Last Thursday, for the first time, I played music live on stage. All in all, it was a pretty interesting experience. Here's how it went down (written a few days after the event so I could view it from a more clinical, detached viewpoint). Be warned, this is a LONG one:
I have a side project called "The Mute Ants": I always turn to it when I get sick of staring at my computer and feel like playing music with actual people (this doesn't happen all that often, mind). It was formed 2 summers ago, with two of my younger brothers: Tom, who does vocals and rudimentary bass, and Andrew, who plays the drums (and is actually quite a good musician). I myself initially took on guitar, but found it dull to play and eventually switched to keyboards, which I felt more comfortable with. We still need a new guitarist now, as it is.
Right. Anyway, Andrew, my youngest brother, is currently in his last year at the high school that all of us went to, Woonsocket High School. This year, as always, the school held a battle-of-the-bands "Rock the Mike" contest in which bands compete for prizes. Andrew wanted the Cat Band to play (Cat Band being the band my 3 brothers have been in for years now... They've played the Woonsocket High School battle of the bands before). However, my other brother, Billy, who is somewhat of a musical virtuoso, felt that playing at high schools was too below him... So as a joke Andrew entered the Mute Ants in instead.
Only 9 bands were allowed to play. You needed to send a demo to get in. I opted to sit out of the demo to give us a better chance of getting in, so on the demo Andrew played guitar and drums. However, we barely got in... The heads of the event thought our demo was "too weird"... And that was with ME sitting out!!!! In any event we got in eventually, as the people in charge figured they’d need at least one odd act to add variety to the show (almost all the other bands were pop-punk/emo bands, and there was also a Christian rock band).
Now, for most people a little battle-of-the-bands contest thing is no big deal. But seeing as this was my first time playing live I decided to make this an epic... I've always admired the film "Rushmore", esp. the character Max Fisher, who turns mere high school plays into special effects laden operas. I decided this show would be similar in scope. Not only would we be the weirdest band there, I decided, but we'd also dress the strangest and open our set with a pretentious manifesto. I then began the long process of planning our show out.
Because we're very much dada punks, at first the costumes were supposed to be very outrageous. I myself was supposed to wear a giant paper bag turned upside down over my body, with the Reichian symbol of organic functionalism on the front and a Xeroxed picture of Aleister Crowley on the back, with the number 23 above his head. However none of my brothers could come up with good costume ideas and I refused to be the only one on stage dressed like an asshole. So one day I was at the Mall, at Hot Topic (hardcore radical, man!) and I was going through the t-shirts when one caught my eye and I knew, just KNEW, that shirt was what I would wear. It was, of all things, a black Poison t-shirt, the cover of their album "Look What the Cat Dragged In", perhaps one of the best hair-metal albums of the 80's (not to mention one of the only Poison albums worth listening to). It's a great album cover, both silly and sexy, and I knew it would piss some Nirvana fans off, this week being the ten year anniversary of Cobain’s "suicide" and all. I suppose the cliché thing I could have done was worn my William S. Burroughs t-shirt or something like Black Flag or the Dead Kennedys, but everyone expected me to do that so I moved in the opposite direction. To complete my "rock star" look I put on some faded black jeans, black sneakers, and a pair of shades with round lenses that had a holographic picture of a green skull in each lens (For the record, Andrew wore a Clash t-shirt and Tom wore a Transplants t-shirt). I had to borrow my brother’s guitar as mine got wrecked this summer, so to spice it up I taped a Salvador Dali postcard to it, the postcard being a close-up of Salvador Dali’s face, with his intense eyes and infamous moustache waxed upright. Beautiful. I’ve always respected Dali, in many ways I feel a kinship to him, so I figured this was keeping in the spirit of things.
So I wrote a manifesto to be read at the start, figuring that no band in the 20 or so years this event’s been going on has ever written a manifesto. I was kind of censored though as no swears or violent/sexual imagery were allowed (after all, my brother as a student was responsible for us and I didn’t want him to get into trouble in his last year at high school). As a result I took the original Mute Ants manifesto (originally written on De Sade’s birthday in June 2002) and did a “dumbed down” version… Yet my parents STILL thought it would go over everyone’s head! In any event it’s not my best work, mostly just “counter-cultural” phrases lifted from my many inspirations, but there is some of my own stuff in there. Anyway, it needed to be sarcastic, elitist, pretentious, etc. So in that aspect it was a great success. Here it is:
MUTE ANTS MANIFESTO
What are you here for?
