Mission accomplished.

The gig went pretty well, I’d say. We met at the KrakaTomb at 8:30 on Saturday night, played for about a half-hour, and packed up to go. I gotta say, we’re getting really good at breaking down our stuff. We had everything unplugged, folded, disassembled, bagged, and/or boxed and lined up at the bottom of the stairs within five minutes. It’s scary how efficient we’re getting.

Setting up at the gig was slightly less efficient, because we, along with Matt and Nick from Barbeau, had to figure out the best way to get us set up in a way that would minimize the amount of work that would be necessary to switch sets. It turned out that Barbeau’s head is identical to ours, so we just plugged in to that and added our speakers to their PA system. I hope it wasn’t too much of a pain that we had to adjust some levels on their head. They didn’t complain about it, at least.

We were pretty much set up by 10:10. Which is kind of funny, because we were supposed to be going on at 10:00. Tim suggested we wait a little bit until more people got there. We didn’t argue. We ended up starting our set at about 10:45. It was kind of cool to start playing so late that it was almost rude to our audience. But since Pete was chatting them up the whole time, I don’t think they minded.

The set went pretty well. Much, much tighter than the Somerset gig. We had to tweak our vocal levels a little more, and I don’t think any of us were totally happy with them, but at least we could hear ourselves singing.

The songs went over well. We had a pretty mixed audience, from people who’ve heard some of our songs a hundred times, to people who had never heard us play before in their lives. Plus we had four new songs that nobody in the house had ever heard. So really, there was something new for everyone. Remember how we predicted that the song “Two Rivers” would surely get people laid? Sure enough, during that song a couple at the bottom of the stairs were demonstrating. Richard and I noticed, looked at each other, and cracked the hell up. The song sounded as poignant as always, but I imagine that its emotional impact was somewhat diminished by the fact that the bass player and one of the guitarists were laughing while performing it. I was just glad that the lovers were out of Jeremy’s line of sight, since it would be a really hard song to sing through a case of the giggles.

We later found out that the couple in question had met each other three minutes before. Okay, not really, but that would be funny.

Jeremy had some technical problems with his guitar. One of his strings or tuners or something. It had been a while since I’d seen his Carvin-—normally he leaves his old Fender at the KrakaTomb and plays that at practices-—so I was beginning to wonder if it was out of commission or something. But I guess it was just pissed off about not getting to play in the band very often. Jeremy seemed to get it straightened out after a few songs, though, and I don’t think anybody in the audience noticed.

I had some technical problems of my own. During the days leading up to the gig, it had occurred to me that I didn’t remember the last time I changed my bass strings. I thought that maybe I ought to do so, just to be safe, but I never got around to it. Sure enough, my D string broke during the intro of the Elvis Costello cover. I’m sorry to say that it negatively affected my performance. I tried to figure out alternate fingerings on the fly, but my success was limited. Okay, I sucked. At least the break happened on the last song rather than in the middle of the set, for which I’m grateful.

Speaking of breaking stuff, we’ve decided to stop saying things are broken. For instance, Richard didn’t “break” his pick, he “rocked” it. By the same token, I “rocked” my D string. It’s funny if you’re us. Maybe we’re just psychologically preparing ourselves for when we “rock” something expensive.

Something that was rocked but no longer is is the www.Krakathoom.com domain name, obviously. The server that hosted it previously ceased to exist, but Richard was able to get us set up on a new host. So here we are. I mentioned that the site was down during our gig, but by that time it was up and I didn’t know it. So if you heard me say that, ignore me and come to the site. Oh, wait.

Also, we were able to unload some copies of the new demo CD. There were seven copies left when I went home. I don’t know how many copies Jeremy made, but we got rid of that number minus seven. That would be more encouraging if we were charging anything for them. On the other hand, having more CDs than we can give away kind of makes me glad we didn’t pay for a run of 300 of the things. Yet.

Big props to everyone who came down to hear us, and also to Barbeau, who played a hard, tight set as always. You can check out their website here.