I don't know if you've ever been in a band, but if you have, you might understand my thinking that playing in a band teaches you how to forget about high expectations really, really fast. I learned this lesson when I joined as a drummer in an indie rock band my senior year of high school with my closest friends. I would like to share one of my favorite experiences with you, and what I learned from it.
Following graduation and a year with the Night Shines, our semi-frontman Dillon (we could never really tell who was the frontman) went to study chemistry at Berry College in Rome, Georgia. That fall, we were invited to play Marthapalooza which is a rather huge celebration named after the school's founder, Martha Berry.
If you could have seen our excitement, you would have thought we misunderstood the gig's name as 'Lollapalooza.' We were told the entire campus would be present on the big lawn next to Ford Hall ' which was imagined as a toned-down Great Lawn of Central Park. And based on Dillon's previous concert experiences at Berry, the stage setup would actually be comparable to a music festival. I mean... we're talking trusses with lights hanging from them.
Dillon drove up to Cleveland the weekend before, and we spent what seemed like an eternity practicing our jams late into the night. At this point, the tension was peaking. Grant's bass was too loud. I was playing off beat. Dillon's keyboard wasn't playing through the system. Boaz was getting 'hangry.' Really messed-up things were happening... but we had to do it. We were asked to play a 50-minute set. And a 50-minute set they would get.
The event weekend came. Grant, Boaz and I spent three hours determined to pack every single piece of gear into my dad's mini-van, which was dubbed 'The White Whale.' We, of course, still had to fit in it too. So, naturally, the bassist was stuck in the middle row holding my floor tom for our 2-hour drive to Rome.
After a couple of fast food stops and the White Whale slipping out of gear a few times, we arrived and convened with Dillon on campus. It was Friday evening, and our headlining performance wasn't starting until 10 p.m. the following night. Needless to say, we had time to kill.
We rehearsed unplugged in Dillon's dorm room, ran around the campus at night chasing ghosts, ate a lot of bad food and quoted the Office and Seinfeld more times than we would care to admit. We also got to witness a strange Berry tradition where students walked up and down a hill dropping pennies in a bucket. (Feel free to explain that one to me in the comments if you know about it.)
Finally, show time was nigh. We drove the White Whale across the lawn to get our gear set up. What we found was a little different from our expectations.
The lawn, while it was massive, had multiple large carnival rides along the edge. Two football fields across the lawn ' far from all the fun stuff where the students would be ' sat the stage. Alone.
The stage did not have trusses. It didn't even have a sound system set up. Sitting next to a group of confused college students holding XLR cables was what appeared to be a collection of wooden squares sitting on a few stacks of cinderblocks. This was, what one event coordinator told us, our stage.
We let ourselves be shocked for a moment but then we hopped in and helped. A few hours later, our time came to play. We climbed up on the swaying stage that buckled underneath our gear, and in front of 25 people in 50 degree weather, we played our 50 minutes. Guitars went out of tune every few seconds. My drums lacked the Killers or U2 echo that I was dreaming of, and instead sounded more like corn kernels popping in a microwave.
And you know what? It was one of my favorite memories of being a band. We drove 120 miles without receiving as much as a dinner, and because three of us were non-Berry students, we were actually charged for entering Marthapalooza to play. But none of that mattered.
In retrospect, I realize that it was the journey to that show that made the memory. The laughs that were shared. The exhaustion we endured together. The bickering that occurred in our White Whale excursions. Now at my age, I'm now so focused on getting to point B that I can forget to look at what happens between point A and B. And expectations? Those can leave us disappointed and let seemingly not-so-great times be, in fact, amazing times.
