Things I learned last night:

1. If you have friends who are willing to drive to Evanston to hear your band go on at 12:30 on a weeknight, by all means, hold on to those friends.

2. If you are an opening band playing your second show ever and a majority of the crowd is comprised of friends you've personally cajoled into attending, it's probably not the best idea to call them "fuckers" between every song, or to end your first song by yelling into the mic: "That's just one song, fuckers! There's nine more!"

2a. Especially if you're going to take your shirt off before the last song.

3. If you are the second band of three, don't play for ninety minutes. Ever.

4. If you do happen to be in that band, and you're going to do covers�and I cannot stress this enough�fucking learn the covers. And if you can't actually learn them, but still doggedly insist on playing them, don't introduce them by saying, "This is another cover, but we couldn't really learn it all, so this is kind of our own version."

4a. Especially if the song is "Via Chicago".

4b. And please, for the love of Christ, don't play the intro to a Pearl Jam song and then stop because "that's all we know."

5. A fairly decent way to spend the interminable stretch of time before your band goes on is to sit at the bar with one of the sound guys and hear his stories about when he was the guitarist for Sister Soleil and lived at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios and had a hand in recording the most expensive debut album in history.

6. Having an amateur stand-up comedian open for you and be the emcee throughout the evening�especially when his humor seems to revolve around a solid core of poorly-executed jokes about gays, women, "chicks with dicks", blacks, Jews, and the Confederate flag�is not the barrel of monkeys you might presume it to be.

6a. In fact, when said emcee gets up on stage after your set and asks what little crowd remains to "make some noise for Nolan" and then proceeds to proclaim, once again, that "homosexuals suck," your initial instinct to run up behind him and push him off the stage is, in fact, correct, and�in retrospect� should have been acted upon.

7. If you are going to be learning all of these things, make sure you get paid $200 at the end of the night, thanks to freshmen from Northwestern who showed up to see the first band play and then left, only to end up with their (parents') money in your coffers.

8. Cha-ching.

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