All Things Indifferent

This first real summer-like weekend held a flurry of activity for me, culminating in the first live performance for Maximum Indifference in a little over a year. The seventh annual Loud Music Symposium (LMS7) was held at the Campbell Heritage theater on Sunday, April 30th, 2006, and brought together the likes of the San Francisco Renegades, Trip Device, the Renegade Minicorps, Earl Brown, Hookslide, and MI. It was a nice change to play in our own backyard as opposed to last year’s voyage up to the Herbst Theater in San Francisco.

The recently remodeled Heritage theater turned out to be a terrific venue, even if the loading dock left a little to be desired. What? No ramps? Well, it wasn’t like it was the first time we had to haul all our gear up a short flight of stairs or two. The scene backstage was crazy and chaotic, especially with that many acts and that many performers, but overall, the logistics worked out…. Mostly.

Our soundcheck went of without a hitch, which is a rare occurrence indeed. We even had a few minutes to spare. Adam and Jeff, the sound techs, were awesome—giving us the best monitor mix and most relaxed soundcheck I can remember. Our set itself went off great, too. We debuted a brand new song entitled “Rendered to Chaos” (check out a short video clip here), which came together quite splendidly. I’ll have you know the new pedal board performed flawlessly. I wish I could say the same for one of Mark’s guitars. During our second-to-last song, he broke a string halfway through, and as his backup guitar was in a different tuning from one of the previous songs… there was just no recovery. Rich and I attempted to finish off the song, but that too was derailed. Haven’t had a train wreck like that in a long time. Guess that’s what we get for not having played a show in over a year. Were we smarter musicians than we actually are, one of us would have launched into some sort of bass and/or drum solo or some other such nonsense. But, alas, such was not the case. Once Mark was up and running with a freshly re-tuned guitar, we finished off the set with a suitably frustration-driven version of “Jack Palance the Ninja”.

The highlight of the evening for me was actually being able to spend some time during the ensuing intermission to talk to some of the folks who came out to see MI. (Normally they have all left by the time we get our gear off the stage and secured) It was great to see some old faces, some young faces, and to put faces to those internet acquaintances… Much to my chagrin (and very much to my wife’s amusement) there were autographs to be signed for a handful of MI t-shirt-wearing youngsters with mile-wide smiles… Sometimes maybe Indifference is worth it.