I think Prince might be the best concert I’ve ever seen.

A friend of Jack’s brother Aaron had 2 extra tickets, so Jen and I snatched them up. They were in the top tier of the Rose Garden, but relatively low. The stage was in the round, and luckily for my poor eyes Jen lent me her binocs.

I can’t tell you how tight the show was. He had an amazing band, and his way with the audience was great. He has SO MANY HITS, that he was able to roll between them just like James Brown at the Apollo. Very spontaneous-sounding, even though I’m sure it took a lot of work. There was a lot of audience participation, and highlighting of various members of his band (bass, sax, etc.) and a couple interludes by the keyboard player while everyone else took a breather.

Using the binoculars I was able to ascertain that one of the keyboard player’s synths was a Nord Lead (which I have too) but instead of being Nord’s trademark red, it was painted black and purple. 😉 I bet it’s no surprise there were a lot of purple lighing effects, and people wearing purple.

Did I mention that he and his bass player did a bass duet/solo thing??? Nice.

He ended with Purple Rain. Phenomenal. If anyone deserves his fame, it’s Prince.

So the gig at the Roseland went well, once I got past the anxiety caused by my car getting backed into. (Luckily not too much damage, but it’s a hassle, ya know?) The size of the crowd served to emphasize the non-viability of Templeshock, alas. But I think we played well and sounded good so it was a good way to end, I think.

In other news, the court date for the speeding ticket I got in March was pushed back to Nov 8. What the hell is up with this court system? I barely remember getting the damn thing, now.

Finished Doom 3, although I admit I turned on God mode for the last few levels…it was getting a little old, although it did definitely cause shivers up my spine multiple times, I kid you not…hey I’m a baby what can I say 😉

Who is , I wonder???

OK, off to go catch up on my email correspondence and send out evites.

Hi all, this is the LAST email you will ever get from me about my band, Templeshock, playing. Ever.

Because we’re breaking up! Yay! Uh, I mean, that’s too bad… 😉

But FIRST, we have to play one of the LARGEST venues in Portland! We (along with 4 other bands, ahem) are playing the Roseland, 6th & Burnside, this Friday at 9:30!! Funny how these things work out, eh?

If you thought we sucked, come out to say good riddance!
If you thought we were good, this is your last chance to hear us live!

Tickets are $12, but you can get them through me for a discounted price of $10, 2 for $15. Call me at 806-4928 or email, and I can arrange to get you the tickets in time. We’re hoping to not lose *too* much money on this one…

The other bands playing are: Shifft, Four Days to Yesterday, Excessive Moderation, and Kross Face. Chances are some of these bands will suck more than us, SOME POSSIBLY LESS!!!

Anyways, looking forward to hopefully going out with a bang, yep.

— Andy!!

Oh yes.

Immediately after playing at our largest venue to date, the Roseland (capacity 400), it looks like Templeshock will be dissolving. Kaput. Finito.

I went to Josh’s tonight for practice. After practice, Josh and Brian said they wanted to discuss “taking some time” after the Roseland gig, “going in a new direction”, and even a name change.

For me, who has been looking for a good way to exit for about 3 months, this sounds perfect. So, the Roseland will be the last show for me. I can move on to another band, or maybe doing some home recording on my own, which I’ve really been wanting to do, or maybe just sit on my ass for a while.

I think Brian has been feeling the same way too.

What about the new Templeshock website? I don’t think all the work I’ve put into it is for nothing. First of all, I now know CSS2 and HTML, phpBB administration, and Photoshop. Second, if I want to do something with strdup.com or something else, I can reuse a lot of what I did. Heh heh. CSS2 is cool.

The final tricky thing is that even though this is it for Templeshock (at least from my perspective) I still need to SELL TICKETS for the Roseland show, because we have to recoup the sizable deposit we put down (well I didn’t put it down but I guess Josh did?) So I guess I’ll still try to hit my friends up to buy tickets but it won’t be the all-out push it was going to be. (BTW I think this is the worst part of playing music — cajoling your friends to come to your stupid gigs.) Maybe they will want to come to see my band possibly implode on stage?

I feel a great weight lifting soon.