Why aren’t you up on this stage?
Why aren’t you performing tonight?
Don’t you have anything to say?
Are you content with being a spectator?
It’s easier, isn’t it?
To just sit back and let others provide the entertainment…
Procreation is no substitute for creation.
But then, thinking really is a waste of time, isn’t it?
Content with brainless TV programs and sports and self-help books…
And the know-nothings that say they know-all.
That’s not you, is it?
We’re so obsessed aren’t we?
With our fast food disposable insect lives.
Prisoners of our personalities, robots raised by other robots.
Your brain is a computer programmed from birth by conformity police.
You pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd.
You’re a slave to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation…
Yet still, despite this, nothing ever really changes.
Because change is scary, isn’t it?
Your individuality?
We’re all the same, deep down, at the molecular level.
The truth?
You’re a survival machine, an ark for genes and memes
A biological robot controlled by electrical firings and chemical spasms.
And we’re all wearing armor aren’t we?
To keep the “Not-Self” stuff out.
This world is a sick world, devastated by an emotional plague.
Wars waged by insect royalty and deranged duopolies.
War breeds more war, violence breeds more violence…
People hate love and love hate.
It all does seem hopeless, doesn’t it?
This world handed to us.
We who made ignorance a god and put greed on a pedestal.
Their reality is a hologram, a TV scam, a perceptual simulacra posing as a shared hallucination.
Our universe is in a larval state…
We are children of the meme, products of the post-identity.
Walking zombies dumped into this snivilization.
A society in which the lowest common denominator is the highest paid decision maker.
Give us Sodom! Give us Gomorrah! Give us chaos and disorder!
Hail Eris!
Anything must be better then this corporate drone slave world you’re selling us.
There’s nothing more dangerous then an intelligent person.
Education is the most powerful weapon on earth.
That and free speech…
We say: Love your enemy!
We say: Evolution is Revolution!
We say: Don’t be afraid to be different!
Diversity generators are what this world needs to survive the bacterial global brain.
The future is pregnant with possibility.
So lets all become architects of the imagination and CREATE!
This stuff works: Do it!
Don’t let your reptile brain control you forever.
Smash the control machine! Question everything! Destroy 2000 years of culture!
Kiss the binary good-bye!
The Mute Ants: The cure for Post-Twentieth Century Existentialist Miserablism!
“Do What Thou Wilt Shall Me The Whole Of The Law”
Hannibal Lector for president!!!!
* * * *
Yeah, Shakespeare it ain’t, but it gets the job done. Naturally it was very heavy-handed and preachy but I figured most of these kids would be teenie-boppers so I needed to be a little more obvious then usual. Having said that, it only makes sense if you’re familiar with Gandhi, Primal Scream, Howard Bloom, William S. Burroughs, Wilhelm Reich, the Torture Garden, Susan Blackmore & Richard Dawkins, Grant Morrison, Baudrillard, Robert Anton Wilson and the Principia Discordia, The Matrix, Atari Teenage Riot and Aleister Crowley. So, yeah, we had a lot of references for the audience to digest, I guess you could say. Anyway, Andrew shows it to the promoters for approval and they love it.
Thursday morning. We rehearse a bit, then decide we’re ready. My brothers are nervous yet I feel oddly calm. Maybe because I’m not the singer so I won’t have all the attention directed at me. Who the fuck notices the keyboard player anyway? I hold my hand out extended and I see it’s not shaking at all. Cool. Half an hour before we leave I feel so healthy I eat a bowl of Mini-Ravs, which taste quite good, though a tad too saucy. Still, it didn’t give me heartburn for some reason that night. Very unusual. But I digress.
