Arcata, a college town in Humboldt.
I'm going to have a brief momment of honesty with you all again and tell you
that I was NOT looking forward to this gig AT ALL... it turns out that
everything was OK in the end, but this was the last-minute booking that sat
in my stomach all tour, festering like White Castle hamburgers after a long
night of drinkin'...
In Other Words: This gig gave me The Scoots.
We were gonna play Cafe Tomo, a resturant and live music venue in Arcata but
there were just a few logistical problems we needed to get around in order to
do the show...
Like the stage.
In my advance calls only days prior to leaving on tour I found out this
place's stage was a sort of half-circle which was a reported twelve feet at
it's deepest point and around twenty-two feet wide... but remember that the
stage quickly loses depth anywhere left or right of center...
"Will that be OK?" asked our contact Lincoln, hopefully...
"No."
Oh brother...
This guy obviously was quite driven to get the band to play and I didn't want
to be difficult...
... and the absolute bottom line is we needed the gig, we are broke as a
joke...
So I told him if they could add another five feet to the front of the stage
we could do the show... he told me he'd call a carpenter and get back to me.
"Ya gotta admit... the kid's got moxy."
When we got there we saw what had been done for us... the stage jutted out
over half the floor! They had added like, eight feet!!!
The layout of the place was like this: When you walk in the front door there
are raised seating areas to the right and left, the seating to the left
extending around the left wall. The stage is on the right wall (and now
extends across easily half of the dance floor) and beyond that there is bar
on the dance floor level of the left wall, and a small raised seating area
and kitchen access on the back wall... large Japanese fish kites hang over
the stage and paper lamps hang all around the place... it's immaculately
clean and smells great from the kitchen... this is a BIG plus... it's weird,
but at least it's comfortable and you're not worried about surfaces you touch
or conditions where your meal is coming from...
The PA is partially set up and there are speakers for the sides of the stage
which is nice... essentially it's DSO In The Round, with people sitting
everywhere but behind the drummers... speaking of which...
There's a lip on the stage which is about six inches tall, so the staging
that has been added on to the existing stage is even with the top of the
lip... the drummers are sitting LOWER than the stage and it's usually the
opposite, known as a "drum riser"... Rob re-titled this situation as a "drum
lower"...
Sound check went OK, with "Lazy River Road"... the place stayed open for
walk-in dinner business so I didn't want to interrupt anyone any longer than I
had to... I had the crew re-angle the PA speakers for the room and the front
set of mains actually fired ACROSS the front of the stage instead of straight
out, which seemed very surrealist to me... the band facing out and me
shooting the sound to the right, essentially...
When the show got started things were going fairly well but by half-way into
the first set the band had become incredibly loud on stage and I was having
to push the system harder than I wanted to in order to keep the vocals up...
during the break I negotiated for lower stage volume and I got it for the
first couple of songs... and then it went up again and stayed there for the
rest of the show... people didn't seem to mind, though... quite the opposite.
The thick haze of Humboldt's Finest hung in the air from start to finish and
gave the place a wonderful undertone of serenity all night long fueling the
spinning, gyrating crowd of two hundred-fifty folks quite well...
Hey... What do you EXPECT up here???
The show was 3/30/89 from Greensboro Coliseum, Greensboro NC. and like I said
it was LOUD... the best songs from the first set tended to be the quiet ones
like "Row Jimmy" and "Birdsong"... "Blow Away" was also pretty good, but from
where I was sitting songs like "Promised Land" suffered from the PA's
inability to blend with the instrument's amp-throw... again, this was from
where I had to be in relation to the PA given the space for things so I'm
sure it was better in other parts of the room...
My favorite parts of the second set were "China Cat" (but not particularly
"Rider"), a spooky "He's Gone" with things getting sort of noisy before
"Drumz"... Scott made some sort of "sound-sheet" on his synth like steel
grinding which I oscillated from the console creating the sound of time
grinding to a halt and speeding up again... it was a nice effect...
After "Space" Maraat turned his amp up to the 'Sterility In Males' setting
for "The Other One" and I threw a pitch-shifter on his vocal just like Healey
used to in the late eighties from time to time... I always sort of thought
Dan was doing that to mess with Bobby as much as to mess with the crowd's
heads, and that was sorta what I was doing to alieviate my frustrations with
the stage volume issue... and Mike looked sort of put off that I was altering
his voice, making him sound like he was on helium... touché... the jams were
angry and tense with John and Mike getting louder and musically sparring back
and forth which got the crowd more and more hyper... it was one of the more
extreme treatments the song has gotten lately...
I gotta say, "Stella Blue" was beautiful... everyone mellowed out and played
the song wonderfully and harmoniously... the encore of "Knockin" was also
nice, if somewhat disjointed...
The "Filler" as we're now calling the extra songs at the end of the night was
"Fantasy>Terrapin" and then "So Many Roads" and "Touch of Grey", the longest
and most involved Filler yet for the most intimate crowd... I thought that
was a great thing for the band to do, giving such a special show for this
crowd as opposed to in a larger venue...
One last thing about Arcata... Cafe Tomo is on this commercial square that
has a large landscaped park in the middle of it featuring a statue of William
McKinley (which the locals call "Jebediah", presumably after the character of
Simpsons lore who founded Springfield)... after our show there were regular
drive-bys from local law enforcement... they would appear up a side street,
cruise around part of the park, and disappear down a side street on the other
side of the park or they would take several laps around the park and
disappear again... randomly but regularly if that makes any sense... and
there were even some CHP cars... it was like standing in a giant Pac Man
board close to the center where the ghosts call "home" and officers Inky,
Blinky, and Clyde are sailing through the maze, waiting for the Pac Van to
make a run for it...
Not that they were sweating us... I think they were more interested in the
people we attract, and most of them shuffled off quietly immediately after
saying good night and thanking us heartily... one kind (and according to all
accounts VERY sober) soul even gave us $100 for food money, telling the
drummers he understood how hard it was to keep something like this going and
that he appreciated what we had done for him that night... all I can say to
that guy is thank YOU...
It was a pretty good night... we got some cash, made some folks happy, and we
even found the all-night donut shop evey town should have right up the street
from the gig.
You'd be amazed at how satisfying an old-fashioned and a carton of milk can
be at 3:30am...
COMING SOON: Red Woods, Slug Spotting, "Some Mind-Blowing Glass, Dude!", and
The Majestic Crystal Ballroom... This gig was UNREAL... Check back soon!