Reverence 2009
Reverence has now come and gone. And as usual, it was a crazy fun time. Lots of great performances by a lot of great bands – I was particularly impressed by The Dark Clan, The Atomica Project, and Alter Der Ruine.
Our performance was, I think, one of our better ones. We were beset with some technical problems, though. During soundcheck, our illustrious soundguy Adam offered me the use of a condenser mic, instead of my trusty 58Beta. I took him up on the offer, despite never having tried our setup with phantom power or anything like that. So naturally, during the first song, the mic cuts out. D’oh. I switched over to a regular 58 on a different line and did the rest of the show that way. Which was fine, but meant that I couldn’t record the gig as I’d hoped, and it also meant that all my cool vocal effects were now gone. Ach, well, they’re just ornaments.
We had some shenanigans prepped for this set. We unveiled an electro cover of Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” (from his 2005 self-titled release…but better known as the theme to “True Blood”) which went over well. As our second-to-last track, and as a celebration of the 5th anniversary of our first Reverence shenanigans, we Dan got onstage to sing “Lestat in Punjab”, the ND-assisted sequel to “Lestat in Cuba.” I played the dhol, Elizabeth played the chimta (the “salad tongs of doom”), Dan sang, Lane assisted, and it was all sorts of fun. The crowd ate it up. I’m no great dholi, so I had a very sore shoulder on Sunday morning. I also got chunks of the crowd to sing along with “Blow My Mind”, which was fun. An easy hook in the chorus makes that possible. And Ryans Bannen & Parks always know the words.
We also had some great, albeit hot and occasionally blinding, lighting. Made for some great pictures.
I drank a lot of water after we got offstage, and spent a lot of time slobbed out on a bench in the back or outside in the cool air recovering. Got some nice complements – apparently we even made a Panjabi girl cry (which, she insisted, was in a good, nostalgic way).
Overall it was great fun. Well-managed time-wise, the setup and teardown was efficient and easy, sound was good, everybody from the other bands were friendly and having fun too, the incomparable Lisa Q sold merch, and Matt Fanale had a big grin plastered on his face all night. It was all sorts of awesome.
