March 5th, 2010|7:36pm.
So I've been thinking a lot lately about the role that playing live music has played in my life. I haven't played a show in a while and it seems weird, so I've just been thinking about some of the cool moments I've had playing music and why they were such cool moments. Sometimes it isn't the biggest crowd of the cleanest playing that makes a performance so great, but just the whole feeling of the moment.
One of my favorite band moments, so far, has been playing Glass and Spiders with Davenport in the basement of Mills's house at ISU for a party we threw there. There was no stage, just a filthy basement. We had just pushed most of the crap out of one corner so we could set up our gear. The PA was a shitty little Fender Passport, so I'm sure the vocals were almost unintelligible. The place was full of half drunk college kids who seemed to love listening to anything loud and fast. Glass and Spiders was always one of my favorite Davenport songs. It just had this amazing presence from great dynamics and a fun, almost spooky lead line. The chorus was just a force of violence and the ending always felt like they could be the last chords you ever played. There was just such a surprisingly good raw energy at that show and I remember just being so engrossed by playing that song but at the same time looking around and seeing that other people were really hearing it too. After the song was over, we all just looked at each other. Everybody was sweaty and exhausted, almost beat-up from the performance, but we all had this breathless grin on our faces and an awareness of how cool of a moment that just was.
After the set we drank cheap beer and collected high fives from random drunk people. "Hey! You were the guitar player! Yea man!" It was just such a good complete experience, really squeezing everything possible out of the performance. Playing that song was just such a powerful physical experience for all of us, and that's really what playing live is about. I've played better and I've played to bigger crowds and on nicer stages, but that show, and especially that song will always one of my favorite band memories.
There have certainly been other great memories and there will certainly be many more, but for some reason I had just been thinking a lot about that performance of Glass and Spiders recently. I just really love playing music so much.
Oh man, I loved that show too. It's weird, reading this blog actually just made me choked up a little. Davenport really was a band that just played to play the music. And that song was pretty damn powerful. Good job to all of us!