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6. White People Ain't Got No Rhythm
But I actually like the city, or at least some aspects of it, as bigger cities go. Cannibal Corpse used to play there almost every year. Tim and Jason even tried to go see them once, I think. We had it all worked out before we even got to The Emerson, an old converted rathole movie theatre on east side. The delusional circle, the barely employed scenesters of Indianapolis sometimes refer to The Emerson when trying to cite instances of noteworthy shows played in the city over the years. "The Insane Clown Posse played there before they got big," they might say, or something like "Prong's old drummer's new band might be playing The Emerson". Applying the idiot logic of the factory to shallow social gaming, many of these people occasionally go see shows at The Emerson as a means of outcooling newer scenesters who go see newer bands play at newer, cleaner venues with indoor plumbing. But even the barely employed would have failed to salvage avant garde meaning from our set. The show listing was set: ShagBark Hickory, Everdown, then a band from Fort Wayne called "Pissbucket", who had recently changed its name from "Mystery Meat" in order to play a short "RAW SEWAGE" tour with a band called "Shitty Diaper". There was a guy wearing a U2 hat, and he did vocals for the last band listed, a "progressive" act called "Fourteen Ton Computer". "We're thinking man's metal," he told me. "We're hopin' to push the limits of what people consider to be 'normal.' I mean, people like old people think I'm 'abnormal,' but maybe bein' 'abnormal' is a lot more 'normal' than we think, ya know?" He also told me he heard the guys in charge were trying to get the Pixies to play The Emerson some time. Later in the coversation I tried and failed to convince him to change his band's name to "Barfbag McDillicutty". It took us about ten minutes to set up since we'd decided not to bother with amplified sound for this one. It wasn't an artistic decision--we just didn't really want to play the show and we all had to work the next day. So we borrowed some of Tim's parents' camping gear and threw a bunch of sleeping bags and blankets on the stage with a few pillows. Beside this sloppy campsite we set up three lawn chairs, and that was it. We had two hours before the show so we went to Broad Ripple, a drag of bars and other trendy businesses in Indianapolis, to walk around. Tim and Michael browsed around a cigar shop, Jason and walked to a bar called The Patio to look at the show listings, and I sat on a bench drinking overpriced coffee. A group of guys who I'm guessing played on a NAIA football team called me a hippie. And I don't get that. I've been called a hippie a number of times, but in truth I usually look like a janitor who just got off work, or maybe an actor playing one of the apostles in a movie about the life of Jesus. It's not like I walk around wearing tie-dyed shirts with "I [Heart] Half-Price Books" written on them, and Indian food gives me a headache. That makes two hippie references and two Dairy Queen references. But the Marian College all-stars moved on and we all gradually ended up back at HOG with no interesting adventures to speak of and no real prospects, so we just went back to The Emerson with about another hour to kill. No need for practice. Waiting for a show at an empty venue is about the stupidest feeling a person can face on a Friday night, or maybe at least in this context. It's even worse when you're not actually playing. This is probably why I lost interest in seeing shows. Shows always start at least two hours after the listing, and there are always a couple surprise first acts no one wants to see--take ours, for instance--but the only option aside from waiting impatiently is alcohol. If alcohol doesn't do much for you and you're not in to the sleazy and/or shallow side of social encounters, there you sit. Bear in mind the show itself is most secondary to people at the show. People just pick the social group they want to be a part of, and they go where that group goes. Like the Smurfs. This is why I've never understood people who whine about scene-building and magical shows coming to town, because the shows don't really matter. Even in towns unlike Indianpolis where good bands want to play, the only moneymakers are fad dance clubs and bars featuring Rob Zombie and the NASCARs. And even then the only real show of the evening doesn't actually take place until late in the evening when desperation drives people to take interest in something they're only coincidentally there to see. But thankfully we were at least "playing" the show, so we sat on stage in our Pontoon Festival lawn chairs, watching the door for stray raccoons to scrounge through our garbage. By the way, if you stick a cigarette in a marshmellow and throw it on the ground, a raccoon will smoke it. I watched it happen when I was nine or ten. The city of Durham, North Carolina is just one big tobacco factory, or at least it was back in the nine-eight, and I'm sure someone in Durham is happy to see that cigarette put to good use. At ten o'clock, our start time, there were five junior high thugs standing outside. We told them Everdown wasn't showing up, walked to a nearby McDonald's, and waited another hour and a half. "Are we getting paid for this crap?" No one seemed to know the answer to my question. "And what have good grades done for me lately?" I ordered some Chicken McNuggets. Jason ordered a strawberry milkshake that "tasted like toothpaste": "We've waited this long, let's just do our ten minute bullshit just to say we've played with a band called Pissbucket." So we sat there a long time staring at traffic. Tim fell asleep. We finally took the stage and the now slightly larger group of junior high thugs still couldn't quite commit to coming inside. So we performed for the other bands, which is sometimes fun if you know and like them, which wasn't the case in this situation. I buried myself in the camping gear and thought about how good credit gets you nowhere. There were alternating scenes.
Scene 1: Michael walks toward the gear rapping lines from the hit song "She's In There" until tripping over the lawn chair Tim sits in. Tim pulls a package of underwear out of his coat and I throw off all the blankets, violently screaming "GET OUT OF HERE! GO AWAY! GO GET OUT OF HERE! GET AWAY FROM THIS ROOM!" until frantically burying myself again. Michael runs off. We cycled the scenes through three times and called it quits. Everyone thought we were warming up for something. Yeah, that's about it. An absolute waste enjoyed only in retrospect. We hoped there would be no more shows at actual venues with actual bands. The show was the highlight of the excursion, which seldom turned out to be the case. None of us bothered asking for payment and no one bothered reviewing the show. The other bands were just kind of confused and embarrassed for us when we left. At least we didn't put out two really good albums then do a video with the Muppets. And it could have been worse. If we hadn't seen The Stranger and mixed its highlights with memories of our own futile attempt to win $10,000 from America's Funniest Home Videos, we would have performed a mock presentation of the show Puttin' on the LIPS, in which we'd planned on lip-synching either something off The Spaghetti Incident? or, of course, "Hazard" by Richard Marx.
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