Friday February 14th

8:00 PM

They had until 9:30 to make their point. They were supposed to start at 9:00, but they took the stage at ten till. Jeremy wanted people to get more than they paid for, and since they couldn't do it on the back end, they would do it in the front.

Jeremy swung his guitar neck like a conductor's baton to set the basic rhythm, and then Steve, the human metronome, took over. Jimmie, the lead guitar player noodled his way around Steve's beat, and a couple of measures later Kelly thundered in with her own brand of funk. Jeremy stomped on his wah pedal and added his own little "wok wok wok," and then raised his guitar neck high and brought it down hard. The band stopped. They had only been playing for about thirty seconds and it had all been improv; partly it was a warm up and partly it was just to get the attention of crowd. Actually, the word crowd might be an overstatement, the house was less than half full, and from the stage it was all too easy to pay attention to the part of the house that was more than half empty.

But they knew it was early, and that the crowd would come, and they wanted the people who had been here first to tell the people who got there late, "Man you should've been here."

The set list was planned, as was some of the witty between song banter. Kelly stepped up to the microphone and Jeremy stepped over to the laptop on top of her amp. Kelly said, "Hey Steve, what do you think we should do with this crowd?" Jeremy clicked on the first song on the list, which started a flashing countdown for the first song on both the laptops. When your drummer is deaf, you have to go to great lengths to make the show work right sometimes.

Kelly knew Steve couldn't hear her, but the audience didn't. The audience had no need to know that Steve, the human metronome, was deaf. When his laptop flashed green once Steve said, "Pick em up and shake em." The next green flash was the downbeat and the band all hit together. The song was tight, as funky as three-day-old sweat socks, and designed to get a crowd bouncing. The audience was not yet big enough to really be called a crowd and not yet drunk enough to bounce, but heads started bopping anyway.

They ripped through another couple of songs, before Jeremy managed to spot Sarah. She was dancing in place by a column. She was wearing all white. Once she realized he was looking at her, she flashed a smile that sent a column of warmth up Jeremy's spine.

The next song on the list was a slinked up version of the Police's "demolition man" they swung the rhythm, and Kelly gave it her best torch singer breath. The song was half whispered and half sung. Jimmie put his guitar down and produced a stack of boards from behind his amp. Jimmie had two hobbies in his life, music and Tae Kwon Do. For this song the band let him combine the two.

Jimmie pulled a couple of chairs on stage and positioned them facing each other about a foot apart. He held up one of the boards so the crowd could see it and then placed it over the gap between the chairs. He stood on the board. At this point some could say that Jimmie was cheating, because he had lined the board's grain up so that his weight would not break the board. If he had rotated the board 90 degrees there is a good chance that just standing on it would have broken it. (Half-inch pine is just not that hard to break.) Jimmie would argue that he was just being a showman, and demonstrating that the board was real and not pre-broken.

He got off the board and hung it by two corners from two of the strings he had hung from the lighting rig. He repeated the process five times. By the time he was done the lyrics had been exhausted and the rest of the band was vamping. Jeremy was noodling around with a solo.

It took almost no time for Jimmie to break the boards. He was showing off by hanging them, the technique was called speed breaking: breaking a board against its own momentum. He threw a punch, a back fist, a roundhouse kick, a hook kick, and a side kick. It would take longer to name the attacks than it took for him to throw them, but things weren't quite done. Jimmie grabbed one last board off the floor, locked his arms and held it facing Kelly. Barely moving her bass she picked her right leg up and shot a side kick through the board. In truth, it was the only kick she knew. Jimmie had spent about an hour one afternoon teaching her how to break a board with a side kick; it wasn't that hard, but it did look good, especially with that slit skirt. Judging by the applause, the audience, which was actually starting to look like a crowd, seemed to appreciate it.

While the crowd cheered Jeremy took a moment to throw a couple of handfuls of CDs out into the crowd. Their square envelopes made them fly pretty well. He even got a couple into the balcony level of the club. They were just a few songs Jeremy had recorded and mixed on his computer, as well as a file version of the band's web page.

The band tore through the rest of their set, threw out a few more CD's and then they were done.

Jeremy thought playing music was one of the best feelings in the world, and tearing down was one of the worst ways to come down from the performance high. Maybe someday, they would be the headliners, and they would have people to do it all for them. Until then though, they had to unplug their own amps, wrap up their own cables, and put their own axes back in their cases. The only good news was that it didn't take long with everybody helping, and the H.O.B. even had a crew that helped even more.

By ten o'clock the band was packed, Jeremy had found Sarah, and Jeremy Sarah, Kelly and Steve were trying to decide what to do with the rest of the evening. Jimmie had already decided he wanted to watch the headliners play, so they left him at the club, and set out on their own.