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In fact, stay away from Columbus altogether.
We arrived at the aforementioned venue last night to find out that we were no longer on the bill. The guy booking the show said his bill fell apart when a couple bands cancelled, so he went ahead and booked a whole new bill. He said he emailed us about it, didn't we get that? We had not. So we were told to come back around seven, since there was still a slim chance we could play.
Meanwhile, the street outside was filling with people dressed in red and white. A parade was gathering steam. The occasion? Homecoming weekend. Big game tomorrow. The opponents? The Iowa Hawkeyes.
We seriously considered covering up our license plates. Cheers of "Fuck Iowa!" could be heard from the parade attendees. Cannons started going off. I kept waiting for a giant Herkey effigy to go up in flames.
We found refuge and killed some time in another bar, Cafe Bourbon Street, which seems like a much cooler venue. Bands: if you insist on playing Columbus, even after my stern warning, play here. Or Little Brother's. Or Oldfield's on Fourth. Anywhere but Bernie's.
At seven we went back to Bernie's. Still no word. We were told to come back at nine. So we did. We went downstairs and were greeting by a man behind the bar who looked downright grateful to see us. Two of the bands had cancelled; we could play after all. Pretty tight ship they run there.
(This is as good a time as ever to mention an article we saw framed and hanging on the wall at Bernie's. It was written by one of the members of the Donna's, and proclaimed Bernie's the worst place they've played, ever. They had to cut the set short because toilet water was running all over the floor.)
Anyway, we were the third and final band. The first band wasn't very good but at least they knew how to rock and have high energy. The second band, Wolfman's Got Nards, was easily the worst band we've played with on the tour (and you'd never know it from their name, would you?). They didn't look much younger than us, but they still seem to consider peurile novelty rock a salable performance format. They tore through lively renditions of songs that weren't only not funny, but offensive. And anyone who knows my sense of humor will know that it takes a lot for me to be offended. I picked up their setlist afterwards, just so I confirm today what had actually happened. Here it is:
Emo Mullets
So anyway. We took they stage when they were finally done, and the place had already more or less cleared out. Oh, there was still an audience: after our second song, a guy to the left of the stage yelled, "You guys sound like you should be wearing panties and bare feet!" Dino said, "What was that? Say that again?" and the man repeated himself. So Dino said, into the mike, "Apparently, there's a gentleman here who wants us to play in our underwear." The man yelled, "And bare feet, asshole!" That pretty much set the tone. Meanwhile, Chris was carrying on with an extremely drunk girl who had wandered up to the stage, and was practically on it, so that by the fourth song, she was actually standing at Chris' mic and "singing" along, in a way that gives new meaning to the word heinous. It was awful. I was not amused. And she didn't stop; she kept doing it on every song. We cut the set short after six.
And our reward? Our vast riches? Ten dollars. Ten fucking dollars, handed to us in an envelope, all in ones, which just drove the point home a little further. We got the fuck out of there as quickly as possible. Columbus is a ghetto-ass town. Police cruisers would race by every few minutes; a guy at the bar said stabbings are not uncommon at some clubs. And this is near campus; apparently it gets worse as one goes south.
It gets better, though. We didn't have anywhere to stay, of course, and were pretty keen on getting the hell out of Dodge anyway. So we got on 70 and drove about 25 miles east, then parked behind a Super 8, cleared off the loft, and bedded down. As Dino and I huddled in our claustrophobic sleeping quarters, I said, "Kids, don't become rock musicians."
But we actually slept pretty well. We woke up ready to take off, except for a couple things: 1) The van had started shaking and rattling quite a bit when we accelerated. We weren't sure how serious this was, just that it was getting worse; and 2) I had left my credit card at that shitty, shitty venue. I'd run a tab and forgotten to pick it up at the end of the night. I hadn't even been drunk, just plain forgot. So now we had to drive back into the heart of downtown, constipated as it was by red and white-colored dipshits, and go back to Bernie's. On the way there we stopped at a service station, where a guy diagnosed the problem right away and said he could fix it this afternoon for about eighty dollars. When he found out we were in a band, he said that he worked on Bob Seger's van once, thirty years ago. That's when we knew we were in good hands.
So now I'm in a Kinko's, killing time and hoping the Hawks win. With a little good fortune, we can be out of this town before the game's over.
Things can only get better, right?
Right?
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