Concert Countdown Week: #2 - KA Melrose, 2001
Fraternities at JMU had a tradition of renting a barn 20 minutes outside of campus for huge BYOB parties. Buses would bring people back and forth from the event, so everyone was usually pretty toasted by the time they made it through the barn doors. This tradition was known as Melrose, and KA asked us to perform at theirs in 2001. Upon first walking into the barn one Saturday afternoon to set things up, I couldn't believe how cool of a venue it was. An enormous sawdust-covered floor. Several stairways that led up to a long balcony with a half-broken piano in the corner. Lots of smaller, secluded rooms connected to the main one. A large outside deck. It was the perfect open atmosphere for general debauchery.
The stage that we were playing on was a different story. It was long and narrow, giving us absolutely no depth. We looked like the band at Chuck E. Cheese, where all the animatronic characters are lined up in a row (it's usually nice to have the ability to see your bandmates for the purposes of starting and ending songs in unison). But whatever qualms we had about the stage disappeared that night when the buses starting pouring people in, creating a steady flow of newcomers that never stopped. The place was saturated with drunken college kids, a captive audience who wanted their pants rocked off.
And rock pants off we did. As soon as we started playing, girls flooded the stage...it was like straight out of a movie. They were dancing with us, singing with us, picking up a tambourine or drumstick and playing with us, and pretty much making the crowd even crazier. One girl in particular, forever known as "blue shirt girl", would pat us on the back with the rhythm of the music. The only problem was that she had no rhythm whatsoever. Jeff said he had a hard time keeping in time with this intoxicated, off-tempo metronome pounding his back.
My friend from a band called the Bureau, Jordan Brown, came down for the show, and played lead guitar on an extended version of Back To Blues. He couldn't believe the surrounding insanity either, and yelled at Andrew over the music "THIS IS SO (expletive) AWESOME!" We also did a rock version of the Dixie Chicks' Ready To Run, where the cowboy hat I put on my head was quickly snatched up and worn by several of the onstage dancers. Crowd surfing was omnipresent. I grabbed the wireless mic, ran through the crowd, up the stairs and onto the balcony to sing the chorus of 718 from above. So many things could have gone wrong...beer spilling on instruments or amps, people trying to take over the mic, fights breaking out...but miraculously, none of these things happened (I even got my cowboy hat back!) We played through two insane, full sets. So this is what it must be like to be a rockstar, I thought. It was a feeling that has never quite been matched since.
(Tomorrow: the countdown ends with the best birthday celebration ever...)
Wednesday, August 24 at 9:00 PM
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