bad nights, loose whiskey...

["r. dennis" <tonobung@panix.com>]

yes.

a general swapping of "worsts" won't ever
make those nights go away, but at least they
make you feel that you're not alone...

so here's mine.

last spring tono-bungay was playing at
the insideous spectacle fest. in philly.

we were in the hot spot of the sat. night show,
11:00, right before bevis frond. i had been
anticipating this show for months.

except that not a damn thing in my
hoplessly convoluted setup would
cooperate, and the totally packed house
was treated to 25 minutes of me on my
knees, ripping the whole thing apart and
attempting to reconfigure it on the fly
(which never flew) and in the process
having a very public, total meltdown.

i guess, in the end, if you're gonna have
a nervous breakdown - it should at least be
sold out.

anyway - in the end bob b. & i swapped sides
of the stage - i just moved over to his rig.
(he can REALLY play & doesn't need
to rely on gizmos) and i used his (working)
setup and the 3 fx pedals he employs
(one of which, an old digitech 8 second
sampler i was not able to figure out
in the time we had left for our set.)

talk about wanting to crawl into a hole....
Nick Saloman was very nice about it as we 
were hustling our shit off the stage
("dun takkit s'bud, man, i'appens t'walluv us!")
then the b. frond proceeded to take over, & 
totally destroy t.- b.

or so i thought.

but i heard later that someone called twisted village
a short time later & ordered a copy of _wunderkammer_
based upon "this great tono-bungay show i saw in
philly the other night"

hmmm...

another person has told me since then that
he totally enjoyed that set, that he just
assumed it was, like, performance art or
something.

hmmm-mmm....

moral of story - 
i should not have killed myself over what
felt like an eternal embarrasment, and
my death was totally in vain.

whoops!

rip,

rbrt


ps - the problem was a compound-failure.
a bad cable in one part of the chain, and
a funky input on a pedal somewhere else.
watch out for compound failures. they are
just about impossible to diagnose outside
of a clean room.