Man, what a week.

So, as most of you know, I opened up for Whitehouse on Monday, a show which I will forever call "the Whitehouse clusterfuck." Here's the story as I know it:

The previous Monday - exactly one week before the show - I get a call from Mary Staubitz, saying that I'm now opening for Whitehouse, with Psychic Paramount and Secret Diary (Mary and Jessica Rylan) also opening. (Psychic Paramount came as a package with Whitehouse.) As you can imagine, I'm pretty enthused. Apparently what happened is that the Middle East cancelled the gig because of lack of ticket sales; this is not a surprise, as nobody promoted the show - Zad (the tour agent) assumed that the Middle East would promote it, which is really a bad assumption, as I've never heard of a single venue in Boston doing any promotion, rationally assuming that it's the job of, well, the promoter. (The fact that you had to pay an extra $6 surcharge on a $15 ticket probably added to the slow sales.) So Zad sent out a frantic email to Ron at RRR, who sent it along to the various people he knows in Boston. Eventually, Ben at Honeypump takes over the show, manages the minor miracle of getting it set up at Bill's Bar on Lansdowne Street, and does as much promotion as any human can with a week's notice. Everyone else on the bill also helps out, sending out emails, hanging up flyers, etc. So far, so good.

So on the day of the show, I go out to get some random stuff at Guitar Center (short mic cords and a power supply for the SU200). When I get back, I call Mary Staubitz (who is one of many who helped set up the show) to see when I needed to get there, and she's frantic because Zad added crap to their rider via email on Friday, then announced that he'll be unreachable for the weekend. They now need two bass amps, plus a stepdown transformer to convert American AC to European AC (why they didn't simply get one in England is beyond me). It's now 4:00, so I immediately go to four different places in Harvard Square to find the transformer, eventually getting one at Radio Shack and a couple of different ones at True Value. Back at home, I ask my roommate Sam if I can borrow his bass amp; he agrees, but I have no way of transporting his monstrous bass cabinet, so I just take the head, while Jessica Rylan agrees to loan her flowery bass cab. By now I have no time to do a final practice, and Jessica is just getting off work and so can't give me a ride, so I pack up all my gear and take a cab to the venue, arriving simultaneously with Mary in her own taxi.

We're both supposed to meet some folks at a Thai restaurant at 7:30, so after a preliminary chat with the soundguy about the bass amp and transformers, we drop off our shit and book. On the way to the restaurant, Mary's stockings keep falling down, so we make a short stop in the alley so she can take them off (and I'm thinking, hope a cop doesn't pull up right now. "No, she was just taking off her stockings, officer - nothing illegal going on here." "Yeah, right, buddy. Now, let's get you down to the station to watch some films about the evils of prostitution.")

The restaurant ends up being very nice. One of the people we ate with is Lisa Carver, aka Lisa Suckdog, who's still in town after doing a reading on Halloween from her new book - said reading supposedly involved her convincing others to piss on each other, but I wasn't there so I don't know the details. She's very nice, and amusingly enough thinks we've met before even though we haven't, and I'm not about to correct her. But I'm nervous about the show so I don't talk much, plus nowadays she looks remarkably like Kirsten Malone (my friend who died in a bike accident), so I'm a little freaked out by that.

I don't exactly have a short setup time, so I leave dinner early and go back to the club at 8:30, to find out things are even more of a cluster-fuck than I thought. Zad stayed in New York, Mike (the club's booker) isn't there yet, and Ben has to work until 10:00 (to be fair, he said as much beforehand). The transformers I bought don't work (I got English plugs instead of European - not that I had a choice), so they can't run their mixer. The bass amp situation hasn't even been addressed yet. Jessica is there trying to smooth things out, and offers up Mary's mixer; Mary herself comes in a few minutes later and OK's the whole thing. I start setting up my equipment and try my best to be helpful, or barring that, to stay out of the way. While I'm setting up, I hear the Whitehouse guys bickering with the soundguy; they want a longer soundcheck, but it's already almost 9:00, and the mics for Psychic Paramount haven't even been set up yet. In Whitehouse's defense, I can attest to the soundguy being a bit of a prick about things - during our short conversation, I told him I was going to get mic feedback through my equipment and not to worry about it, and he was very interested in telling me exactly how much it would cost to get the monitors re-coned.

