the stage. Anytime we asked him a question, he got super huffy. When we were trying to find power on the right side of the stage, he got under the stage, then came out yelling "who the fuck left the fucking shop vac under the stage!" to no one in particular. He was the only person working at the venue that was even in the room. So he just tossed it on the stage and dragged it to the back behind the sound board.

Tone and Niche showed up, they're the ones that set up the show, they opened and played a cool, mellow set as a two piece; acoustic guitar/vocals and violin. We're playing with their four piece band in KC at the RecordBar in June. Extremely nice people.

The hurricane of drunkenness known as elusive Parallelograms rolled up as we were loading in. They were rolling as a four piece for this show, with a new guy named Dave playing guitar. Dave was trashed and sporting permagrin. Before the show we met one of the other guys on the bill, Cetan Lawson, pronounced "Chedda". Or as we called him, Chedda the Shredda.

Me and Allen got on stage and did background vocals on the elusive Parallelograms song "Orange". We did the woohoo's in the chorus. We shared amps with them and played a decently messy and noisy 25 minute set. Chedda went on last and played some hardcore shredda shit. I was outside smoking some of the time with elusive Parallelograms, but at one point I heard him go from 'The Star-spangled Banner' to '?' to 'Eruption'. He played with his teeth, he played left handed, but we kind of wished he was trying his hand at more original stuff, he could definitely play guitar, but he played everything exactly technically correct, to the point of draining most of the emotion out of the songs he was covering. He's only like 19 though, I'm sure he'll get into original material when he's tired of memorizing extremely technical guitar solos.

elusive Parallelograms didn't have anywhere to crash, so they followed us to Scrummage University after the show. Scrummage is a huge warehouse space in a kind of dangerous part of Detroit. The guys that live there are beyond cool. They opened up the gate for our vans, and we hid them in the corner of the lot behind the building. The only parallelogram still conscious when we got to Scrummage was Cory, the rest of the band, being professional musicians, had drunk themselves into comas on the 20 minute ride from the bar.

The next few hours included lots of smoking/drinking, a freestyle rap session, Cory riding a bicycle while playing a tuba, Cory doing the worm on concrete and James taking his shoes and socks off (i don't know why, it was freezing in there) as he passed out in a chair. Baby Birds slept in the room where, at one point, a dog had lived and marked every mattress. There was a huge heater in the corner of the warehouse that I was unaware of somehow. I slept on a couch freezing my nuts off, but didn't get any sleep really.

Around noon, we said our goodbyes to the Scrummage guys and started a long drive to Pittsburgh.