Still Oz reunion!

Actually, I shouldn’t call it a reunion because this was actually the first time that my band got to play a full set together. John V left for Singapore last January, and back then, we still didn’t have a bassist (well, we had John Q splitting his keyboard so that one half of it played bass notes while the other was a regular keyboard). John Q hasn’t really been able to play a lot of keyboards due to his tendonitis, but his wrist seems to have healed well enough for him to play at least one full set now.

So finally, last November 13, the whole band got to play as a whole band: Bunky on guitar, Cholo on drums, John Q on keyboards, John V on sax, Oz on violin, Sep on bass, and of course myself on vocals. Imagine that, seven people in a band. Haha, we might as well be an orchestra! But well with us it’s all about enjoying playing together and enjoying the music we play, so even if that means that our talent fee gets split into 7 (not to mention the manager’s fee going to Dex), we don’t really care.

The gig was held in the Edsa Central parking lot, and we played only one set, although this was kind of an audition for something and as such we didn’t get paid for it. But we hadn’t played in almost two months due to busy and conflicting skeds (our last gig was the one in Breakfast, which btw was also for free), and our next gig won’t be until December 9. Plus, we would be complete for the first time, ever. So we decided it would be great to play, even if it was for free and just one set.

Once we got there, though, we almost backed out at the last minute because the other band playing was a showband and we realized that that was so not our crowd. But we decided we were there already so we might as well play.

We changed the sequence of our set just so that we get the audience to pay attention to us from the get-go. So this is how our set looked like: With or without you, #41, Knockin’ on heaven’s door, Grey Street, All I want is you, Where the streets have no name, All along the watchtower, and Ants Marching. We sorted it out that way so that the unfamiliar songs would be placed between popular ones and audience interest in us wouldn’t wane.

Seems to have been a good idea as the audience started cheering once they realized we were playing the intro to “With or without you.” The coolest thing was, even for the songs that they didn’t really know (pretty much all the DMB ones), they were still banging their heads and cheering. It was also great that the audience seemed to figure out our genre as we got requests to do other 80s and 90s rock songs.

By the time we were done, we had put together a pretty decent set. Probably the best set that we played after not playing for a long time (normally, if we haven’t practiced or gigged together in about a month, our first gig is crap, but this one we pulled off pretty well. John V also brought his videocam and Dex got us on tape.

Next stop: Racks El Pueblo, 10pm on December 9!