But eventually Whitehouse did get a soundcheck, the Psychic Paramount guys got everything set up, and everything ended up working out. Neither me nor Secret Diary got a level check, but we really don't need one, so no big deal.

Secret Diary went first, and did a very good set. Jessica actually yelled into her mic a bit, and her synth-pops went pretty well with Mary's wall of sound and feedback from her dildo-shaped microphone.

I went second, after a short level check, where I managed to confuse the soundguy by giving a thumbs up when things were OK (in soundman parlance, "thumbs up" means "more in the monitors"). I kidded around with the audience a bit, accepted money to throw my vest into the crowd, but throwing it back when they asked me to doff the cop hat. The first song was merely OK, and Deb later yelled at me for saying "that sucked" on stage. The next one I did was "Creep," and about halfway through I realised I hadn't turned up my mixer loud enough - I fixed it, but if it sounded crappy, don't blame the soundguy. I thought I was out of time, but people yelled for more, so (after the soundguy turned the sound back on) I did another bit of harsh noise. It turns out that I didn't play nearly as long as I thought; after I packed up all my stuff and shoved it off to the side, it was still only about 10:40.

Psychic Paramount went on next. This is a three-piece experimental rock band; the two string-slingers were in Laddio Bollocko, Dazzling Killmen, and had a brief stint in Panicsville, and the drummer is in Sabers. Their first five minutes or so were pretty good - guitars and bass doing nothing but noise while the drummer thudded away - but after that it wandered a bit into guitar-noodling. Some people liked them, but many in the audience didn't (Kate from Twisted Village was especially snarky). I went out to have a smoke, noting that they're becoming the most hated band in Boston. Personally I would've enjoyed them immensely had they been on any other bill, and among my friends this seemed to be the general consensus. They also played for about an hour, which was definitely too long.

So now it's a little after midnight, and I hear a rumor that Whitehouse doesn't want to play. I ask Jessica, who tells me "We're working on it." A few minutes later, they both come back and go up to the stage, so I think everything's OK.

Turns out it's not. Phillip Best gets up and does a lackluster set of ranting over the backing tracks of Why You Never Became A Dancer and Wriggle Like A Fucking Eel. It's loud as hell, and despite the fact that Phillip wasn't even remotely into it, it did at least sound good. Halfway through I have to go to the bathroom; expecting this to be just a warm-up for Whitehouse proper, I have a smoke with Jon Whitney (and get into an argument about who usually sang vocals in Whitehouse - for the record, I'm right). While I'm out there, Phillip comes storming out with a smoke. "Hey, that's not it, is it?" I ask.

But it was. Bennett never does get on stage. Instead, he just hangs out at the bar next to the stage, watching Phillip's performance and hitting on Mary.

My own theory: I have never seen William Bennett's pussy, nor do I have any firsthand knowledge that it "hurt," but that's my working hypothesis.

One other thing. Everyone had to wait an hour after the show for the club to give Ben the payout; I got a little bit of money, as did Secret Diary. About five minutes after Ben left, one of the guys from Psychic Paramount came up to me, saying they didn't get paid yet, angry at Ben and asking if I had his cell phone number. I told them: "I'm just guessing, but I think the money Ben gave to Whitehouse was for the package - you and them. I'd talk to Bennett about it." (I later emailed Ben, and he said this was in fact the case.) I don't know if they ever did talk to Bennett, but they were still complaining about not getting paid as they were getting in their van to go back to New York.

Well, whatever. I can't really complain: I got to play a good set in front of a lot of people, I sold some picture discs (thanks largely to Deb), and I got paid - not a lot, but enough, and I was expecting not to get paid at all due to Whitehouse's large fee. (Had they actually played, I would've told Ben to just give my cut to them - but not after this, no way.) Frankly, I and everyone else just ended up looking better by comparison.

