postcard from copperas cove, 1993.
So I was a rock star once. For about an hour or so. It's not much, but it's more than many people have in their lifetimes.
It was, again, Dyn@mutt's first tour, on the road with our friends in Seed. We had, rather improbably, booked a show in Copperas Cove, Texas, a city I had never heard of before the tour was booked. Our guitarist Dave had, as I recall, leaned heavily on Maximum Rock & Roll's Book Your Own Fucking Life while booking the tour, and an enterprising youth named Noble* had sent in his name as a promoter there, and so, we had a show in Copperas Cove.
Our arrival was not promising. The show was at a rec center, and if I remember right, one on a military base. As I recall, there was a little refreshment stand in the center, a room with some video games on the left, and a small room on the right that could hold, maybe, 40 people. This was where we would play. There was a stage, a rather tall one as I recall. There were no posters or anything that seemed to indicate that a band might play. This was in the early days of our tour, before getting kicked off the pueblo or having our gig cancelled to save money on air conditioning, so at the time it seemed like this had the potential to be the nadir of the tour.
Instead, it was the pinnacle.
What I neglected to consider in my initial evaluation: in a place where there is fuck all to do, and Copperas Cove most decidedly fits this description, everything is an event. And our arrival was most definitely an event.
I'm not sure how many people knew our music prior to the show, other than Noble. I knew he had listened to the tape because he stood in the middle of the packed room, taller than everybody else, and would clap his hands together when we made a tempo change, once, as punctuation.
But everybody was - or seemed to be - living or dying by every note that we have played. There's never been a show that I've played, before or since, where I felt so sure of this while I was playing. In part, it was the nature of the light. I could see everyone, I could look everyone in the eye, and I could see that, I could feel that.
The scale is obviously different than Madison Square Garden, but the feeling of connection, I suspect that it is the same.
Did we play an encore? I think we might have. Did Seed play before or after us? I can't remember. I know that, after the show was done, there were autographs going around like crazy; Heather (the drummer for Seed, and the ultimate star of the evening) signed some guy's shirt or hat.
After the show (which I think had to be done by 9 pm or something, curfews on a military base being what they were), we went back to Austin. Sebadoh played at Emo's. We sat near the back, by a tree as I recall, and I kept looking into the sky, at the stars, trying to get my brain around what had happened, but mostly just coasting on the feeling of distilled euphoria.
*I have no idea if this is his real name, or if I'm even remembering this correctly.
It was, again, Dyn@mutt's first tour, on the road with our friends in Seed. We had, rather improbably, booked a show in Copperas Cove, Texas, a city I had never heard of before the tour was booked. Our guitarist Dave had, as I recall, leaned heavily on Maximum Rock & Roll's Book Your Own Fucking Life while booking the tour, and an enterprising youth named Noble* had sent in his name as a promoter there, and so, we had a show in Copperas Cove.
Our arrival was not promising. The show was at a rec center, and if I remember right, one on a military base. As I recall, there was a little refreshment stand in the center, a room with some video games on the left, and a small room on the right that could hold, maybe, 40 people. This was where we would play. There was a stage, a rather tall one as I recall. There were no posters or anything that seemed to indicate that a band might play. This was in the early days of our tour, before getting kicked off the pueblo or having our gig cancelled to save money on air conditioning, so at the time it seemed like this had the potential to be the nadir of the tour.
Instead, it was the pinnacle.
What I neglected to consider in my initial evaluation: in a place where there is fuck all to do, and Copperas Cove most decidedly fits this description, everything is an event. And our arrival was most definitely an event.
I'm not sure how many people knew our music prior to the show, other than Noble. I knew he had listened to the tape because he stood in the middle of the packed room, taller than everybody else, and would clap his hands together when we made a tempo change, once, as punctuation.
But everybody was - or seemed to be - living or dying by every note that we have played. There's never been a show that I've played, before or since, where I felt so sure of this while I was playing. In part, it was the nature of the light. I could see everyone, I could look everyone in the eye, and I could see that, I could feel that.
The scale is obviously different than Madison Square Garden, but the feeling of connection, I suspect that it is the same.
Did we play an encore? I think we might have. Did Seed play before or after us? I can't remember. I know that, after the show was done, there were autographs going around like crazy; Heather (the drummer for Seed, and the ultimate star of the evening) signed some guy's shirt or hat.
After the show (which I think had to be done by 9 pm or something, curfews on a military base being what they were), we went back to Austin. Sebadoh played at Emo's. We sat near the back, by a tree as I recall, and I kept looking into the sky, at the stars, trying to get my brain around what had happened, but mostly just coasting on the feeling of distilled euphoria.
*I have no idea if this is his real name, or if I'm even remembering this correctly.
2 Comments:
Fuck all to do? Dude they have Rabbit fest every year! Rabbit Fest!!!!
Holy shit. You guys played Cove? I never knew -- I grew up literally a 5-min. drive east of there on the highway, in Fort Hood proper, although my parents moved back to San Antonio in '93.
Man, that place was a hole; when I was in high school (in Killeen, on the other side of the post), Cove was where all the crazy/bad kids lived. I remember their high school's star quarterback got in a shootout w/cops in the middle of downtown (such as it was), at one point... You have my deepest sympathies -- I got out and have tried my best to never, ever go back.
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