Don’t Dream It

This.

Anyway, Kilroy and I were way up north when I got a call from a good friend of mine. He told me to head to a Best Buy further south and I immediately forced Kilroy to quit playing Dead Rising and drive us down there immediately, god damn it.

After a few calls, I managed to figure out why we were going to Best Buy; they were having a contest or something. On Rock Band, a game that’s become something of an obsession with most of the people I know. There’s probably something similar going on with your friends, too.

But do any of them cart a gigantic sound system, several flat screens, a projector, and backup microphones to different bars in town to play it?

The people we were meeting at the Best Buy were three other folks from said group, generally known as the roadies since we show up at as many Rock Band nights as possible and help with setup and breakdown.

(We don’t run a merch booth, though.)

One member of the band was there already. We had to wait an annoyingly long time for the other two to show up, since they had to battle work and traffic. We all came ready to pull out the hardest songs we could possibly do on expert difficulty with unerring accuracy and our usual rockstar mannerisms. The contest, however, called for everyone to play on easy, so we ended up doing this.

(In my opinion, it’s not exactly epic, and Kilroy’s singing along ruins the video completely. But we only had one other band to compete against and they were completely outclassed in both style and accuracy.)

So they gave us a limo ride up north for the concert going on, and we psyched ourselves up to play in front of thousands of people in between some actual band’s sets. It’s a pretty clever idea, having something like that in between bands, considering the stupid amount of time it takes any band bigger than, say, Animo, to set up all their equipment.

Despite the sideshow mentality behind everything, we went out there and gave our all on the stage, getting more of a reaction from the crowd than the actual bands seemed to*. Naturally, Kilroy’s camera completely failed to work during the performance, so you’ll just have to take my word for it, it was awesome. Our vocalist hit the guide button on the horribly-designed new mic and everyone (including us) kept singing along regardless. A quality performance, all around.

Once we got off the stage and into the hall, I realized that, in an odd way, we’d made it. Every person who plays Rock Band dreams of playing in a real band on a stage somewhere, melting faces in a way only a live performance can. Well, we played as a fake band on a stage in front of a ton of people, so we got it a little over half right.

Afterwards, we hit the limo back into town and I sent a text message to the guy who runs Rock Band night…

Now that we’re famous, we’re heading up to the bar for a special appearance! No autographs, please.

Shows at smaller venues are better, anyway.

*actually true!