…of gigs. I mean, obviously we embrace and endorse most types of diversity (diversity of opinions about when rehearsal begins is one prime example), but our gigging schedule last week and this coming weekend highlights the vast range of venues we play, audiences we play for, and compensation packages we receive. What’s that you say? We’ll do anything to play music, go anywhere, play anytime? Ridiculous accusation.
Opening for Nada Surf and Dawn Landes
We kicked off our Diversity Tour last Wednesday night with our first gig at a bona fide rock club. Pearl Street Nightclub, right in the bustling center of Northampton, is part of the Iron Horse Entertainment Group, and regularly attracts some of the big names in the business. We were particularly excited to be sharing the stage with Nada Surf, a nationally and internationally-recognized act (they’re going to Japan in a couple of weeks!) that had a big hit a few years ago, and Dawn Landes, an indie-rocking singer/songwriter backed by a flannel-clad crew of, well, indie rockers. Our local crowd came out in force for the event, and good times were had by all.
Precinct Bar in Boston
With the first stop of the tour, the “Big Gig at the Real Club,” behind us, we moved on to the second leg: the “Average Awesome Bar for our Not Average Awesome Boston Fans” leg. After a day of brushing up on some new songs and working on some new covers (more on that later), we made the four-hour trip (the first 2 hours were spend sitting in traffic right in Hadley, then in Northampton on 91, then in the parking lot of a convenient McDonald’s for a pit stop) out to Somerville, MA and the Precinct Bar. Even at this early point in our young careers, we’ve played lots of bars similar to The Precinct, but the combination of a full (if small-ish) room and our loyal Boston-area fans made this one particularly special. Or maybe it was the stage with the swooping front edge, so that it felt like we were part of the crowd. Or maybe the free cider at the bar helped. Actually, it was probably that the band debuted the cover “Shout!” of Animal House fame, to an Animal House-like response from the crowd. In any case, while this gig was average on the outside, it was better than that. Also, the drive home was only an hour and forty-five minutes.
Don’s diverse new guitar!
The following night was the “Small-Format Acoustic House Party” gig. These gigs have special significance to me, because as the drummer, I don’t have to do anything. While the rest of the band still has to play their instruments, I get to tap gently on my snare drum with anything and everything that’s not a drum stick. Nevertheless, the rest of the band excels at this diverse type of gig, where they get to prove that they don’t need tube amps and fancy cellos with extra strings to make music. I, however, do need a kick drum to do much of anything useful, so I’m bringing one next time we play the “Acoustic House Party” leg of Diversity Tour mkII. I’m already looking forward to it, because another thing that makes these stops unique is the abundance of delicious food and drink, rare at “less diverse” types of gigs.
We’re now exactly half way through our tour, with some of the most diverse stops still to come: Thursday we have the “Small (But Not as Small) Format Quasi-Acoustic Gig at a Restaurant in Exchange for Dinner” stop, followed by the “Outdoor Tent Party Pretending We’re DJ’s for College Kids” stop, and finally the “Outdoor Music Festival with Several Other Local Bands” stop next Monday, at UMass Amherst. We’ll keep you posted…
Performance Review from the UMASS Daily Collegian
On monday, Darlingside played a short set in the Hampden courtyard at UMASS-Amherst as part of a six-band battle of the bands called “Paper Jam”. It certainly didn’t feel like a battle (prizes were never really discussed, nor were the judges not shwasted, nor did they not brandish pictures of rocket ships as their means of “judgement”), but rather an excuse to make music and merriment. The atmosphere was lovely, the other bands were fantastic, and you know somebody above is looking out for you when your gig just happens to be located next to a bona-fide vat of trail mix being aggressively doled out to the masses by people with no association to the event. It’s so collegiate it hurts. But the point is that we were written up as part of the UMass paper’s coverage of the event, and Dave Coffey had some very nice things to say:
What a kind, kind man. In other news, the Darlingside household has been Spring Cleaned! Springed Clean? Clean Sprung? Anyway it looks great, and the leaves are coming back in, and what a wonderful world, and all you need is love. Whoop!