So, what time did you get there?

Let's see. Well, we stayed at my house, actually, my parents house in Wilmington. No furniture or anything like that. No refrigerator, either, so we had a bunch of warm food and stuff. John and Brian got super-baked the night before, and ended up face down on the floor, and the left their pot and pipe there, so we had to go back after the show and pick it up before my parents got there.

What time did we leave? We were late, whatever time we left. See we were supposed to get there at 11:00, cause we were supposed to go on at 12:00. Right. But still it was funny, because we didn't get to play at 12:00. Silk had been doing a sound check for, like, an hour before we got there.

So we get there, and it said in our little contract thing that it would be an auditorium show, and that there were supposed to be 2000 plus people there. And it was outside. And we were supposed to have a little dressing room, but we weren't going to use it or anything like that. So were there, and these people are saying we have to park our car in the one place, but we just drove through the gate to a place behind the stage, and the people said that we could unload there, but we'd have to move our car afterwards. So we're like "Sure sure" all smiling and stuff, but then they went away, and we just left the car there the whole time, right in the middle of everywhere.

People in the audience sitting on it?

What audience? Ha, all of 150 people. Maybe five people came to see us. The girl that got us the slot there (apparently we were the "underground favorites"), came up to us and said "You don't have a dressing room. Silk took the both of them", and we were like "Oh, ok."

There were only two dressing rooms?

Yeah, Silk and everybody else. Or like Silk and the "fly dancers", and their Road manager, Wedgie. Wedgie was like "You guys are Freaks, man". Apparently now, Silk had a $30,000 garuntee, 2 free meals for up to 50 people anywhere in Wilmington, an air-conditioned, cable TV dressing room (and they stole ours, a little shack with curtains around it or something, for their "fly dancers"). They had everybody, and they promptly told us they were gonna bring the funk that day.

So were out there, waiting for sound check and all, and Silk's like "Wedgie (who didn't really resemble a wedge, more like a pear), we're gonna bring the funk out today. You boys gonna see some funk." And you know they have these like, techno-synthesizers. They don't even have a real bass player or nothing. The funk on Yamamha keyboards.

We're going to bring out the pre-recorded funk today.

Yeah the funk we stole from the real funk-o-fonics. They must have sound checked for four hours. So we get up on stage and they have these little lame-ass deli trays in the damn hot sun. So were just sitting, and the first thing they wanted us to draw the damn stage map of where we want our stuff on stage, and we have like, 3 things (including ourselves), so we're like "Well, we hold all the stuff we use, except for John's drums." And he's like "Well I want you to draw a map of where you want the mikes and the drums...." and so we just drew a bunch of little circles on a sheet of paper like, blip blip blip, "There you go." So then he's like, "I want you to set up yourselves off the stage and wait for us to finish sound check." So that was like 12:30, maybe.

So it's 30 minutes after it was supposed to start, and there's this one guy up there that looks like the lead singer for living color...

With the long dreadlocks behind his head and whatnot.

Yeah. And he has this cordless mike, and he's standing up on the front of the stage, and all he does for the next two and a half hours is "Yup, Yup, Yup, 1 2 3 Check, Yup, Yup. Bring up the rolloff on number 13 mike. Yup, Yup. Bring up the rolloff on number 468 mike. Yup, Yup." and then they have this one bass riff going on like "Bwaurrreeureeuruuuuhhhheeureeur" And this all gets mixed together, and were just sitting there. And all these people have already come, all like, 250 people, eight dollars a pop, out of 2000 plus. So right now, we're trying to figure out how much UNCW is loosing at this moment. So we started goofing around, kinda running around in the audience, doing nothin' really.

At this point, we kinda take it upon ourselves to start stealing the staff shirts. There was like, this pickup truck full of them, and we were like, putting 'em in our car. We started carrying them around, and Brian Puberty had one and this big Fabio-looking guy saw him and said "You all the staff?", and Brain was like, "Nnnnnno, I'm playing", and fwomp he took them and put 'em back in the truck. Sort of like man's inhumanity towards man or something.

So it was like 1:30, and some of the punks in Wilmington had shown up, and they had this bike. Chris Murry liked to ride his bike around and had ridden it to the show, and he was riding it around for a while. And everyone that we knew was standing up by the side of the stage, while this bass like was going on. We were getting sapped, it was so monotonous. We were giving them all drinks and stuff, trying to hook them up. So we were laying on the stage with all this sound checking going on, and everyone is out there on blankets, craning their necks, trying to figure out what's going on; shouting things "When are you going on?", and we were saying "Tomorrow". At this point, we were looking to see if they had produce to throw at us, cause we could tell they were not going to be a friendly crowd.

So did it look like a lot of Silk fans, weird people, or just aggressively normal people.

We were the one unrepresented genre. There was like us, the Craven Dogs (a kind of a hippie band with a fiddle and stuff), and then the Sex Police (which is that Sorority-Fraternity kinda funk thing)

White Funk college band that'll never make it in the big leagues?

(Laughter) Yeah sorta "We got horns and stuff, so we're cool." I guess it was kinda aimed at that hippie, funk, soul, R&B kinda thing. I don't know. You can sit through the craven dogs, and kinda duke it up during the Sex Police, and go hogwild for Silk. But there was nobody there at all really.

