Whenever we were looking for gigs in Wilmington, people kept saying “you know, the Soapbox doesn’t pay that much, but, you’d do really well there.” Well, I try not to ever go into financial specifics in our Journal, but I think they paid us just fine, and we DID do pretty well there. Despite a “slow night in Wilmington”, we had a pretty good crowd, and we proceeded to rock the bubbles out of the scarecrow (that’s a common Southern aphorism, donchaknow? – ahem – don’t y’all know?).
Our audience consisted of two vast and vastly different contingents. There were the North Carolina lesbians and Rowan’s family. Both are enthusiastic, hugely appreciative of us and one another, and both are really, really loud. Between Deanne’s wild whooping, Georgia’s screaming (was she screaming to get Heather out of her clothes? perhaps…) and Joanne’s… enthusiasm, it was a good thing we were playing through a decent system. The energy was immense.
Having Rowan and Sharif join us on the road brought me up so high – the ferocity of the bones, the liquid emotion of Sharif’s keyboard – I Love my band. The night before, at Port City Java, we were forced to be SO reserved in order not to blow the place out, all the pent up aggression and tension and FORCE just came roaring out of us. Amplified by a fantastic audience, we poured ourselves into the Soap Box and … and… we win!
There were a couple of high-profile local names, other musicians, producers and club owners in the audience. We won rave reviews from them. We had a bunch of passer-bys that paid the cover so they could see what was going on, and stuck with us till well past midnight. We had people come out from word of mouth, from that fantastic article in Encore (thanks Shea!), from the open mics we played – essentially, Saturday night was the way this OUGHT to work. We spend the week wandering a town, spreading the word, playing the open mics, getting press – and then play a kick ass show on the weekend where we Live up to everything as advertised.
We might’ve even got it all on tape. Score.
