Stardate 0330.00 [March 30,2000]
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Nowhere X Nowhere Festival 2000
Today Planet X made it's first appearance at the annual Nowhere X Nowhere Festival in Chico, CA. (Gig #40) The festival lasts for three days, and includes live bands playing at various clubs around town and in the local park, but also poetry readings, sporting events, and a film festival.
We hadn't been doing shows outside of Sacramento for awhile, largely due to the fact that most of us work and usually you have to play a weekday gig as an audition - yet somehow magically manage to draw people into a town you've never played. It's a tragic catch-22. Fortunately the existence of the ongoing Festival made most of these issues moot. Simply by submitting our package, we found ourselves booked into one of the larger clubs in Chico - Mr Lucky's - between some of the better known Metal Bands in the area, War Cry, Luxt, Dementia and Fallon.
We arrived early to pick up our Band Passes, which allowed us access to all of the venues and the possibility of watching many of the other bands that were playing in nearby venues besides our own. There was quite a bit going on. We discovered that our friends from San Francisco in Blue Period (who we originally met while flyering Lindee's) were scheduled to play an hour after us - just three doors down at Duffys - which was a small bar with a postage stamp for a stage. I still don't know how they fit all five of them on that stage. Down the street and around the corner was a huge club called The Brick Works, where Sebastian Bach had played the previous night with Fallon opening. Playing there tonight was a Hip-Hop/R&B group. Another couple blocks from there I found the Beer Dawgs performing in a Yogurt shop.
I kid you not.
Somehow they squeezed their entire setup - six instruments including guitar synth modules and such - all nice and snug in the corner.
It was a trip.
We we're pretty lucky to get booked into - uh - Mr. Lucky's. It was nearly as large as Big Shots with a capacity approaching 400, and a good sized stage including a nice drum riser. The one place that they could have used some improvement was the sound system. They only had a Mackie 1604 (16 channel) Mixer and not much outboard gear such as equilizers and gates (which you can use to control feedback and disable microphones that are not in use) At the time we thought little of this, but as we found out later - there was a price to be paid for such austerity.
Almost as soon as we arrived and unloaded we discovered that the best laid plans of mice and promoters are sometimes rarely achieved. A sixth band had been added to the bill - Innocent Anarchy, and both Dementia and Fallon had cancelled. This left four bands with us going on third at about 10-11pm and Luxt on last. We had planned for a fairly short - 30 minute set, but this gave us an oppurtunity to play a little longer and pull a few more songs out of trick bag - which was perfectly fine by us. We could do an hour and a half if neccesary - we even had a new song to debut. So it was all cool.
Innocent Anarchy was up first and they...well, they were a mess. They tried hard, but it just wasn't happening. They really weren't together on anything and their guitars were all out of tune. Maybe, it was just an off night - but it was clear they needed some practice - the singer was using a sheet to read his lyrics. Next up was the speed metal three peice, War Cry. They were pretty good, and they got a good response from the crowd. They weren't quite up to Megadeth level yet, but they were all right and might get there in time. Besides, both bands we're plauged by sound and equipment problems so it's not entirely fair to judge them due to that.
I spent a lot of the time while the first two bands were up trying to hook up with and talk to the guys in Blue Period, so that I could get them into checking out our show - except I couldn't find them. While we were standing outside Mr Lucky's we noticed a van full of band equipement drive up. This didn't surprise us since there were three clubs on that same block, but we were surprised when the starting wheeling their equipment into Mr. Lucky's???
So were thinking ..."What's up with this?"
Ok, so I asked Anna, Luxt's singer about it - and she said that she'd called "Headquaters" due to the band cancellations and found out that the same thing had happened over the Blue Room, only that over there - three bands out of four had cancelled. The only band left playing there was Ten Fold, who like us and Luxt