So John gets the wise idea... well you got to understand that the stage is right here, and it comes up just four or five steps off of the ground, one of those pre-fab things. So he looks around for a second, and kinda inches the bike up the stairs. And he gets it up to the top. And he gets on it and starts riding it. And Wedgie, who's already mad at us because we don't have a drum carpet, and he had to cut us one out of his personal Silk stock drum carpet (even though they don't really play the drums, cause they got the drum machine going on with the bassline during the sound check). I mean they had a set of drums up on stage, and Wedgie would occasionally "Dink Dink" add an accent to the drum machine. Wedgie was not what we'd call a... well what Wedgie was apparently good at was eating.

So Wedgie was standing over there being a stage dude, kinda waddling back and forth. And John goes riding across the stage, and people are actually interested in this since this is the first real thing they've seen happen on stage. And it's not a big stage, you couldn't really turn around on the bike...

Or gotten up any speed?

Now it's 2:30, and at this point we're already sunburned, so we know we're screwed. So someone finally says "Alright, bring your stuff out and set up", and we bring out our three little pitiful amps and John's kit. It's looks like we're being swallowed by the stage or something. We're so far apart that we're waving to each other. Then they plug us all in, and they're like "That's all you got?", "Yeah", "Ok, you're going on at 3". So we figure three hours after we're supposed to go on isn't that bad. So it gets around three and they're like "Alright, play, play.", and they haven't given us time to tune (we told the guy we wanted to tune and he said "Well you can do that later").

So Charlie turned on his amp and started tuning, and the guy at the sound board got really frustrated or something, screaming "That ain't professional! Play, just play!". And charlie didn't even hear him, cause he's intent on what he's doing. So the sound guy stormed of the stage. After the bicycle incident, I think they decided that we weren't getting a sound check. The were like "Your first song will be the sound check."

So we played the second one, and by the time we finished that people had gotten over their initial daze. So they started yelling: "Boo!" "Get off the stage!" While this was going on, Silk was in their dressing room (they didn't come out for any of the other bands), and Susan (the girl from Wilmington that was their gopher) asked if there was anything else they wanted, and they were like "Well, while we're waiting, why don't you give me a little bit of head?" Susan replied, "I don't think so". Silk then asked for "Ten large black women, 'cause we like 'em cushy."

So we finished the second song, and they were these potential cushy women (that, we learned later went backstage with Silk) yelling at us. Then there was this one hippy guy that was like, "Nirvana!", and there was this other group of people that was saying, "You're not Nirvana!", and we started looking behind us going, "Nirvana? Where?", and they were like, "NO! YOU'RE not Nirvana!" So I said "Hey, we're Resol, from Seattle, so everybody raise their flannel in support of our grunge movement." People didn't know what to think.

So we played there more songs and it was evident we were not wanted on stage. At one of the middle songs, Brian said "This one's for the Lord." and people were like "I cannot believe that blasphemy!". People were starting to yell more and things were getting a little ugly. So we played the last one, and we're jumping around, and Brian Puberty is squealing into the mike, just going crazy. It kinda ends when Charlie broke some strings and we all were fed up and frustrated so it just peters out. So we started to pack our stuff up. I think I broke a bass string.

Then this big cushy lady in the front yelled, "You're not James Brown!" And I said, "Hey, you want us to do some James Brown?" And all these people stood up and started raising their fists at us screaming "No! Get off the stage!" So Brian Puberty got to the mike and said "You know I know you guys love us so much, so why don't you come out to the Taco Bell with us right over there and we'll eat and you can PUKE UP ON OUR FACES AND WE'LL LICK IT UP AND EAT IT CAUSE WE LOVE IT SO.." and at this point the mike was cut off, and they started almost sweeping us off the stage. The other band's running up there already.

And so we were getting our stuff together, and the roadies were throwing our stuff off the stage (we found one of John's floor toms stuck in the ground, kinda fucked up), and nobody was talking to us. So we were sitting out behind the stage, and all our friends were laughing and saying "That was so Punk", and stuff like that. So we thought "Hey, let's go out and try to see our shirts and seven-inches", cause we didn't have a lot of money to get home. And like, John and Charlie were like "No way, I'm not going out there." 'cause the crowd was still kinda hostile, still kinda lingering with this bad karma, but Brian said "Hell yeah, I'll go."

Then later on, we saw Wedgie. So I said "Hey man, how do you think it went?" and he said "You guys are wild man, Wild" (just like on the Beastie Boys album) "you tore it up!" So we sat there, and we don't have any money at all, and we're waiting to get paid (our contract garunteed us $100), and finally they tell us that they're going to pay us by check. So we have no money, nothing, and we're like "Fuck this place, man" And we're getting ready to go, and Silk is getting ready to come on, but they're too lazy to even walk like the 100 yards from the dressing room to the stage. So they had this big Trailways bus drive up within two feet of their door, and they get on the bus. The bus drives over to within four feet of the stage, and they get off the air conditioned bus and walk on the stage.

So that they can sweat and look "proper"

Yeah. We had to drive John and Brian down to get the pot and the bong at our parents' house, and then we drove home, which was just a long, damn thing. We got the check a week and a half later (after calling them twice). When we left there was like 150 people there, so they lost a shitload of money on that. After that, we didn't pay real shows for a long time, just house shows.

But there had to be a certain amount of cool to it. Now if there were more people that hated you....

It was great that people hated us, in general. It reminded me of when I saw Sonic Youth with Neil Young and Social Distortion at the Dean Dome. People liked Social Distortion, and then Sonic Youth came on. There was like, a million rednecks there going "Turn it off!", and they kept turning their knobs up more and more. It was such a great feeling, people were actually leaving because of Sonic Youth.

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