Undercover
Every so often there's an amazing event in the Bay Area put together by Undercover Presents - each show being a parade of local musical acts doing crazy renditions of all the songs off an entire classic album. For example, Undercover once produced an evening in tribute of Black Sabbath's "Paranoid." For that I played bass/keyboards in Sabbaticus Rex and the Axe-Wielders of Chaos doing a brooding 20-minute version of "Electric Funeral" as well as bass in miRthkon attacking Wally's almost unrecognizable arrangement of "Faeries Wear Boots."
That was super fun, but the real kicker was being in two bands for the epic production celebrating Green Day's "Dookie" at the Fox Theatre. I played keyboards in MoeTar reworking "Welcome to Paradise" and keyboards/electric guitar/acoustic guitar in the Fuxedos destroying "Basket Case." It's not like I was a huge fan of this record, so it felt unfair I got to be in two amazing bands tackling two of Green Day's biggest hits. In any case, this story is about the day of that show.
I should begin by noting this all went down during a phase of peak anxiety for me, so much so that I considered taking a much needed break from music and maybe quit my day job once this was all over. I come from a very anxious family where our blood is 25% panic and 25% worry. So I'm generally used to managing this level of paralyzing emotional chaos while pretending to be a functioning adult, but after years of over-ambitious touring, followed by me accepting new responsibilities managing the entire computing infrastructure of Breakthrough Listen while still helping out with SETI@home (i.e. doing the work of 100 commercial-sector IT employees at 20% their individual salary) I was constantly out of my mind, with my heart pounding all day long, and I wasn't basically not sleeping at all. The night before the event was typical, i.e. fraught with insomnia and dread.
I powered through the morning in a daze like normal. Given there was well over a dozen different acts, each with wildly different instrumentation, there was incredible scheduling and coordination involved, along was a crazy early load in time of 10am. I went about my morning routine, which included the silly mistake of checking into work.
In the early days of Breakthrough Listen we took oodles of data every day while still building up server backends and establishing data reduction/analysis pipelines. Kind of like finishing an ark that's already afloat on the ocean. My time was split between trying to advance our ability to do science while putting out fires in various new and older projects. And every day I'd "walk the beat" and make sure all systems were stable.
So while surverying the perimeters I discovered the main SETI@home web site was down, and another site flagging. I guess some tangential server crashed and the whole network fold was in some NFS cross-mounting quagmire. Remote reboots of these servers did nothing to help. Luckily, I had the foresight to make a clone of the main website on another server a few weeks ago just in case, and this ended up saving our ass.
Once that was sorted I hurried to the Fox. Of course there was chaos loading in and dumping gear into loose piles filling the back of the stage. I parked at a meter which I had to feed every couple of hours. There were 16 bands containing 150+ musicians who all needed to plug in and test everything. So as you can imagine there were expected delays while coordinating all the soundchecks, but everybody was graceful under pressure.
Since I was playing in both MoeTar and The Fuxedos I was stuck there a while. At least I got to geek out with friends and fellow musicians in the vast bowels of this venue. Plus you can count on Lyz, who produced and organized these events, to make sure the hosptiality is top notch. Due to the slipping schedule neither of my bands had the chance to run a full song - we had just enough time to prove the instruments and monitors will probably work come show time.
I was able to escape at 3pm and went home for a much needed nap. But after waking up I made the mistake of checking into work *again*, finding one of the RAIDs on our Green Bank telescope backend servers had flipped out. If I didn't fix this by 3am our project will we be losing about $1000 worth of data recording capability when observations start at 3:30am. Yes, I have a bad habit of always calculating the exact dollar value of every potential problem - and these numbers are pure anxiety fuel.
Knowing this I headed back to the Fox by 5:30pm for the big all-hands-on-deck show meeting just before the doors opened. When I appeared I saw one of the other acts using my keyboard without my prior consent. At first I felt a pretty fucking miffed about this. A stage hand saw me and the sour look on my face and nipped this in the bud by intercepting me and apologizing. I quickly got over myself and remembered we are all professionals. It was fine. But this is the sort of thing that could break me when I'm on the edge.
