They don't make gigs like this everyday (part I)

Last Saturday, my band Still Oz played what is now considered to be our best gig ever!!!

Almost a week after we performed, everyone in the band is still on a natural high from it. I just remember, while performing, there was one distracting thought in my head - that I wished my family and friends were there to witness that performance. After each song of the second set, everyone in the band just kept looking at each other with disbelief, almost like we couldn't believe how well we were playing.

But the clincher was the audience response. We were playing in 90proof as part of its 2nd year anniversary. 90proof is a resto bar. And normally, when you are in a resto bar, you spend your time talking to the people you are with and drinking beer, only giving cursory applause to the band playing after each song (sometimes not even). But that night, during that second set - EVERYONE was watching us. It was almost like it was a concert. Our concert. And it felt unbelievable!

There were a couple of bad omens actually that gave us the feeling things wouldn't go all that well. Cholo couldn't play with us because of an exam. Also, the night before the gig, I hung out with my office friends because it was Pia's birthday, and we sang for 5 hours, from 930pm to 230am, in IO. I promised myself I wouldn't sing a lot that night, but when I got there, well guess what? I couldn't stop singing, even when I wasn't holding the mic (not surprising, really). Needless to say, my voice was clearly strained the next day. It was sufficiently hoarse that my band agreed NOT to do our U2 medley of "All I want is you-Where the Streets have no name" because that is one of the most taxing song combo that we do. We planned to play "All I want is you" in the first set and "Where the streets have no name" in the second.

When we got to 90proof, I started feeling jittery since that was the first time we were to play there and I wasn't sure how well my voice would hold up. Add to that the fact that there seemed to be a new TV show that would be shooting our first song and maybe part of our 2nd (the camera was actually about 2-3 feet away from my face and pointed directly at me). Our first set was going to be a bit laidback, so I decided I would sit while we were performing. We did a sound check, then I took a deep breath and we kicked off our first set.

We played "Counting Blue Cars" by Dishwalla first, to try and start off laidback and get the band in a playing groove. We are technically clean when playing this song, and it's a good song for me to open up my vocal chords with. We followed it up with Matchbox 20's "3am" which is another cool but laidback song, then performed our first of five U2 songs that night - "Stuck in a moment you can't get out of." The crowd sort of sang along with us for the chorus of "Stuck..." and we played every song very well, but for the most part, the crowd wasn't responding too much (since those songs, as I said, were all quite laidback).

Now since Oz and Bunky draw their energy from crowd support, there was some desperation in the atmosphere after the lukewarm reception to our first 3 songs. Oz said we needed to throw in a DMB (Dave Matthews Band) song to shift gears, but we didn't really have anything we could put in at that time. Instead, we decided to drop "Yellow" by Coldplay, another cool laidback song, and jump straight into "Anti-gravity" by Incubus which was a bit more loud and would hopefully get the crowd going a bit more. Ack, bad move! That was our only bad song that night, and I think it might have been because we were distracted. We still hung tight though, and I just kept thinking - we are following this up with "All I want is you" by U2 so we can still turn things around before we end our first set.

Now remember how I had a hoarse voice earlier that day due to singing too much the night before? Somewhere during "Stuck..." I realized that for some reason the strain in my voice while singing had disappeared. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or all the hot tea and mints I had that day. Whatever it was, when I hit the high notes of "All I want is you" I didn't feel as much strain on my voice as I normally do when singing that song.

The thing now was that the host and crew of that TV show shooting us earlier in the evening started cheering like crazy when I started belting out those high notes. And it seems everyone took their cue from those guys as now the whole crowd was getting a bit wild.

But that wasn't the defining moment. When I realized my voice was on top of its form that night, I quickly looked back at the band during instrumental and said "Let's do our U2 medley!" So I start hitting those high notes again, then I held that last high note without strain and longer than I have ever been able to hold it, and by the time I stopped, Bunky had started playing the chords of "Where the streets have no name." The crowd interest in us had definitely gone up.

The fantastic thing about our performance of "Where the streets.." what that we didn't practice it that day and we didn't talk about how we would play it either. But at the very last minute, Bunky, Sep, Oz and Mano decided to play a version of that song that they had practiced once and that we played once in Ponti. I picked up on it and started singing one of Bono's live versions of it. By the time we were done with the song, the crowd was definitely applauding a lot more loudly and were more involved and appreciative.

We capped off the first set with our first DMB song for the night, #41, and by the time Oz started mesmerizing the audience with his violin-playing, we knew that we were on to something special.

After that set, we were all going crazy. I recall telling everyone else, how the heck are we going to top that? We normally play that U2 medley towards the end of our last set but now we've tossed out our trump card too early. I was worried. But at the same time pleased at how well we played that first set. Save for "Anti-gravity," we played every song very well, crowd reaction notwithstanding, and it was by far the best first set we've played in a long while (or maybe ever).

(Stay tuned for details on how the second set went! This post is already too long! hehehe)