My second annual 29th birthday coincided with my new life as a freelancer. The good news about my freelancing career is that so far I have had plenty of work. The bad news is that it’s a little too much work. I have been very busy and very tired and haven’t really had time to blog. So that’s why I’m just getting around to writing about my birthday party. Which was AWESOME.

Some friends, my Mister and I had been noodling around in the basement for a couple of months with instruments making something resembling a band. We played a lot of Weezer because it turns out it’s not that hard. Emily was pretty good with the rapping so we decided to put a couple of verses of “Shoop” in the middle of “Tired of Sex”. That worked out so well that I wrote some raps of my own and we put them into the middle of “Undone” and “Surf Wax America” too. The “Surf Wax” rap is based on the Patrick Swayze character in “Point Break”. We discovered that we weren’t terrible. We gave ourselves a name: The MC Superman Skivvies. And eventually, we got the bug to play in front of people. We happen to know a lot of very talented people who would be fun to share a stage with. Hence: The First Periodic Baxtle of the Bands was planned and scheduled to take place on my birthday. We somehow managed to cram 6 bands and 60-some people into our living room.

The other bands who played were:
Supercolliding Superconductor (involving the awesome Yuna on keyboard and vocals and Arsenio on lead vocals and megaphone)
3X Wogato (another cover band playing Clash, Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello and Roy Orbison)
Floppy Donkey Dick (a brother and sister rock duo)
Tough Guy Mosh (a duo of epic proportions)
Lady Drama (the incredibly talented and professional rock quartet)

The voting was done democracy-style via a ballot box. It was a realistic democracy too on account of the illegal ballot stuffing (not in our favor, by the way) and the fact that not very many people remembered to vote.

All the bands were really phenomenal so there was pretty stiff competition. Lady Drama plays a lot of gigs and all their songs are original. 3X Wogato brings years of experience to the table. But the MC Superman Skivvies won anyway. I like to think it had very little to do with the home court advantage. We recorded the whole show and I’ve uploaded our set onto our new MySpace page. You can hear people singing along and cheering during our set. I think mostly they were genuinely surprised that we were any good. We just need to keep the expectations low and we will do fine as a band. We don’t have any designs for world domination but we would like to play a couple more gigs.

I didn’t drink much before we played. Just enough to ease the nerves. But after we were done, how the bevvies flowed. By the time all the bands were done and the cake was cut, I was appropriately birthday drunk. So much so that I didn’t even recall the occurrence of the late-night jam session, much less taking part in it myself. Thank god for photographs. Now I remember the whole night like I was there. Which I was. I’m fairly certain.

Check out our set on our MySpace page and maybe become our friend! We will play another show soon! And we will have more songs ready by then too!

Also, check out the pictorial evidence of the mayhem here and here.

September 21, 2008
Categories: Dear Diary, Picture Pages, The Soundtrack . Tags: band, birthday . Author: Baxter . Comments: Leave a comment