Stardate 0317.00 [March 17,2000]
Next | Previous
Planet X Live at Cafe Paris. Most of the interesting event involving this show occured before the event itself. First, there was how we got the gig. Just a few blocks from both my home and Cafe Paris is a local record store - the Beat. One afternoon my step-son and I were over there looking around, checking to see if any of the CD's we have there on consignment have sold, and seeing what bands are playing locally, as most groups place their flyers on pillar out front or on a series of tables located just inside the store. While we we're there Greg, the owner of Cafe Paris, walked in. He was putting up flyers showing the upcoming month's schedule of shows. We said "Hi" and out of the blue he asked me if we wanted to play a show.
"Sure," I said. So we went over to his car where he had his calender handy and setup the middle slot on this date. Man, I have to tell you - playing Cafe Paris isn't the most pretigious gig because the place is small - but honestly - it's not really that much smaller than most of the "prestigious" places to play like Old Ironsides or Bojangles. Old Ironsides stage is the size of a postage stamp, but trying to get a gig in there is a stone-cold-beeyotch. At least, it is for us.
At the point where we booked this gig, there we'ren't any other bands on Greg's list. Eventually two other groups were brought in, Tangent and Watts Up both of them from outside Sacto. We later found out that these bands wanted to play back-to-back, and since we were sitting in the middle slot...well... something had to change.
So we said, if we have to choose to play either before or after you guys-- we'll play before. They we're grateful and said that that was cool and they'd like to "open" for us sometime. Uh...Ok, that's cool. But for us is more about convenience. When you play first at Cafe Paris you get to take your time setting up your gear checking out your sound, especially NO-ONE really gets a sound check. Plus we get to go home early - and Sac crowds rarely seem to want to stay very late for some strange reason, so it was all good with us.
The last set of pre-gig weirdness was in an email note I received from Yasa, the promoter who had brought in the other two bands, asking if a rumor she had heard about the show being cancelled was true. I hadn't read my AOL email for a couple days, and didn't notice this until the actually day of the gig. So semi-frantically - I called up the club to confirm everything with Greg about noon, and the answering machine was on. A couple hours later we had to run errands, and Cafe Paris was along our path - so we stopped by and looked in.
The place was empty.
Ok, so finally 6pm rolls around - which is just an hour before me and guys planned to begin setting up our gear and I finally get a call back from Greg and he says "Everything is fine, the show isn't cancelled".
Whew.
By comparison - the show itself was pretty uneventful. We ran through a couple tunes in our sound check and we're all set to go well ahead of time. Both Tangent and Watts Up were nice guys and they brought quite a few people with them, which is always a good thing. Darryl is now using Ron's yellow Ibanez guitar for most of our sons as it stays in tune much better than his own "I-Bone". Our set itself was fairly short and didn't have any major problems - other than me bumping Darryls Dean Flying-V with my mic stand and knocking it out of tune. (Oops) Basically we looked at this gig as a practice/warm-up for our NowhereXNowhere gig at the end of the month up in Chico - where we're only going to 30 minutes to kick-ass. Just for fun we threw in "Endless Night" which we don't usually play.
Unfortunately, I didn't stay for long after our set, as I had plans to check out the Okra Pickles (Digimag Article) over at the Press Club that night. I've gotten to know Gwamba, lead singer of the Pickles, over the last few months as I've performed at acoustic open-mike nights at the Press on Wednsdays. Also performing was Grub Dog and the Amazing Sweathearts
