It was colder this January than any I can remember for a long time. But by the 8th, it was still warm enough for me to stand around outside of Maxwell's in my black interview suit. No coat. I found myself doing this often throughout the course of the evening. Alone as well, despite plenty of decent people I could have been social with. And that night I thought about this a lot, trying to understand myself and this quest for solitude in the midst of a crowded evening where for a long time coming I'd purposefully made myself the center of attention. Like a bad joke on myself, I guess. But there was no bad feeling.

Weeks before the show, Joe of Plug Spark Sanjay and I made a pact. We'd go for a sell out. We didn't exchange blood on it, but he did promise (or was it dare?) Todd Abramson, club proprietor. Close enough. I knew that with three locals on a Saturday night in Hoboken bodies were going to count. You'd think at this point in our assorted careers we'd all be sick to death of worrying about this sort of thing, and I suppose we are. But sometimes when you set up a challenge like selling out Maxwell's without a national act, the task takes on a different feeling. It gets to be a bit exciting, and you test yourself, your faith in all the previous months or years of legwork in nurturing a following and supporting a scene, and your ability to deal with the tension that accompanies the wait between sound check and the opening act.

Dinner at Maxwell's is one always of the highlights of my evening, when I can remember to make time to eat before the show. How many damn clubs feed bands anymore? I know none. The food is fine, but it's not the food. It's the hospitality. It's one of the last places that seem to actually treat bands with an ounce of respect. Once upon a time, being in a band was a respectable thing to do. It took some courage, even. Today for many it's fad like any other, I suppose. It's as safe as khakis. So being in a band distinguishes you about as much as being in college. And everyone thinks that their band is special, don't they?

Like a good grade school teacher, I tell myself to feel special anyway. We played and my eyes were open. The people had filled the room and were all staring at us, sometimes moving around and sometimes singing along. The only observer thought I remember is, "How the hell do they know the words?" Contact. Suddenly I had that once and again feeling of being inside something infinite. The truest live feeling there is. The reach back into the collective unconscious from the dawn of time. Like fucking; the feeling is as much a part of you as breathing and as good a reason to live as any.

And while Joe and I fell a bit short of our mark of a sell out, we did enjoy a very full club for the better part of the evening. It seemed Todd was pleased enough, and still had the opportunity to rip on the boys of Plug Spark Sanjay, who for a variety of reasons, deserve a good ribbing at just about any opportunity there is. If you don't know them, you must go see them and then you will understand. It's worth it.

I am trying to find some way to wrap up this thought. Tonight it's this. For every single day I get out of bed and do what I do, whether I want to or not, and especially for those days when I can't remember the reason any more, there is one show, or one moment, or one memory that belongs to me that is so provocative there's no choice but to...

In case you hadn't noticed, the mechanics have not shown face in public for quite some time. There was a reason for this. You see, we are desperate to complete a new project for the ambiguous city urban development series. We are trying to make a new recording of our unreleased material, to be split on a compact disc with Land Speed Record! of Baltimore. We're still working on it, and far behind at this point. As you will see in the entry that follows, we scheduled a launch with them from our home port for 031100 which we thought would be to promote the record. Well, we're late.

Benny of Aviso Hara invited us to play with his other band, Clydesdale, at the Brighton Bar in Long Branch on the eve before the Court Tavern. We said, "Sure." It'd been so long since we'd played out, and wanted to check out Benny's "other" band.

We are almost always too early to clubs like this. We get there, what we think is 15 minutes late, to a bar empty, save the few committed drunks stinking the place up. We unload. We wait. The first band, whose name escapes me, was a youngish hard-core-ish gap/mtv looking band with a rack kit and a wireless mic for the singer. They were so...young! They had to be at least 18, but they were really, really young. That's all I can say. They were very nice and had a lot of friends (and I am thinking some parents too) there to see them. It brought me back years. I felt very old. But it was okay. We went on next!

To be honest, we were pretty bad. It was a shame too, because our last few shows had been very, very good if I do say so myself. But we made lots of stupid mistakes. Well, it had been a while — two months, actually, since we'd performed in public. We've been drilling recording material, rewriting some things. It's a different kind of work. We felt a bit amateur, but hell, we tried. We all need those humbling nights every once in a while, don't we? Gap Scatter Recovery seemed to be pretty good — I was quite distracted by that leggy boy-energy strutting all over the bar. Especially during Clydesdale. Now I know where Benny got his groove.

Next Night? Back home at the Court Tavern. Our boyz Land Speed Record! started up the night with another frantic performance. The wonderful thing about these men is their ability to use humor in the midst of such intense rocking. And another thing. I always dread bringing out of town bands into the Court Tavern, because the crowd in that bar tends to be quite selective in when and why they venture to the basement where the bands perform. This was demonstrated to LSR when they began their first song to a handful of friends while I was upstairs drumming up familiar faces to go and check them out. However, less than halfway through that first song the downstairs got warm with bodies. In fact, there were plenty, and I mean plenty of folks there checking them out. I believe they've got a bit of a following up here now. See what persistence will do?

