Concert Countdown Week: #3 - Theta Chi Survivor, 2000
When starting my first year at UVA, I became fast friends with a guy named Russ Jenkins two doors down in the dorm. He had an acoustic guitar in hopes of learning how to play, and I, samurailess, wanted someone to rock out with. So we would sit in the hallway or out on the front stoop at night and play Dave Matthews Band songs together. If a girl walked by, we stopped whatever we were playing and immediately jumped into Crash Into Me. The ladies liked that. And we were shallow like that.
Anyway, fast forward two years, and Russ was now a brother at Theta Chi. At this point "Dave and Russ" had played a few acoustic shows together around Charlottesville, and we were still close friends...now we practiced guitar on the Theta Chi front deck instead of the dorm hallways. Russ was also the new event coordinator for his frat, and booked Okay Samurai for their massively hyped "Survivor" theme party. This was our first frat party, at UVA no less...everyone was very excited.
They went all-out with the theme: tiki torches, sand-covered floors, palm trees and palm fronds, and a kiddie pool filled with live goldfish...which the brothers would grab up and eat whole (usually followed by a blur of high-fives). We began the first of our two sets close to 11PM, and everyone's energy was through the roof. The acoustics of the room weren't that great, so everything seemed louder than usual. We did a cover of California Love and some of my female friends came up on the stage and started dancing with Eugene and Don. We ended the first set a little after midnight, and I took a deep breath and suddenly felt really sick. I could taste blood in the back of my throat from singing so loud; my voice was strained. As we got off the stage to head up to Russ's room for a break, Andrew revealed his blood-covered hands. He had been playing so hard that the friction from the wooden drumsticks was rubbing the skin off his hands. While we walked upstairs, I was uncertain that we'd be able to pull off a second set.
It turned out, in a semi-cliched way, that we persevered through the Survivor party. I silently gulped down bottle after bottle of water and regained my voice. Andrew wrapped duct tape around his hands as makeshift bandages. That's right, my little brother took a roll of duct tape and looped it around his bleeding palms in order to play more. Pretty soon we were back down on stage, churning out a heavily distorted electric rock version of Nsync's Bye Bye Bye (complete with Justin Timberlake dance moves, of course). When we finished, something new happened to us: ENCORE. ENCORE. ENCORE. This was our first encore; we didn't expect it and didn't know what to play. Don began the chords to Sweet Home Alabama, the quintessential southern frat favorite, and the crowd went crazy. We had never played the song together before as a full band, but all of us caught on to the simple three-chord progression pretty quickly and made it through. And hey, if we didn't, everyone was trashed out of their minds on beer and goldfish anyway.
(Tomorrow: Crowd surfing in a southern Virginia barn...)
Tuesday, August 23 at 9:00 PM
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