Average Jane’s Weekend of Rock

So my band, Earthquake Jake, made it through its first two gigs this weekend.

Good things about the experience:

• Enthusiastic crowds. On Friday night, someone inquired about hiring us for a Halloween party. Spyder, Kanga and A Librarian hung out for all four sets on Saturday. Thanks, guys!
• I also appreciated my sister, Zen Zone Chick, coming out and bringing one of her neighbors even though she was sick. Hope you can stay longer next time!
• The band sounded pretty darned good. There were a few minor mistakes, but no trainwrecks. In general, I was impressed with how tight we sounded considering that we've only had our current bass player for a few weeks.
• I learned how to set up the PA and lights by myself.
• Money!

Less-than-good things:

• The crowds were smaller than I would have liked. That was partly
  because the bars in question were a good 30 minutes outside of town.
  Still, I invited well over 100 people and it would have been nice to
  have seen more than four of them.
• I'd forgotten how unpleasant it is to play all evening in a bar where people smoke. All my carpeted speaker cabinets smell nasty now.
• The smoke plus my cold or allergies (or whatever it is I have) started to affect my voice by about the third set each night. On Friday night, we had to skip "Famous" by Puddle of Mudd at the beginning of the fourth set because it's really high and I didn't think I could hit the notes.
• We weren't able to use our full PA because either the crossover wasn't working or we didn't know what we were doing when we tried to hook up the sub. We'll have to get that figured out between now and the next gig.
• On Friday afternoon, I spent $96 on speaker cables alone. At $100 per night, it's going to take me months just to break even.

We're taking break from band practice this week, but we'll want to learn another four or five songs fairly soon to beef up the sets. A couple of them were a bit short of the ideal 45 minutes, even though they each contained ten or eleven songs.

It was really a lot of fun to get to perform again. I'm looking forward to booking more gigs – closer to town, ideally – and keeping the band busy until the weather gets bad. Now I just need a better rock wardrobe…