Saturday, November 20, 2004

The Lincoln Juggernaut Rides Again
The Killing Machine played it's second show last night. The Seattle Debut. It was an utter disaster. I heard people compare us to the Dwarves more than a few times.

The Run Down:
First, lets just make it clear that we all had a few cocktails before the performance. Taiga, being the 17 year old, asian, straight edge kid, was acting as the responsible adult. The rest of the band, as well as just about everyone we brought with us, and 80 percent of the people at the show, were absolutely hammered.

From what I've heard, and this may not be completely true, none of the other bands wanted to play after us, so we ended up headlining. We had brought along with us; a bunch of red lights, 32 rolls of toilet paper, 20 rolled up party streamers, 15 or so noisemakers, the Nickelodeon Banner we stole, a God Bless America banner, Taiga dressed like a gay construction worker, Neil in nothing but a loin cloth, Doug back in the tiger suit, and, of course, The Fog Machine. Our good friend Bob Swift also lent us a hand and kicked off our set by showing up dressed like Abe Lincoln and reading the Gettysburg Address. It was crazy. We played our first 2 songs with little incident ... just the token crazyness of the show we put on. Then Taiga blew fire.

The room we played in was probably 30 feet long, 15 feet wide and the ceiling was probably 7 feet high--max. It was a basement. I didn't see the act because I was busy playing songs on my guitar, but apparently he blew a huge fireball into the crowd and the flames crawled across the length of the ceiling like in Backdraft. (GREAT WHITE, GREAT WHITE!!!!) That's when I looked over and saw Taiga dancing around with his crotch on fire. Seriously. He accidentally set his crotch on fire ... as well as a couple of other peoples heads and a big puddle of the fuel he was using on the floor. It was utter chaos after that. I think the only thing still resembling any sort of structure at that point was the band still playing in time. Everything else was mayhem. Taiga sprung into action and grabbed the fire extinguisher--that I had so thoughtfully purchased earlier in the day--and proceeded to blast, first his crotch, then EVERYTHING IN THE ROOM with it. Have you ever breathed the discharge from an "all purpose dry chemical fire extinguisher." It sort of smells and tastes like barbeque flavor potato chips ... If they were killing you. Doug and I tried our best to forge on after the fire extinguisher mishap, but the air was too thick to breath and the room was empty anyway.

After maybe 2 minutes outside, we came back in to try and finish our set. A few of the die hards came back downstairs, as it was still a lot smelly, but way less irritating. We got things back in some sort of order and started into our fourth song ... yes, we had only completed 2 songs and interrupted a third to run outside at this point. We got about a minute into the song and then we blew the circuit breaker. Or the outlets fried. Or someone pulled the plug. I don't know. At that point I didn't care. The room looked like a hurricane had hit it and there were maybe 6 people left standing in the dark. Then Doug leaned over and whispered, "I think we need to get out of here ... Quick." When Doug, of all people, says something like that, it get's my attention. Let's just say Doug isn't the kind of guy who dedicates a lot of time to worrying about the little things. Luckily no one was too bent out of shape over the whole ordeal and I think we blew a few kids minds who didn't know what they were in for. I still made it home in time for Conan.

Overall it was kind of a bum out of a show since we didn't even really get to play, but someday kids are going to tell super blown out of proportion stories about it and we'll all be folk heros. Take that Gwar.