Welcome to the TMF blog, asswipe

Hey look, the May Fire has a blog. Isn't that fantastic? Finally, a place to put all the crap that doesn't fit anywhere else. Why does this stuff need to be posted to the internet? Is it because all our screaming fans are dying to see videos of us brushing our teeth in the alley behind Motel 6? Hell no! It's because the music business is hard as shit, and you can never do enough promotion, and this is just another way of getting MORE STUFF ABOUT US out there. Us, us, us. The May Fire, The May Fire, The May Fire. Rock, rock, rock, roll, roll, roll.

So let's talk about what's going on. A couple weeks ago we played a raucous show at the Stork Club in Oakland. Anyone who knows anything about Oakland knows that that place is just plain nuts. They got barbie dolls lined up over the bar, and a huge P.A. system in a tiny little room. You set up your guitar amp, which only has to be at 2 or 3 to fill the room loudly, and they stick a mic in front of it and send it through the P.A. Outta control! They mic the drums, the bass, everything. When we played there last year the sound guy said "oh yeah, this is a full service dive bar." They all have a great attitude about it, which is huge, but they rig it all up so loudly that you're basically generating this enormous wall of soupy insanity... like outfitting a school drinking fountain with a fire hose. Luckily, by the time you get onstage, everyone's good and hammered (the stork pours good drinks) to the point that they actually enjoy standing right in front of us and getting blasted.

Here's some pics from that night, courtesy of radcliffe photos:
http://flickr.com/photos/radcliffephotos/sets/72157594469821851/

Speaking of late set times, something that a lot of music fans don't realize is that at the local level, "headlining" is often not a good thing. The general assumption with any music show is that the headliner is the best (or at least, most popular) act on the bill, and will therefore draw the most people. It's assumed that these people will leave after they see their band play, so naturally the headliners play last. Which is all well and good if you're, say, Radiohead, and playing last means starting around 9pm. But in your average local bar, the first band doesn't get going until 9 at the earliest, so your headliners are often going on around midnight, which cuts out a good deal of audience. Sure, die-hard fans stay up, but as a general rule, people get tired at night.

So really the best timeslot is the second-to-last set, around 11 or so. Everyone that's gonna come has showed up, and not too many people have headed out yet. So local bands end up playing this funny game with each other where they try to convince each other that "you're so much bigger than us, you should definitely headline", and the other band replies "are you kidding? we only drew like 5 people to our last show, you guys are the obvious headliners." And then you both turn around and tell the next club that you can totally draw 150+ people. It's not so much lies and backstabbing as... okay it is lies and backstabbing, but everyone has to do it, so it all balances out. Maybe.

For another example, last Friday we played at Kimo's in San Francisco with Shiloe and the Dont's. Kimo's is like the Stork Club West. Crappy lookin' little hole, but fill it with people and booze and you've got a good time. And I'll give Kimo's this: they understand the limits of their own sound system, and don't overdo it by mic'ing everything. Which is nice. But here's what's not nice: a week before the show (we had this booked two months in advance) someone at Kimo's suddenly decides, for reasons still unclear to us, to throw a 4th band in, in the 2nd slot. Which inevitably causes a certain amount of chaos and difficulty as everything gets reshuffled and the bands end up competing with each other all the more for good set times. And in the end it came down to The May Fire and Shiloe duking it out, which is really too bad cause we're both good and we're both in the same boat, pretty much. But that's how it is.