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<Previous | Next> Saturday,
March 8th 2003 Kip's is an interesting place at midnight on a Saturday. At 11:30 it sucks. But at midnight it's hoppin'. It's the last-call drinking hole on the Berkeley campus repleat with as much kappa kappa gamma as you can standa standa standa. And they've never had bands there before. So the lovely folks of the Beth Champion Band scoped it out, set up this night to see how people would dig it, and invited us to open. Well, the experiment didn't really go as planned. Not a total failure, but strange for sure. See, the bar is pretty darn big. And there's a huge room in front with large tables, then a bar next to it, and then another room off that where we played. And there was no steel door, or curtain separating the rooms, but yet some imaginary force field kept the 300 or so people in the bar/big room area from spilling over into our completely empty space. Now is that weird? Would you rather squeeze yourself through hundreds of sweaty, drunk bodies to get to the bar, or would you rather spread out, have a seat in our empty room, and breathe a little before your long islands start coming back up? Well the answer was clear. They were a little too busy trying to get laid to bother coming over 4 feet to listen to the music. The Beth Champion Band went on a little later, and had a slightly better time of it. Their Radiohead cover sparked some brief interest, and if they had followed up with some Jay-Z, they woulda been set. But who knows? Maybe they just weren't used to it. Maybe it was just the first-night kinks that needed to be worked out. Or maybe these people just don't know shit-kicken good music when they hear it. Either way, the bar staff was friendly. The room sounded good. Dean from The Beth Champion Band set up the whole sound system, and it was great. We got lots of drink tickets and Karen even got a free piece of pizza! (thanks David!) There may be hope for this place yet. It could happen. Yeah, maybe...maybe.
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