The place filled up with people. Jenya arrived in the photographer pit. And the gig flew by. Every band killed it in their own unique way. And when it was MoeTar's turn we put on our simple costumes and nailed our crazy version of "Paradise" complete with all the requisite crazy time signature changes, angular harmonies, and tempo changes, plus the backup singers, Mikki and Erin, absolutely nailing it. The five minute tune felt like 30 seconds.
Due to the whole promotional machine behind the production every band had to run downstairs after each set while still in costume to take pictures. Fair enough, but this process took way too long because some of the MoeTarians chose to disappear despite earlier warnings from me that I had to get the fuck back on stage immediately. The cats were eventually herded, photos were taken, and I sprinted to the stage to start setting up for the Fuxedos tune.
When I finally emerged upstairs I was happy to find the stage managers were letting us set up before the next band even started. Phew. I mentioned to Steve how luxurious this was, but then he noted that I missed the previous act, and *we* were the next band. As a gallon of horror juice entered my bloodstream the pre-song video started to project on the giant screen. The video was about 2 minutes long - after which we were expected to immediately start playing. Meanwhile I had enough gear to set up yet that would normally take at least 10 minutes.
I scrambled to move my keyboard and monitors into position, unwind cables and plug them into the proper DIs, and locate my picks and pedals. Frantically I removed my two guitars from their cases, plugged them in, and didn't even check the amp settings or tune them. I then leapt into the wings to dig out my costume: the trademark Fuxedos bloody shirt and bow tie. It took way too long to get these on in the darkness. All the while I tried not to shout the violent invective boiling in my throat aimed at the stage hands who let this happen. I admit some unhelpful words may have slipped out.
The video ended while I continued to struggle getting my shirt and bow tie on while my fingers shook with frustration and fury. Danny, ever the pro, stalled with some impromptu comedy in front of 2000 people.
I jumped back onstage, checked all the keyboard settings, and then launched into our utterly ridiculous 10-minute version of "Basket Case." Despite the rushing all the guitars were miraculously in tune and sound came out of the monitors. At one point during our arrangement the whole band stops and I'm supposed to immediately come in with solo acoustic guitar. Being I had no chance earlier to dial in proper settings and test the a/b box, there was a 50% chance the guitar would have been completely silent upon strumming. I won that coin flip. Yay.
The Fuxedos tune - full of all kinds of hijinx - clobbered the crowd. And just like that, months of preparation and anticipation was over. Fucking phew! I stayed through the rest of the night to witness more great music, and speeches by the Green Day guys and Oakland Mayor Schaaf.
I didn't hang out with the guests of honor (as you could imagine they were swarmed all night) but I did chat a bit with Jello Biafra who was milling about backstage. He adored the Fuxedos set. The final encore had everybody, including the Green Day guys, performing one last bit together. I took pix from the stage of the various VIPs near me. These photos were lost forever when I tripped and dropped my iPhone in the ocean a few weeks later.
After the final encore I got my ass out of there. Jenya was in the photo pit all night. She met me by the loading dock and we ghosted that shit.
At home I immediately logged right into my VNC session at Green Bank Observatory to make the proper magic RAID incantations which tricked that pesky array back to life. Due to my efforts we didn't lose any data or recording capabilities - I will learn the next day that observations went by without a hitch.
But before we went to bed Jenya and I went out to Rudy's Can't Fail in Emeryville where I rewarded myself with some late night french toast. Deeply satisfying. I ate the first syrupy bite and let out one big motherfucking sigh.
After that weight was lifted off my shoulders the job reached a manageable plateau of average daily dread and chaos, and I did go into low-power mode with music for a short while. I also cut down the coffee and sugar intake. That helped - my average heart rate dropped significantly.