Hi everybody, i’m Conan Neutron, I play in the band Replicator from Oakland, CA. There are many tour diaries, but this one is mine. Thanks to the SSC gang for asking us to do it here.
At this point in the tour we really had hit the wall as far as homesickness goes, two kind of lackluster shows in a row was making us all feel a little road weary. Luckilly Seattle decided it was going to treat us right, and the spontaneous cheering that we sprang into when we saw Puget Sound (and by extension, the Pacific… meaning OUR coast), was definitely indicative of a larger feeling.
Luckilly we were in for a hell of a good time in the beautiful SeaTac area, and, as it turns out, one of the best shows of the tour.
Just ask James from Police Teeth/USS Horsewhip there, he’s so stoked on the show he is IN. BEN’S. FACE.
James from Police Teeth/USS Horsewhip messing with Professor Ben.
We rolled into Seattle about an hour before show time, the show was at the Funhouse, Seattle’s longest lived punk club, that’s located right next to Paul Allen’s monstrosity the Experience Music Project, and the Space Needle.
Amazingly enough, we’ve played Seattle many, many times, and i’ve visited before on vacation, but I have never ever been to the Space Needle. Strange!
Tensions were running a little hot in certain enclaves of the Replicator camp, mostly due to the sheer amount of driving the last few days. Homesickness, stir craziness, short tempers, etc.
Tonight’s show was with two awesome bands Madraso and the Ruby Doe, both of which I know from the ol’ internets.
Sure enough we roll up and the club (despite having a clown head on the front, which usually would portend doom) is pretty rad. In fact it’s downright comfortable, if you don’t count the WAY TOO LOUD jukebox that’s playing good music, but… still!
Wait… what? Is that.. a GREEN ROOM?!?
ahhhhhhhh… Funhouse you win it.
Hifi vs. Potential Energy from No More Music comes on.
holy crap! I freak out and immediately ask the sound dude if he threw that on, or if that was something that came on the jukebox. He says that he put that on.
“Dude! We just came off tour with these guys!! er… rather, they just came off tour with us… i played half a set with them a couple days ago I was playing this song a few days ago!”
We have a good laugh about that, and I inform our tourmates of the whole hilarious exchange through text messaging.
Ben, Amanda, and myself head over to a local pizza place with the Ruby Doe guys and hang out for a bit while Todd and Chris restring guitars. Good times ensue, my friend Chris has id problems (his license is expired) and a good amount of time is spent trying to ensure that he can get in for the show.
The next thing you know, Madraso is up! We’ve been trying to set up something with these guys for awhile, in fact we almost setup a show with them on our most recent tour before this in May, but it didn’t come together. They bring it live. They seem to get Shellac comparisons like we used to, which is weird because to me they are way heavier and more aggresive sounding then that.
Basically they are muscular, musically interesting and precise, but still powerful enough to crush some serious skulls.
And I mean that in the best possible way too!
In any case, we thoroughly enjoyed their set and were pumped to play to the good sized crowd.
The sound guy Cody throws on the whole No More Music album by Ifihadahifi, which is pretty damn rad and gets me pumped to put on even more of a great show.
setlist:
Fashionably Latent
King Shit of Fuck Mountain
Warrior Needs Food, Badly
Delicious Fornicake
Baby, I Want to Terraform Your Planet
The Tiny Machines are (Still) Out For Revenge
Login With My Fist
It was a great set! Very well received, a lot of energy to feed off of and a hell of a lot of hijinks.
Since there’s a fitted pipe that goes up the right hand side of the stage, I made sure to incorporate that into my “off guitar” antics and put on a good show of it. Sadly no pictures exist of that, but there are plenty of pictures from James of Police Teeth/USS Horsewhip, revenging himself upon Ben for getting all up in his personal space in our last show in Bellingham, observeth:
James from Police Teeth/USS Horsewhip messing with Professor Ben
James, again messing with Ben
I don’t trust those crazy eyes one bit!
He was in rare form
Ben leaning into the rock while Todd thrangs it.
Conan is impressed with his own guitar playing.
Conan singing
yet another picture of Ben, just time looking down.
Chris with his eyes closed.
Conan staring
Floor thranging
Chris is red
Neutron strut
It was a damn fine show, top 5 of the tour material to be sure and mostly pretty much awesome.
It was great to see some old friends from the internet, Kurt Morris who used to do action attack helicopter and writes for Razorcake now, Chris Devlin, who does the excellent Beerly retarded podcast and reviews beer, our old pal Greg who transplanted from the bay… so many people came out! Including a fellow that was at some of our first Seattle shows with The Whip and Akimbo. Rad! It was a great time with a great crowd.
There was a vertical pipe on the right side of the stage, that I made good use of during Login… swinging around and such.
Our merch area:
Glowing spider penis!
The Ruby Doe played after us, which made it quite the rock sandwich as they also bring it in a methodically brutal way. I could give a laundry list of bands I could RIYL, but let’s say this: Just like Madraso, they were an excellent match for us and brought their own unique voice to stuff.
Ruby Doe
At the last song somebody turned on a smoke machine which filled up the entire club with a surreal smoke that made the place like the 7th level of hell.
Chris and the smoke machine.
Holy fucking dogshit!
Not freaking bad, $140 from the door, $60 from merch sales, and $27 more from last minute merch saling. We ended up hanging out at Aaron’s RubyDoe HQ, which was super awesome.
Sandwiches! late night… good times.
Thanks for hosting us buddy.
And thank you Seattle, for one of the best shows of tour.
Like I said, I would gladly repeat this show here, or down in our neck of the woods, easy!
Honestly Portland could suck, and this could be the last night of tour and I would be totally fine with it.
luckilly Portland did not, in fact, suck at all.
-C.
5 Comments »
hahahah.
Yeah man, the head dude actually started rolling his eyes at me, by the time I got to the last update.
Thanks for going through all the work to see our little troupe do our thang.
And yes, Podcast!
It was good to finally see you. Come back again soon!
The good resource should be brought in bookmarks
Man….I just found this.
Don’t mean to get all spammy but Songbird on Linux (Ubuntu in my case) is pretty awesome in terms of it’s xml capabilities.
I had it on shuffle and one of my shitty band’s songs came on……lo and behold a list of links (one of which being a link to this very page) mentioning our band’s name. Pretty slick feature. Does Itunes even do this?
Conan, etc. you are always welcome up in here. Think I missed you this time around though….
I suck.
-Aaron
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Comment by Beer Retard — September 12, 2007 @ 4:20 pm
I think I’m up for a Darwin award for those ID misadventures. Thanks for helping make sure I got in. I was so beat when I finally made it back to the Funhouse, I don’t think I enjoyed Replicator rocking it as much as I normally would’ve. Still great to finally see you play. Next time…podcast.