Okay, since Andrew's car had more room we loaded the gear in that. We leave home at 5:00, get there early, help set-up. At 23 I'm like one of the oldest people there... Feel like a geezer. Some of the bands are gonna be late, so we move up from seventh slot to fifth. Eventually the crowd fills up. maybe to about 500 people or so. There’s a pamphlet with all the group names. I feel a sense of pride when I see the name “Mute Ants” listed in it… Then get PISSED when I see they just list me as guitarist but not keyboardist. WTF? The guy in charge of sound check is some old hippy guy in a wheelchair with long hair, looks like a British ex-rock and roller. While the first band sets up the three of us go into the audience to watch. Band one does 4 songs, 3 of which are covers (Sum 41, Blink 182... how original). They're not that bad. Typical pop-punk, if you're into that thing. Ditto for the second band: More pop-punk, etc. I’m feeling a bit of nerves now. The third band was the only other band to bring a keyboard: They were these dorky looking computer nerd types that were pretty skilled, they covered U2 and Led Zeppelin and stuff. I thought they were dull but they were nice enough to let us borrow their keyboard wire. Dull music, nice guys. During their act I went out to the water fountain (or, as we call it in Rhode Island, the "Bubbler") before I went back to my seat. By now my lips and throat have become very dry, which always happens whenever I'm standing before large groups of people. I go to the backstage where my bandmates await. Billy has come over to help us set our stuff up as he knows more about that kind of shit then we do. Fourth band is really bad. Just boring hard rock, totally insipid IMO (yet to everyone's shock this band won third place!) As we wait to go on we make jokes and shit. For the first time ever in my life I wish I had a glass of beer in front of me and I was drunk out of my mind. Oh well, too late for that.
Okay, we're up. I take a deep breath and walk on to the stage with my band and help set up, trying not to think too hard about the audience (I remember how Genesis P-Orridge would often imagine the audience to be a bunch of corpses. This strangely helps). While we set up one of the MCs takes 2 minutes to read my manifesto. Because I'm busy helping to set up I only pay attention to bits and pieces. He does a pretty good reading of it, though he mispronounces the line "Give us Sodom" as "Give us Saddam" and also mispronounces the word "Simulacra", but other then that it goes off well. Crowd reaction mixed: Some think that "it's awesome, man!". others yell "Who cares?", most are either indifferent or not paying attention. At the end the MC yells "Let's hear it for the manifesto!" and the audience cheers and claps wildly. I can't help but smile... These kids'll clap for anything I guess.
We finally finish setting up (had some trouble adjusting the keyboard volume). I take my place on the far right of the stage, strapping on my guitar. It's at this point I realize I'm about to "play" guitar in front of 500 high school students, and that I'm wearing stupid skeleton shades and a dorky hair metal t-shirt (not to mention the goofy Dali picture taped to my guitar). Oddly enough I don't freak out, instead I'm forced to chuckle at the sheer absurdity of the situation. It’s not really scary, more like an alien feeling, mostly. I kick into our first song, "Drip", with the opening riff, a riff so moronic and simple an ape with severed hands could play it. As usual, I mess it up and I notice my brothers both wince in mock pain. But then the bass and drums kick in and we're rocking (hah!). "Drip" was the first Mute Ants song ever played and practiced so it's always been close to my heart. It's supposed to be half punk, half heavy metal but we speed it up faster then usual here for some reason... I could tell Tom was nervous as he was singing the chorus way faster then usual. As always it ended up as pure noise and chaos. My guitar was a jumbled wall of noise, but then again the amps were so loud that even the guitar work by people who knew what they were doing sounded like noise.
The second song, "Dynamite", was a very fast hardcore punk song, clocking in at around 1:30. I've never liked playing this song... We always seem to play it after "Drip” and my arm is tired from that first song, so I have trouble playing fast. But the band is a democracy: Andrew is a fast drummer so he likes fast punk songs, whereas I like avant-garde experimental noisescapes. So we usually have to compromise in some way. During this song I loosened up a bit, moved around more, the dry lump in my throat gradually vanishing. Every now and then I look up at the audience with a blank, “I could care less” look on my face… A nice counterpoint to the guitarists of all the other bands, who seemed to jump around like rabbits with electric eels shoved up their assholes. I digress yet again. After it was done this song I put the guitar down and take my place behind the keyboard. Once I was behind the keyboard my confidence went up very much. It was like an electronic shield or something. Now I’m feeling like Marty Rev, the keyboardist for the classic groundbreaking electro-punk band Suicide, playing one-handed synth riffs (though Rev always played with one hand because he needed the other one to deflect stuff the audience through at him).
