Get on the Cool Bus!(author?)
Macrophage, a three piece Industrial Metal Rap, uh, band consisting of Jai Woodfolk on drums, Nexus rapping, and me (Gra) playing guitar. Oh, and the fourth member, the CD player, which is pouring out all of the cool techno sounding junk that's really the core of the band.

I’d been planning this tour for months and was finishing up all of the final details at 5am the morning we needed to leave.

I’d set up the gig at the “Necro Tattoo parlor” in South Carolina. After an easy 7 hour drive, we searched around each of the 5 truck stops off exit #78 for 20 minutes, and eventually decided that one of the abandoned looking buildings might be a club. As we pulled up, we dismissed it, since it was clearly labeled “Club Latino”, with garish murals of banditos and donkeys. As we began to pull away I noticed a small sign that said “Club 221”. Our reaction to finding out that this was our venue was simultaneous, “Oh shit.”

At around 8pm, we load our gear into a small room next to the stage. The opening bands show up, by my watch, 2 hours late. The first band sounded roughly like “RarrrarBlahBlah-RarrarGrrrr-Blah”, Nexus thought they sounded pretty good, Jai thought the drummer was good, I thought it was the audio equivalent to what you find in unwashed toilets.

The second band had songs like “cold dead bitch” and “hot black chicks”. The audience liked them bunches, which I didn’t think boded well for us, with our songs of tolerance and community.

I think our set started well. I had written intro music that started us off with crazy breakbeats and techno, we came on the stage full of punk rage, and Nexus’ microphone was dead. I could see him emoting, jumping and yelling, but he might as well have been Marcel Marceau for all the sound that was coming out. When we started the second song, we could hear Nexus well, in between the waves of feedback coming from his mic.

Pretty much the rest of the show was an hour of us not being able to hear the backing tracks at all. Let me explain this to you. The backing tracks are recorded on a CD and play at a consistent set tempo. When we can’t hear them we often play at a different tempo then the tracks. This makes us sound vaguely like your average junior high school marching band.

I feel that the real highlight of the show was my connection with the audience. Here is a snippet of our dialog. (After the song “Miscegenate”, which suggests that people should mate interracially.)

We finished our set, packed, got a whopping $45 for our troubles, and got the hell out of there. Later that night we slept in our bus. We used our flashlight to charge the star stickers on the roof, and drifted off to sleep, professional musicians.

Next week: Ashville North Carolina, Queer Community, and Tennessee punk rawk.