Our thoughts: Spyder Room (Manchester NH)

June 14, 2006

w/Adria, Fallow & Duke

I’ll be quite frank: this gig was a bitch to book. Despite our not-too-shabby resume, it seems that many “promoters” in that whole Northeast Mass/Southern NH are not all that on-the-ball. I sent demo after demo, called and emailed when and where told, and for the most part I didn’t even get responses. At least they could have given me a “we hate you – go away”, and thus saved me a lot of time. That being said, rumor had it that the Spyder Room was the good joint in the area to play at, but getting them to even acknowledge our existence was a chore. (We later found out that they went through a string of these lazy-ass “promoters” just when we were trying to contact them.) Eventually we got dumped into the lap of Amy from TNA Productions, and in show of professionalism rare for that area she gave us a slot, admittedly on a wednesday night with Adria, Fallow and Duke. Since we’re not local the best we could contribute to the promo effort was to mail some flyers to the club and ask the staff to hang them (Imagine my shock when we arrived at the club to find our flyers actually hanging on the walls!)

So the club was nice and clean with a small kitchen and a nice, friendly staff and a decent looking PA. Adam from Mongrel and former Eternal Embrace drummer Mike and his gal Deb showed up to support us, and boy did that feel good, considering the only other people watching were the bar staff and the members of Duke. (Some ditzy-looking chicks were there right when we started and I knew they wouldn’t last past the first chorus. Some people wear their shallowness on their sleeve and these gals were no exception – sure enough, they split about 8 measures in.) The soundman tried really hard but seemed pretty inexperienced – the drums kept leaking into one of the keyboard channels with a nasty distortion and I couldn’t make him understand that such things happen when you never untangle the mic cables – it’s called crosstalk. On top of that, he couldn’t get the vocals into the monitors at a listen-able level. The guy needs either a feedback destroyer or lesson in ringing out the monitors. Anyway, our set went down pro as usual, but turnout was disappointing. As we packed up Duke played, and they were an extremely polished, tight pop group with excellent vocal harmonies and songs that were so “uplifting” that we suspected them to be Christian Rock. One of these uplifting ditties sounded a lot like “I Remember You” by Skid Row, although these guys were probably 5 years old when that song came out. Go figure. Since we had a long drive back to Maine, we boogied and missed the other bands. Oh well, it’s not like they showed up early to support us.