NASCO show

Saturday night I played at a party at Black Elk co-op in Ann Arbor. The party was for the annual NASCO conference (North American Students of Cooperation), so there were people from all over the country in attendance. I think it was the best show I've played so far (out of six). I felt like I had a small breakthrough in terms of not being nervous or inhibited. I was still quite nervous before the show, but it didn't affect me during the show. My friend Kiwi also said that I performed better, with more confidence, than in previous shows. This was all very encouraging. Especially the pleased looks on some people's faces... it reminds me of the look on my housemate's face after a particularly thrilling ride when we went to Cedar Point. This is definitely what I was there to do. One guy told me that since he saw me perform, he understood how Jesse Jackson felt at Obama's victory speech.

There's definitely still room for improvement. I was pretty winded after just three songs and was thinking how in the hell was I going to get through the rest of the show. So the second half of the show ended up being more subdued than the first half, and the Crazy Man Dance wasn't quite as crazy as I would like. (Though it was fun charging into the audience; some girls looked pretty scared. Everyone had been standing around watching at a polite distance, like it was a stroll through the zoo... I just thought, Fuck this...) So, I've started jogging every day and I'm going to start going faster and farther than I used to. I'm in pretty good shape already, but not nearly enough to be able to give my all to each of 13 songs including the Crazy Man. As usual I was totally spent afterwards and feel like I've been recuperating for the past two days.

Before the show there was a problem where I tried to insert cables into my foot button board and rather than connecting with the ports, the ports just bent back into the frame until I couldn't reach them. I had to find a screwdriver in the house and open the thing up so I could hold the ports from the inside while I connected the cables to them. It's really not a good thing to be taking apart your equipment right before the show is supposed to start... it kind of put me on edge. Then when I put the button board in place under the keyboard and went to connect the other ends of the cables to the keyboard and the PC, I discovered that both ends of the same cable were connected to the two ports. So I had to open it back up, switch cables, put it back in place... and then I discovered that I plugged both ends of a different cable in the ports, same mistake again. I don't know how I managed that. I didn't take the time to screw the lid back on, I just put it on the floor and hoped nothing would get jostled out of place. It worked ok thankfully. I had a scare when in the middle of one song the buttons stopped working and I had to stop the song, but it was a completely routine fuckup for one of my shows -- just a matter of having selected (with the mouse) the wrong thing for the buttons to trigger. It's so easy to make mistakes like that... so far I think I've had only one show of the six where none of the songs got interrupted. (The Linder show last week was almost without interruptions; there was just one song where it was close to the end, I was about to play the final solo, and bang, the mic fell on the computer keyboard and the music stopped. Nice dramatic finish.) I figure the glitches are just part of the fun.

Unfortunately I didn't make contacts for future shows outside Michigan as I had hoped -- again I need to figure out how to promote myself more -- except for one girl from Austin who said I should come to the South by Southwest music festival there in March... this seems like it could be an interesting thing to do.

Later that night, the Ann Arbor band Canada played. They were surprisingly good ("surprisingly" because I'm predisposed to hate contemporary indie-rockers). The best thing about them were their strong rhythm section. They reminded me a lot of the band Mice Parade.