Saturday november 17th, and black kites hit the airwaves. it was my 4th time playing live on the radio, but my first time at KXLU, so i was looking forward to an interesting time, and – it was.
The band met up a little early to do a quick practice space level check and short song run through before packing up and making the drive to collegetown. Shelley came by around 8:30 and then off we all went, a 4 car caravan into the night. A few twists and turns on the highways and freeways and streets, looking for each other, looking for destination, and then – eventually, but with time to spare, we made it to the Loyola Marymount University, somewhere in Westchester, and filled up the small “live room” with our equipment. Setting up in front of walls of records, which made me feel right at home. There was the cool country radio show going on, and some crazy video/radio station/webcam action taking place as we set-up, as the sound got dialed in, the mics put in place – and i was having flashbacks of hanging out with my friends at CiTR back in the Vancouver days of 1987 or thereabouts. Keith “Scratch” Parry doing his late night radio DJ thing – which i cannot remember the name of. Howcome i can remember Pedestrian Sacrifice, but not the name of the radio show. mind holes. yeah – so, 20 years later, and i’m at KXLU, which reminds me of CiTR, and the last time I was on the radio was with Black Nite Crash on KEXP, and i start looking at the shelves of records, thinking about me playing with Blaise Pascal on CBC… and there it is, stuck up in the “old music” section – Blaise Pascal. The Foreword album. We did that in like 1994 or something. So it was kinda nice, i got to play a track off of that (Segue) before we started playing. Things like that are nice, and kind of tie different parts of my life together in good ways. It was also cool hearing my band from almost 15 years ago being played on the radio right before my band from right now played on the radio.
And we played. Loud and noisy from where we were sitting, but Shelley was dancing in the doorway and said that the sounds coming through the speakers on the otherside were sounding good. Matt moved around with some crazy fisheye webcamera and got all artsy live video on us, and we played our songs pretty well, considering none of us could really hear each other. We did 4 songs, with a little banter between songs… and then it was over. short and sweet, and then off to the DJ booth for a little impromptu interview. I did my best to just stand quietly in the corner and not say anything. I think I did that quite well. Evy and Alan chatted a little about the band, about our plans for world domination, about music and how, really, we aren’t shoegaze. more like post-gaze. I guess we’re kinda melodic postgaze noisedream pop. Or something like that. Genres can be so annoying sometimes.
I think we did good. we got the little KXLU notch in our collective band belt, we plugged our upcoming Viper Room show (dec. 10th), we got annoyed by all the saturday night college kids running around the campus (thank god i’m not in college these days…), and then we packed up and headed out.
Shelley and I, both having missed our pre-show dinner, decided to go and hit Swingers in Santa Monica for a late night eat. It was alright – love them Swingers Chocolate Shakes… but the place was overflowing with annoying drunk people. I guess that’s the way it goes when you hit a hipster diner at 2 in the morning.
Sunday came and went, with a little shopping at Target (keanan duffty for me, erin featherston for her), and then home to relax and watch episodes of the Venture Bros.
Good Times.
mochaLouder 