Our third song was "Cold We Are" (Chorus: Cold We Are, Cold We Are, Cold! Cold! Cold we are!) which had a steady mid-tempo beat, slow bass and me playing an adequate synth-riff (that matched the bass: I messed up at a few parts though as this is still a new song). The crowd seemed to like this one for some reason. Finally, however, we came to the fourth song, "Rabid"... the one I was waiting for. “Rabid” begins with loud synth drones that I’m very good at playing before going into a very slow drum beat and plodding bass, with Tom whispering random words like “The Beast whose number is 666” and “Armor Stratification” (yet ANOTHER Reichian phrase… I coached him on that one). During this song I switch from drones to the keyboard’s WHISTLE sound, which is loud and piercing. I hit the high note and a vicious squeal of feedback whips the audience into submission. I grin, suddenly I’m evoking Whitehouse. This song goes on for awhile, but eventually after all this power electronics wankery we go into our fourth and final song, “Megatherion”. The sound collage was supposed to be here. But now it’s just Andrew drumming mega fast, me pounding the keyboard with both fists over and over again until it nearly falls off the stand (great way to work out aggression, that) and Tom doing his Ian Curtis wannabee twitches and jitterings, pretending to hump the stage at one point. Finally after a final burst of noise we all stop playing, Tom gets up and says, into the mike, in the blandest voice possible, “Thank You”. This gets a laugh from the cop doing security for the show. Most of the audience cheers, but there are some boos. Success! I take my equipment off the stage in a bit of a daze. Then a bunch of Suicide Girls tossed their panties at me. Well… Not really.
We go back into the audience and watch the rest of the show. Adrenalin is pumping in my veins, and I can’t believe I got through the set without any trouble, not even any panic or anxiety attacks! I feel happy, giddy, victorious! But enough about me… Sixth band is a teeny-bopper pop band that the audience LOVES (oddly enough, they didn’t place). Then there was the seventh band, who have been rumored for months now that they’d be in first no matter what. The rumors were right, the show WAS rigged. This band got a longer time to set up, had fancy light effects, even a spinning disco ball. To add insult to injury they covered YELLOWCAR! And said they’d be opening for Something Corporate soon so “catch that show, kids!” Very whorish. Band eight was okay, but their sound was so drenched in Emo I wanted to take a shower afterwards. They were the only band to have a female singer, and to emphasize this they covered No Doubt’s “Just A Girl”. Good song, bad cover. The singer was kinda cute though. (This band got second place). The ninth and final band was the Christian Rock band, who strangely enough covered Metallica. This band had problems setting up and put in a kind of bland, professional performance. Many people thought this was the worst band there (even worse then us). Anyway, the rigged band won (big surprise), which got some boos from the audience and some grumbling from the other bands. I didn’t mind though, as I didn’t really expect to win. I just wanted to go out there and play and try something new.
Watching the performance afterwards on VCR (my parents, who were in the audience, taped it) I was fairly impressed by our performance. I mean, it wasn’t life-changing or anything, but for our first gig we did pretty good, I think. We were very much unlike the other bands there: Totally different sound, no schmoozing with the audience, no cover songs, just punk rock and attitude with experimental avant-garde surrealism tossed in to give it spice. I heard a CD is going to be given to each band of the show… Hope so... Anyway, some people liked us, some hated us (my dad overheard someone in the restroom say “Those guys were so bad they were funny” while someone in the audience complimented my shirt and told me that “we rocked”). The hippy guy in the wheelchair seemed to be impressed by my unorthodox keyboard style also… So I feel a sense of accomplishment. We did it our way, didn’t compromise too badly, got through our set the way we wanted… Plus now I can say I’ve played music live and I guess that proves that maybe I’m not the shyest person in the world. Hell, I had so much fun I’d definitely do it again. Once I got past the first two minutes I was completely comfortable and enjoying myself. Sure we may of looked like pretentious twats, but who cares? That's what I FUCKING AM!
The moral of the story? New experiences should be relished and appreciated, not feared! Anyway, I need to apply this philosophy to the rest of my life now. I kinda liked being rock star James for a little while… He was laid-back and all attitude. I should invoke him more often. |
