December 4

I have to thank all our friends in Auburn, AL for putting the “party” in house party. I was slightly ambivalent before our arrival of playing the show, knowing that we were to be performing outdoors and it had been morbidly raining all day. We pulled up into a cul-de-sac of woody cabin-like party houses, nestled between solid towering trees and a hilly cemetery with worn headstones jutting out of the ground like abscessed teeth. We were warmly greeted by an eclectic group of the cul-de-sac’s inhabitants, college students with firm handshakes and an earnest enthusiasm to show us a good time. The plan was to set up our equipment in the main yard facing the cluster of rustic student houses, isolated by the vacancy of the graveyard and massive empty field behind where the party would be held. The outdoor stage was composed of large plastic pallets stolen from a grocery store, which plotted the wet leafy ground like hopscotch boxes. They had hammered together a drum riser about knee high with left over wood from broken furniture that had not gone into the fire pit yet, and had us run power from the kitchen of the house across the yard. The whole operation was beautifully provisional. In order to evade the constant light drizzle of unfortunate rain, we hoisted up a large plastic tarp over the yard and tied it overhead to the loose branches of trees in the surrounding---making the whole façade of the stage’s completion look like a junk yard jam festival. It felt like we were erecting the set of some scene in a teen movie; live bands and kegs with the clamor of an abstruse drunken crowd sloshing about the wet yard nodding their heads and swirling their hips to the commotion. As the sun was setting and students were finishing up any remaining homework before bleaching their brains with keg beer, the first band took the makeshift stage and let out a booming electric wail. The party had begun. Kids started showing up with briefcases of canned beer and oversized plastic bottles full of miscellaneous liquors. The cavort commenced and we all played long into the night. It was a beautiful scene; the deep sea of onlookers clenching their ruby red plastic cups, swaying back and forth in wonderment to the crunchy sound of live music as their breath rose up into the cool ebony sky forming a hazy liquor-soaked cloud above the ivory beams of shop lights. The jubilation eventually was thwarted by the arrival of campus police, who encircled the scene and yelled demands for the bands to stop playing; their hands cupped around their squawking mouths as if they were performing duck calls. We cut the music and sadly wound up cables and packed the gear back into our trailers, but the avidity of the audience would not perish. The crowd stayed and did not follow the police as they withdrew. I ran behind the stage and put on some dance music at a reasonable volume and the festivities resumed. For the rest of the night I walked around the setting with a massive smile stretched across my face, elated with the fact that your college years are the best years of your life…and I get to celebrate them at dozens of colleges across the country--without the homework. It was about 4:30 a.m. when I decided that sleep should be next on the agenda so I wondered into one of the neighborly houses and found a spare bed buried in junk. I quietly pushed the mess aside, enough for me to stretch out my sleeping bag and fell asleep to the sound of some girls in the other room on acid listening to prog rock. Stay young college kids.