I had to wait a few days before I was able to make this post. I almost posted on a nightly basis through the festival, but I was too drunk whenever I would get home, and didn't want to say anything I might regret (not that anything I had to say was negative- I just didn't want to sound like a fifteen year old fanboy).
When Suday came around, I crashed hard. I was hungover a little, but mostly exhausted. We had been preparing ourselves for our showcase for a month, and the week before we promoted like men posessed- hanging and passing out flyers, spending hours putting together promotional disks, and talking to every kid we could over at the University of Cincinnati.
We played Thursday night at Crush above Carol's on Main. We couldn't fit the six of us onto the little stage, so Darin and I stood in front of it. All of our hard work paid off in spades, with an amazing crowd showing up to cheer us on. We were too nervous to talk, so we ran a lot of the songs into each other with feedback and noise in between, finishing our 45 minute set in 30 minutes. It ended with a reprise of "Liquor Man" while I danced and pogoed into the audience with Misty (from the Newbees) and knocked my microphone over. Misty said, "Don't quit, you still have fifteen minutes!" to which I replied, "But, those were all the songs we know!"
The rest of the festival was pretty mindblowing as well, full of drunken wanderings from bar to bar to bar, seeing band after band after band. I even met Art Alexakis from Everclear while he was meandering between venues. My friend Jess asked him, "What band are you in?" He told her it was Everclear, and she said, "Sorry about your luck." Funny stuff, but for the record, Sparkle and Fade rarely left my CD player when I was seventeen through nineteen.
I stuck pretty close to the itenerary I posted here and no bands disapointed. My good friends, The Newbees, were my favorite act on Thursday, inspiring Jason and I to walk around singing their song, "Mary," all night.
Tristen Shields had a great set on Friday, and Spectacular Fantastic turned me into the drunken fanboy I fear of becoming as I stood in front of the stage and sang along with every song (even the ones I don't know). Hilltop Distillery was my second favorite of the night, sucking me into their indie-rock-jam-band sound (the bass line at the end of "Roads" is fucking cool as hell).
Saturday my nerves were finally back to a semi-normal kind of state, and I was drunk and hopped up on Red Bull by nine o'clock, ranting and raving to some band from L.A. about how they had to see Chalk.
The Minni-Thins (minus Damon, who was taking pictures) were invited to climb on stage with Black Bear and sing along as the band's chorus. We sat on the big couch that wraps around the back of the Crush stage with members of Sleepybird, Eric from the New Machines, and Tristen Shields. At one point (again, I was really drunk), I thought it would be a good idea to bang together beer bottles as percussion, and after a few moments, the one in my right hand exploded. I put the remaining shards down, found myself uninjured, and commenced with clapping instead of banging.
Other highlights from night three turned out to be the frenetic, frantic, disjointed, and hillarious set by Coltrane Motion and the insanely cool Campfire Crush. Staggering Statistics were not on my itenerary, but luckily Mike from Spec Fan talked me into catching their last few songs. They did not disapoint!
Afterwards, Darin and I made it over to catch the Ass Ponys last couple of songs (and subsequent encore). We found the rest of our band as well as The Newbees and Beth from Lovely Crash there, and it was a great way to finish out the festival.
Thank you to Yara for all the promotional help, everyone at MidPoint for putting together such an amazing weekend, the Thursday night Crush crowd, and everyone who talked to us, hugged us, shook our hands, yelled at us from across the street, and/or invited us to play a show with them. By the end of Saturday night, we were all walking around with our chests puffed out; a set of regular egomaniacs (speaking of which, let us know if you have any pictures so we can post them here on the site).
I can barely wait for next year!
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