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2004-06-03 - 3:33 p.m.
now that's powerful music, man!
If you missed Zuul on the radio, it’s archived on the WMUC site until probably next Sunday, in the form of an mp3 of the whole hour we were on. It’s a big file, but the Zuul set starts 3 or 4 minutes in, and we’re either playing or being interviewed for about two-thirds of the hour. You can either download the file directly from here or you can go to this page, and download the “Third_Rail_Radio_2000.mp3” file. There was a feeling for a while there that it wasn’t gonna happen, but we pulled through, and it came out well. After the show at the Sidebar, we had three weeks to prepare for the radio show. Sean and I had exams so we didn’t worry about band practice for that first week or so. But then it started to get down to crunch time and we only had a week til the performance, and we planned to play a certain night, but Sean had his phone off, so the rest of us were calling and leaving him voicemails the whole weekend and he never got back to us until the next day. It really pissed me off, and then the next night we tried to practice, he nixed that because he wanted to go to a show and socialize. So it got down to the wire and our last opportunity to practice was on Saturday, the day before the radio thing. So I was pretty stressed about us getting it together. I figured that we could just do the same set we did at the Sidebar minus the 2 covers, leaving us with 7 originals, and a good 20 minute set. But the other guys in the band decided that playing a punchier, more consistent set was more important than playing a set of a substantial length, so they vetoed a couple of our more downtempo numbers. They wanted to slim down the set even further, but I campaigned to keep the remaining songs, just because I wanted to go to the trouble of going down there and playing for more than 10 minutes. Plus I knew that usually when bands go on there, they play for 20-30 minutes, so we were already pushing it by coming up on the lower end of that spectrum. We always have bull sessions during practices where we write goofy songs and then joke about playing them live but never do. So in the course of the practice, we ended up improvising this weird Creed/Scorpions-type power ballad about rocking this town in every possible way on every day of the week. It was really ridiculous. And somehow, it was decided that that would be the first song we’d play on the radio. So that brought our set up to 6 songs. We ran through the set once, and it was rusty but not bad. It was still pretty early in the day, so I thought we’d run through it again, but the guys decided to call it a day and hope everything would work out the next day. So we packed up our stuff and made plans for meeting up before heading to College Park. So on Sunday afternoon, it was getting to around the time that we were all supposed to go meet up at Mike’s house in Laurel. Then Mike heard from Nick, and apparently Sean had broken or sprained his foot or something, and suddenly we weren’t sure if we’d be able to play, but we also weren’t sure if this was all a joke. If you recall, before the Sidebar show, Sean had told me on the phone that he’d broken his finger, but that was just a wacky prank. So I wasn’t totally buying it. But it turned out that he was telling the truth this time, when we finally saw Sean, he was rewally limping. And in fact blamed me, because he’d stepped on one of my drum sticks in the practice space, and when he woke up the next morning, it hurt so bad he could barely stand on it. But by that point I was so tired of his shenanigans that I just had to laugh at him and appreciate the karma coming back to him. The situation with the show was that Third Rail Radio is a show on U of Maryland’s campus radio station that has bands, mostly local, come on and play a live set and do an interview to plug their shows and whatnot. Our friend Chris hosted the show for the past year or two, and a couple times I’d tipped off friends and friends of friends to it to go on there with their bands and play and they’d had good experiences, but I’d never done it myself, although one time a couple months ago Mat and I stopped by to see his friend Eric’s band play on there. Chris graduated this semester, so he’s not working at the station anymore, but he still managed to help us get on the show, and even came back to help out for this one show. It’s a 3-hour show, and they usually have 2 or 3 bands on each week, so there was one other band playing that night. And we were told to get there at 5pm, an hour before the show started, to be the first band on. But of course, while Mike and I were running on time, Sean and Nick didn’t meet us at Mike’s house until about 6, so by the time we got there, the other band was about to play, and we hung around and waited for them to finish. We finally went on the air around 8pm, and we were ready to rock. We got through the first 3 songs of our set, including the new power ballad, and then in the middle of the 3rd one, Sean broke a string. So the DJs took over and put on a record for a few minutes while he change the string and we got ready for the 2nd half of our set. And when we came back, we nailed the last 3 songs. Sean wanted to re-do the one song where his string broke, but I think there was some miscommunication so that didn’t happen. Oh well. A few minutes later, Nick and I went into the DJ booth with Chris and he started the on-air interview, and eventually Mike and Sean came in. You can listen to it on the mp3, it was pretty ridiculous. Sean pretended to be Romanian, I said “poop” on the air (twice!), Nick read a story from Yahoo news about a man killing himself after being caught having sex with a hen. And when we couldn’t get any listeners to call in, Mike took his cellphone outside and called in. But as soon as we picked up the line, we dropped the mic on the speakerphone button and it hung up on him, which had the most perfectly hilarious timing ever. It was just insanity. By the time we packed up and left the station, they already had our set burned to CD for us, which was incredibly cool. They run a pretty tight ship over there. And we listened to the CD right away and were pleasantly surprised by how good the recording came out, soundwise. At least half of the songs came out well enough performance-wise that we should be able to use that as our demo to get shows for the time being. We’ve got another show booked at the Sidebar in July, so we’ve got a few weeks to prepare for that, and I’m hoping we can get it together and step up our practice schedule and work on some new songs and become a tighter unit. Zuul world domination is on its way. -al
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