I know that Friday nights are hard, I know it as well as anyone. I have some friends that I used to go out with on Friday nights — they said the trick was to just go for it, to haul yourself into the shower, change your clothes, and head out because after an hour or so, you’d be so glad you did. But it gets harder, and maybe you need a babysitter now in a way you didn’t ten, 15 years ago, or maybe your week just wore you down to your last nerve. I’ve pulled the plug on all kinds of things because I didn’t want to drive in snow or I knew it was going to be too loud or I simply could not make myself put on shoes. I get it. You just couldn’t do it.
But I’m still going to say, “Oh, man, you should have been there.” On Friday night, The Castaways released our music video and our new CD into the wild. And it was an amazing night.
We held our release party at the Feedback Lounge. The Feedback Lounge is just down the street from my house, it’s my local, and it’s run by Jeff Gilbert, a guy who’s been a metal DJ, a rock journalist (he still does some writing), and an unlikely supporter for the band — Jeff wrote the liner notes for our new CD.
We’ve got a theory that when we first pitched him to play his bar, he said, “Meh, what the hell. Could be fun, and I gotta get something on that night…” But we think he did not expect us to fill the place. We filled it again on Friday night — it was standing room only — and I caught the enormous smile on Jeff’s face when he walked into his packed bar around 8:45 on Friday night. You can’t miss him, he’s got a spectacular head of hair, and if you saw him, there’s no way you could have missed that smile.
My friends Jessica and Mark came up from Portland to work the merch table. At home, when I was gathering our stuff, I wasn’t sure how many CDs to throw in. The husband laughed, rolled his eyes, and said, “If you run out, I will go home and get more.” Jess and Mark were busy all night long, and guess who had to go home and get more CDs? We were sold out by the time we’d played our first set. “They just kept coming,” said Jessica. “I’d think, oh, maybe now I get to watch the band, but no.” Every time I looked over, they were in a clump of people three deep.
Since joining the band, something I did entirely on a whim, I have learned a hundred million things that I can not quantify and a few that I can. I have learned that your audience wants to love you, they are rooting for you. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be in the room. I have learned that you can make mistakes and survive, sometimes they are gone before anyone but your bandmates notice, and sometimes, if you recover with good humor, everyone notices but they just don’t care. I have learned that you can play flawlessly and still have kind of a lifeless show. I have learned that playing a good show is something more than just playing well, it’s what happens between the band and the audience, it’s like a chemical reaction that makes everyone part of the party. It’s when your friends, who don’t throw praise around lightly, say, “They killed it.” Friday night we made that happen.
There are all kinds of things about being in a band that are challenging. Creative differences. Personality differences. Who’s responsible for doing what, when. Variations in vision about what the band can or should do (or not do). There’s a lot of driving cars full of stuff from one place to another and back again, a lot of picking things up and putting them down, a lot of winding cables, and it seems like there’s always something that’s broken — a pickup, a mixer channel, a string. There’s memory, holding all those songs in your head. The video and the CD involved a lot of tedious technical work. For me, there’s almost a foreign exchange student component — I’m in third year Chinese and I’m with a bunch of native speakers, so sometimes, I literally have no idea what they’re talking about. There’s a constant sense of doubt.
And for The Castaways, there’s another odd level of cognitive dissonance — we have a modestly successful rock and roll ukulele band. What? Really? Yes. Really. How can that even be true? When I got home I lay in bed in the dark and laughed for a good long time.
“What’s so funny?” asked the husband.
“Everything,” I said. “Did you see that? I just turned 50 and I played a standing room only blow the doors off show with my ukulele rock and roll band. What could be funnier than that?”
After the show on Friday night, one of the guys in the crowd came up to me and asked this: “Why the ukulele?” I was stumped. The question seemed both absurd and full of the significance of everything we’d been doing in the band up to the moment we started our Friday night show. “Well… you can teach yourself in a weekend, and it’s small and light and you can take it everywhere. And I love the sound of it, I kind of fell in love with it on my first trip to Hawaii. It’s super social, the ukulele makes you friends everywhere. But mostly, it’s just insanely fun.”
You can buy our new CD online, yeah, it’s in iTunes, but we get to keep more of our money if you buy it from CD Baby. It’s good, I’m proud of it. And you can watch our new video here — if you like it, please share it with your friends. This stuff — the CD and the video — will give you a shiny, polished look at what we do. But if you weren’t there on Friday night, well, I’m going to say it again. You missed out, you totally should have been there.
But also, there is no way we are not doing that again.
I am so, so glad I was there to see it.
And, now that I’ve had a few days to catch up on lost sleep – when are we doing that again?
And you’d make even *more* money from the downloads if you were on Bandcamp.com. I would strongly suggest that you price said downloads at the “pay what you want” level. It’s amazing how nice your fans will treat you when you give them the opportunity.
Also more money if you simply hooked up things from your site so that y’all were doing the order fulfillment on the physical CDs.
When you do your next CD release, try to make it sometime between late spring to mid autumn. Then I could afford the bus fare, beer money, etc. Because I’d love to be there and January sucks like a great big sucking thing for buskers in this town. February is worse. By March “armed robbery” starts looking like a good career path.