So, I recently played a show with my band*, Cracktion, here in San Francisco. It was at a divey little place in the Polk Gulch called Kimo's. I played 'lead' guitar, and the set of 7 songs came in at about 27 minutes long. Not a whole lot of opportunity for me to get off a lot of Guitar Heroics in those 27 minutes, but I did get to knock out a couple of solos and some cool rambling.
This whole band thing just sort of gelled out of a Friday Night jam session I've been attending at work for some time now. The 'practice space' is really just an elevated empty space that my creative director was storing his drums in; someone would go up there and hammer out a beat now and again, and that was about it. But slowly people started to bring other instruments and equipment and leave it up there. At one point there was so much stuff up there that it had to be moved around and organized to allow people to still fit in the space while they were playing. There was a time when an art director I work with was playing pretty regularly with some old friends of his up there, but they both had babies at the same time and that whole thing kind of petered off.
I'm not sure exactly when things got going again up there, but there was a time when a few of us would hang out, share a few beers and make some bad music together. It was low-key, sloppy, and fun. Then someone signed us up for a 'Battle of the Bands' and things kicked into gear.
We were utterly unprepared. In a panic, we all started practicing like mad, asking everyone in the agency if they could play any instruments, and assembling a modest set list for the show. Fast forward two months and we had seven people in the band and a four-song set together. The show came, we played our set, the show went. Good times.
Perhaps more out of habit than anything else, five of us from that band continued to get together on Fridays and refine the set. We added a couple of songs and had a good time with it. One of us made the comment that, "...we only really get serious when we have a show to get ready for," so I booked the show at Kimo's.
And that show rocked ass. We'd expanded the set to seven songs (well, more like ten, but we cut a few that we were less fond of for the show), and got costumes together. We even had a smoke machine there, though we forgot to use it. The show's bill was eclectic, the crowd was enthusiastic, and the house was jumping. The booking agent said it was the best Thursday night crowd the joint had had all year, and offered use another gig at a different club.
So, we'll see how things progress.
*To be perfectly clear, I play guitar in this band. It's not my band, as such.