And the people who they hurt the most was themselves. I've heard lots of people say they're now selling their CD's, and who won't go and see them if they ever come back. They're supposed to be back in the States in March - yeah, good luck with that, since everyone who's ever heard of you in New England was in the audience that night, and will now never touch you with a ten-foot pole. Good job not compromising, dumbass.

Incidentally, I still have a great deal of personal respect for Phillip Best - he was even kind enough to help me load out my equipment when Jessica dropped me off back home. I'm genuinely sorry that Bennett made him look like such a fool.

And I was able to return the transformers, thankfully.

Note: I edited this entry, removing some stuff Philip said. It was "off the record," and I probably shouldn't have included it in the first place. Also, with the benefit of time, my negative opinion of Bennett has softened considerably. But I'm still going to leave my own words unedited, just because I dislike historical revisionism. Consider it the rant of someone who was a little too pissed off for his own good.

Last night was also sort of an interesting clusterfuck.

I went out to see some bands at Great Scott (Go Go Go Airheart and some other band that I can't remember), and ended up taking a cab back at 2:00 in the morning. As soon as I get home, the phone rings. This turns out to be Mary, who's been calling me and Deb all evening. She frantically tells me that she needs me to come to Brookline with $40 so she can be bailed out of jail.

I write down the address, withdraw money, and take another cab back the way I came. When I get there, I ask the cop at the front desk about her: "Oh, I guess she's calling everyone tonight, eh?" As it turns out, Deb got one of her messages, then went down there herself with the bail money - so essentially I went down there for nothing. I left Mary a note, made sure there was nothing more I could do, then had the cop call me another cab back home.

As to why Mary got arrested, I'll let her tell the tale:

So it's 7 AM and I just got home from JAIL. I got pulled over back around August for driving w/o a license, got arrested, had to go through all this court shit, went to the DMV to see what I had to do to get my license back, and i just needed to get this one piece of paper of clearance from New Hampshire. So I call this woman in NH, call her again, call her again.. she can't find my paperwork since the outstanding violation was from 1994, and I get sick of calling her after two months and just give up and figure I'll start bothering her again when I actually need my license.

 

I have NOT been behind the wheel of a car since that arrest. Then Jon asks me to drive his car home from the club because he's leaving with Gogogo Airheart to go to Providence. I think that the lights are on, apparently they're not, a Brookline (!!!) cop pulls me over, I explain all this shit to them and they arrest me anyway, the cop is a dick who says "I find that hard to believe" when I tell him this is the first time I've driven since I got arrested in August. Thank GOD I had left my pot and my pipe at home. I make all these frantic calls from the station begging someone to bail me out because they're telling me that since it's a holiday weekend, if someone doesn't come get me out now I'll be there for three days. So now I have to trudge out to WATERTOWN to pay more money to a tow yard to get Jon's fucking Mercedes out of there, I have to go to court on Monday, and now I'm going to have a much more difficult time getting my license back because of the second violation - if that fucking lady had just faxed me the letter I needed I wouldn't have any of these problems.

So there you have it. It was cold in jail and I had funny dreams. At least I slept for a bit.

But there's more to the story. After I took another cab back, I got back to the apartment and realized I forgot my keys. Neither of my roommates use the land line anymore, and the phone is the "doorbell," so after a fruitless half hour of repeatedly dialing our apartment from the lobby (with a short break to have a smoke and urinate in a corner of the courtyard) I go round to the back of the building where our apartment is, and start digging through the trash to find stuff to throw at Matt's window. My aim with a plastic bottle is terrible so I don't hit his window, but a wandering drunkard who was taller than me manages to hit it square on, so I did at least get back in, waking everyone up in the process.

To reward myself, I stayed up eating nachos and watched Day of the Dead, which turns out to be a pretty bad movie.