Category: music venue

Here’s a pic that Hilger stole off the wall of the place, its somekind of daycare center or something…

penny road pub. i would call this place a roadhouse. we were all looking for
patrick swzaze. its literally in the middle of nowhere in barrington. you are driving down (you guessed it)penny road and there are no street lights, there is nothing, then this massive bar. they have 2 stages, one on the main floor, one in the basement. we were in the basement, playing with 2 other bands: r&r and dropmouth. R&R played all covers, they were a 5
piece with a chick frontperson. they opened with ‘just a girl’ by no doubt, they played a good selection of songs but werent very technically sound. dropmouth was awesome, 4 piece with a front man. the very things that would make me want to rip on the guy were the same things
that made him awesome. rob told me he saw him hairspraying his do in the car before the set. he had painted nails and leather pants. but above all he had some vocal stamina. they sounded (at least vocally) like the disturbed (also from chicago, the singer chris also told me that they knew the band personally). they played a very long set of 4 min.+ songs, i was very anxious. we finally went on, there were a good deal of people there whom i didnt know or invite, they definitely dug us though. i handed out some cd’s after the set, i didnt recognize any of the faces. the sound man maurice was awesome, a very nice guy. i got paid a whopping(literally) $68 by the owner(?)/manager dave. he was pretty much of a dick and unfriendly despite my attempts to by professional and respectful but i cant complain after receiving probably our 2nd biggest paycheck ever. on the stage upstairs was a band called arra, they have a HUGE local following, they play all covers, or mostly i think. the upstairs was totally packed. I must
also bitch about the asshole security. when i first arrived and tried to load in, i had to tell them that i was in a band, i told them low profile and one commented, “oh, thats DEFINITELY the basement stage…”. i then asked if they could open a fire door to allow me to load in.  they said that i could (and had to) but they refused to open it or help in any way(im sure they needed like 5 people at the door to take money)so i just said fuck it, ill load in thru the front door where they were standing. then a bitch security guard commented that,’well dont get mad now’ in a very sarcastic tone as if  i was a 2nd grader. there was one guard though who was very cool, a black dude with a yankees hat, if hes reading this, youre down dude. great gig overall, despite some assholish behavior from some of the guards.

Like the previous show, no one was there although there were a few sound men and workers around, as well as some girlfriends. This place is really far — about as far as Rockford. It’s a juice bar which is cool because they had the obscure Snapple Hydros line. I bought a few and they were great. I nearly broke my neck and back at this show thrashing so hard. They made us wear bracelets to show that we were in the band which was ironic since no one showed up and we didn’t even need them. Me and Hilger wore ours for a while after that — a few months. The Perps were great and they gave us all CD’s and we gave them ours. Out back where we parked there were back doors to all the businesses next door. There was some kind of meeting going on next door and when it convened they stood out there and they did some kind of weird corporate inspirational chant/cheer. We all laughed and cheered them on and they loved it. As usual, Paul from the Perps was drinking vodka out of a Snapple bottle. He cracked the bottle and we tried to duct tape it but it didn’t work. I didn’t know there was vodka in there and when we realized the tape wasn’t holding, I kept telling him to just pound the whole thing cause it was leaking everywhere. I didn’t really understand why he was so concerned and why he couldn’t just pound the whole thing. He told me it was mixed with vodka and I felt pretty dumb.