Stuff I learned (or was forcibly reminded of) at Diver's gig at Fado Irish Pub on St. Patrick's Day:
- Drunk people aren't the most aware. I don't think this ever happened before, but here's how it played out. I had Tony and Anto start "Into The Mystic" without me while I tried to fix my balky snare drum (more on that later), so some guy figures that, since I'm not playing, I'd be the most appropriate target for his request. So he marches up onto the stage and asks if we know any Pogues. He is rather incredulous when I tell him we don't, and that goes on for a little while. Then he requests...Van Morrison. Now I'm the one who's incredulous. Yes, he essentially requested a song while we were playing that song.
- In which Coz is right. A very reasonable, very nice guy asked during the break if he could come up and sing "Ice Ice Baby" before we started our second set. Apparently he had already done this during one of the earlier acts and was well-received. I shot him down, telling him that if we let him get up on stage, everybody would want to get up on stage, and that this would be bad. I got overruled. Later in the night, some chick who had insisted she could sing during another break came up onto Avi's microphone and provided backups for some song that I'm trying to repress from my memory. I've heard dying cats with better pitch. The moral of the story is that the first person you randomly let come on stage to sing with you will probably be pretty good. The second is gonna suck.
- In which Coz is very, very wrong. I actually do know that the bridge to "If You Could Only See" from Tonic comes after the second chorus, and not the first. I blame the rounds of Jameson coming from a certain friend of the band. Tony seemed pretty amused by that.
- Drunk people, a story in four acts. I don't remember how it started, but this one drunk woman was sort of hanging over the bench dividing the band from the crowd. Anto would banter with her a bit from time to time. Then she either started heckling him, or she started drinking from two pints of Guinness set down on the arm of the bench that were for the band. Drinking the band's beer is not cool. So Anto stopped acknowledging her, which apparently made her quite upset, so she started giving us more shit throughout the set. Then, during the break, this other woman (from St. Louis) offered to knock her over for us because she was being such an obnoxious bitch. We declined, figuring karma would come around eventually. She yelled at her anyway. During the next set, the obnoixous bitch (TOB) once again takes Anto's beer off the arm of the bench and takes a sip. St. Louis, thinking the beer belonged to TOB, dropped a full cup into it, spilling it all over the stage. At least her intentions were good.
- Apparently, the gear was drunk, too. I think Tony broke something like three strings on the night, forcing yours truly to get up and banter with the crowd for a while -- I don't think I'll ever get such a rousing response to "How many of you have been drinking since before noon?" Meanwhile, my snare drum head was misbehaving all night. Premier boasts that they undersize their drum shells a little in order to improve the point of contact between the bearing edge and the drumhead, but if you don't have the head centered properly, it can pull to one side and lose all its tension. Which it did. Often.
- Maybe we learned it since you asked last time. This one actually happens pretty frequently, but if you ask the band if we know how to play a certain song, and we don't, we're not going to magically know it an hour later. Yes, it would be appropriate to know something like "Dirty Old Town" from The Pogues, but we don't. So stop asking. Let it go.