Next was Aviso, our dear friends pulling it out for us on semi-short notice since Ex Models had their shake up last month. They were supposed to play on the bill with us, but then beloved Mike Masiello quit as bassist. Now they're searching for someone to make them whole again. So Aviso saved our asses once again. Our show redeemed us, I believe. We were much better, although I had much more vodka in me this time.

I'm getting a bit tired writing this now. It seems I've fallen short on the insights I used to have. Hmmm. It must be time to record again.

How desperate I was to feel prepared for this mission. We had been requested, a bit last minute, in order to represent Hub City as more than just another college town with a shitty little music scene. We were heralded by local supporters as a band up to the challenge of opening for national touring acts. We played directly before Juliana Hatfield and wanted to appear as though we could have jumped in the van and followed these bands across the country and Europe.

In my heart, I know we are up to that, but my nerves got the better of me at this time. See, we haven't been playing out much lately and I don't have my gigging legs in shape like I do when we are playing regularly. Right now we are in the midst of recording some new material, so we stopped booking for a while and have only played a few shows that were offered to us. We finally bit the bullet and invested in some decent recording gear of our own, so enough stalling on throughput. You can now officially expect more out of us in the way of steady releases. That goes for the Baltimore contingent, who I must thank for kicking our asses hard about this since the summer. You can expect brand new product from us and our dear pals Land Speed Record on a split cd this summer, courtesy of Mike Hilton (a la Scott Farkus Affair) and his label amBiguous city records.

But back to the show. It was very much one of these typical pre-show frenzies, where you rush to get to the show on time, and then sit around for 4 hours until all of a sudden everyone is rushing you around again to get all your gear up on stage, set up, hurry and finish the set already, hurry and get your shit off stage, thanks. That's about how it went.

I admit, I made some really embarrassing mistakes. First of all, when tuning for my all time favorite song "Red Down the Middle," I couldn't see the little "sharp" light on my fancy Boss floor tuner, and tuned to D# instead of D. I began singing the song thinking, "oh shit — am I tuned right???" and got my answer when Alex came in. I tried to finesse it by dropping out the vox and re-tuning, which was pretty disastrous. Forgot where I was in the song, then forgot the words. I never got my groove back after that. My confidence was shot and I held back on my vocals for the rest of the show. They sounded quite unpracticed, novice. At least to me. I thought, "Well, at least the people who know us know we're better than this, and the people who don't probably won't know the difference. At least no one from Ween or Juliana Hatfield are anywhere around to hear this." Then I looked over towards Alex and just beyond him, in Ween's sound truck on the side of the stage, I see Mickey standing there hanging out with Kirk Miller (their soundman, and our friendly soundman at the Court Tavern.) Oh Jesus. Oh well...

Enough about that. Juliana Hatfield was wonderful. Just her voice and guitar. Too bad I'm not all that into that chick-folk stuff, because she was very, very good. Problem is, I get bored after the first ten minutes. It's very pretty, but pretty doesn't hold me long enough. I wandered and tried to forget my humiliation.

Ween, I have decided, is like a retarded grateful dead. If you've never heard them, you must. Start with songs like "Spinal Meningitis" and end with "Poop Ship Destroyer" like they did at the show. The field was mobbed with tripped out college students wearing all sorts of ween gear and jumping up and down like maniacs. Like at a dead show, home tapers were camped out in front of the sound tent, frisbees were flying in the dark all throughout the 2 and 1/2 hour set and 1/2 hour encore. Their fans are very dedicated, or weenicated as the case may be. I watched from the side of the stage and had to respect these guys for their creativity, warped sense of humor, and their ability to have such fun making a living. Why couldn't I have done that?

Makes me wonder why I have to take things so fucking seriously all the time. Okay, I don't. But when we play I do and maybe that's part of my problem. There's a headspace some people get into and I don't often enough. It's wandering through space. Too often these days I fear just going through the motions while too inhibited and worrying endlessly, ceaselessly, relentlessly about you. I mean all of you. Or anything. I so desperately want to make that connection but life has taken me on this course that calls for action, action all the time on behalf of the truly fucked. I let my worries about the world interfere. I take it all to heart and lose myself, my truest longings in the process.

Sometimes in life we are given choices about who we will be or what we are to become. I've made choices I knew were dangerous to me and now I'm paying the price. The price is the weight. The difficulties letting go of situations that aren't about me and I can do little about. And because this is so, so hard for me, when it's time to embrace my own life, my here and now, my grip is weak and it slips through my fingers.

Why go on and on about it now? Well, I can only figure it's about the show. The show I was so excited to be invited to play — the show I wanted so badly to perform at peak velocity — the show where I made every stupid error I could make — and the show where I lost my ability to let go and stay with the sound. I was ruined by modesty. I was ruined by delusions of grandeur. All I wanted was to feel good and couldn't let myself have it because I made mistakes. And I'm still doing this! Why?

Do you get this?

If so, send me nasty jokes. I've just downloaded Cookie Puss from Napster. So sue me.