Just got back from rafting the Deschutes river, for the occasion of Jennette’s birthday, a friend from when I did improv. Took off early from work on Friday, met up at Jennette’s, took big green unairconditioned van to campground, and set up base camp. There were around 16 of us. It is the dry season so there were signs everywhere saying NO SMOKING NO FIRES (and in fact there was a sizeable fire on the last day that we suspect was caused by someone flicking a butt. Smoking is bad mmmkay?)

Set up my tent. Man it’s a nice tent. Thanks dad. I felt very preppy though because it said “LL Bean” on it. I don’t think people know about or buy LL Bean on the West coast much, I mean, we do have great outdoor companies like Columbia and REI so maybe that’s why. I kept it from blowing away with big rocks. Proceeded to drink lots of PBR.

The next day we went rafting. The Deschutes is not as rough as say the New River in W.Va. so guides weren’t strictly necessary and there were a LOT of people rafting. We only had 1 water gun and so were extremely outmatched in the water fights. I used sunscreen but still got burned a little. Everyone in my raft didn’t paddle worth a damn! BTW, here are the 3 rules of rafting we came up with:

1) Paddling will help you stay in the raft.
2) Wedge your feet under the pontoons.
3) If you fall out, put your feet downstream.

Came back, had burgers, and more PBR. Then it started raining.

Huh? Rain? Eastern Oregon in the summer? It’s like a desert! But rain it did as we hurried to get the rain covers on all our tents. Slept pretty well — only got a few drops in the tent even though it came down buckets. It was still raining when we packed up this morning.

My plan for the rest of the day is an 8 hour-long shower.

Went to Harvey’s comedy club tonight. Mildly funny, I guess. Free tickets, but they get you on the overpriced ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE food.

Came home and did more work on my nemesis. Oh yes, I will finish you, you bitch. Did the reviews and  live dates pages, and added pics to the band page. I’d have this done a long time ago if working on it didn’t feel so much like work. Hopefully this feeling will go away once it goes live.

Going rafting next weekend, so that should be fun, I guess. Got new Tevas. All this week I’m in a PCI Express class, yawn. Pretty cool. I’d like a system with it. Too bad there still are no PCIE cards on the market yet…

I must think I will be using this blog a lot since I installed Deepest Sender, and got it hooked up so it automatically pulls in track info from Winamp…

KPSU thing got cancelled last night. Oh well.

Gonna go take a nap, methinks.

http://ruthlessreviews.com/top10/10blackmetal.html

Just got back from the U&I gig. Went pretty well, except for the blister forming on my right middle finger. Gotta play more…

Anyways, the most interesting thing was that Valerie, our manager, brought her friend Casey, who was from New York. He has in town because he was in the band for Rent, which was in town for a week.

I SAW Rent on Thursday! And here I was chatting with one of the musicians from it. He said it was pretty difficult, some of the material was in six flats. Woah. Anyways, I mentioned that I noticed how during the performance I saw, Mark (the character in Rent who is supposed to be a musician, struggling to come up with the perfect song) started to play his song but nothing happened. He laughed and said “oh you were at THAT show” and said he tried to cover as well as he could.

Anyways, thought that was funny.

The show went fine other than that, too. Apparently letting the bass sit a little bit lower was a good thing.

Also, look for the review of us on portlandmusicians.com. They were taking pictures tonight and are going to do a write-up.

BTW, North Portland is pretty sketchy, in case you didn’t know…

Last thing. One of the bands was named Pain Theory. I just thought this was funny because isn’t “pain” French for “bread”? Bread Theory. Also, I think _____ Theory band names are kinda cliched, but whatever. I liked their music, FWIW…

don’t feel like doing anything today but I have so much to do. Went to Frys…my pc is so old I basically would need all new ram, cpu, and mobo.

The last CPU I bought was a P2-400, 6 years ago. Since then I got a P3-933 free (via the short-lived Intel Home PC program) a dual P3-733 (scrounged from trash @ work) and now I’m running a P4-1.5 scrounged from work too. With 512MB rdram it’s still good enough to play Doom 3 (although not in super-nice mode) so grrr maybe I can wait a little longer.

I also checked out the digital cameras there. I think the Nikon SD10 would be better than the SD110 — more conducive to carrying around in the pocket, yeah.

We got a gig tonight at the U&I, and I really need to work on the website…so off I go.