First MoeTar Gig
Here's the story about MoeTar's first gig on May 17th, 2009. There's a legendary annual 12K footrace in San Francisco called Bay to Breakers, and we got to perform on one of the stages towards the finish line in Golden Gate park. By "stage" I mean the side of the road as joggers passed by, mostly costumed.
The race starts at 8am, so I got up at 5am to load my gear into the car and beat traffic going into the city. I found myself at the park entrance on Fulton @ 43rd around 6:30am. Tarik and Moorea were already there setting up the generator and whatnot.
There were already signs it would be a blazing hot morning, and we'll be in direct sun. But I brought a hat. Matt showed up all sleepy and set up as well. He had 6-7 hours of private guitar lessons facing him when he gets home after this, and he played a late show last night. Oy. Dave arrived - we all somehow managed to figure out the parking/pass situation and got a place to keep our vehicles not too far away during the gig.
We snacked on the various vittles Moe and Tar brought. Nearby people were starting up a tai chi group and doing their strange meditative yoga when Tarik had to fire up the load ass generator nearby. I joked (only within earshot of the band), "relax through this!" which became the catch phrase of the day.
Suddenly it's 8:28am and the real runners who began the race all the way on the other side of the city were already passing us near the finish line. I guess that was our cue to start, and we did. It all began well enough, and felt/sounded pretty good considering the early downbeat. The parade of crazily clad runners began to flow down the road, some stopping to check us out. Cool.
During "Screed" Dave and Tarik and Matt were getting all weirded out about something and began fading out mid-song. What the hell? I had no idea what was up until I realized some older runner totally fainted right in front of our performance area due to heat exhaustion, and here we were playing our loudest/darkest song of evil.
Medics appeared quickly and the guy seemed okay, but we were kinda forced to stop playing for like a half hour as it took a while for the dude to get off his ass. Eventually an ambulance came and cleared him out. How that's for a first gig story? Our music physically harms people! I felt bad for the guy of course but during that episode literally thousands of people jogged by without getting to hear us play.
Back to it, we ran another set's worth of material, took a short break, ran the same set again, took another short break, and ran the set once more. Talk about good practice - running all our songs live three times in a row, and those who had the chance to witness our musical offerings generally seemed to dig it.
By 11:30pm the race is basically over and now it's just a city-wide party. The authorities diverted the remaining racers out of the park. I mean, everybody had 3.5 hours already to run a 12K - y'all had your chance to finish now scram! Less people in the park made loading out super easy. However escaping SF was difficult. I feared the highway so I took surface streets, which was super painful going through the Haight as errant runners were still out in droves and quite drunk at such an early hour. However the costumes were entertaining.