Live Set - NOBODY HOME

Live Set Standard Insanity

nobody home
I had the back of a Marshall Amp confronting me, and it was already 15 minutes after the show was supposed to start. But we'd forgotten the power cord & it was 60 miles away. The crowd was leaving already. Desperate Sweat. I looked around in the dimly lit area behind the stage. Something had to pay- and it was... a vacuum sweeper. Some well-meaning janitor had left it there unattended, and helpless. Duncan took a pair of pliers and snipped off the power cord. Incredibly, he¹d had brought a soldering iron with him. So he and I took off the back of the amp and soldered the leads to the two naked wires from the vacuum cord. We ran on stage and ripped into our first song. It was freezing cold. I could see Jonathan¹s breath, and I could barely move my fingers.

How had we gotten here? Why did every gig have to be a trial? It was December, and earlier that evening we¹d been pulled over by the State Patrol for having no lights. When we¹d rented the Montego station wagon (points for style?) it was daylight, but once on the road we found that there were no lights- not even dashboard lights in our trusty boat. We tried to run in packs on the freeway not to be noticed, but we were pulled over anyway, and told forcefully by the Trooper that we WOULD fix the lights before continuing. Of course no number of fuses and bulbs replaced had any effect, and the Service Station Attendants could only smile blankly and shrug. We were mindlessly late, and decided to risk arrest and make a run for the remaining 30 miles with just hazard lights.

Halfway through the set the power had gone out after someone danced into a wall or on a cable, and a circuit breaker had tripped. The sound man had vanished, and the crowd left again. It took a while to find the fuses, and once the power was back on we played harder than ever, trying to recapture the energy which we had struggled to build up. Then the power went out again, but now because the sound man was back, and pissed off about something, and he¹d decided our set was now over.

next page