In this installment of the Fozzolog: SoN rocks the Zephyr like never before; Your trusty author is taken by sickness; Trouble (more than usual) at Hecticity Manor; More trouble elsewhere.

Sons Of Nothing at Zephyr Club

Friday, 24 October, was the date for the big Sons Of Nothing show at the Zephyr Club in downtown Salt Lake City. I arrived at the club around 1:30 p.m. to help set up and entered through the back door. At that time, I was the only person there aside from the two janitors.

I set up my computer gear toward the back of the east balcony as the telephone rang incessantly. After a few minutes, I heard the janitors making comments about how annoyed they were getting with the telephone ringing off the hook. Finally, the older guy cussed at the phone, came upstairs, and answered the phone only to find no one on the other end of the call. But, the phone stopped ringing after that and the janitor personally apologized to me for swearing (yeah, big f-ing deal!)

Tim and Carl showed up soon after that. We put up the projection screen and started working on mounting the video projector, rigging up the crashing airplane, and the on-stage flashpots.

Tim said the projector he had borrowed from his employer had good resolution, but he wasn't sure how bright it would be. That got me real concerned. I decided we should try hanging it close to the stage, from a light bar where the motorized movie screen hung from. Once we got it hung from there, it was about to 4:30 and nobody was real happy with the projection. It was plenty bright, but it suffered from some shape abberation that made the picture trapezoidal as opposed to rectangular.

So, I recommended we hang the projector from the next light bar back where Brian — the light guy — had hung 6 spots from. I proceeded to move the projector but when I got up there to hang the projector, I studied the situation and decided there was a good chance the heat from those spotlights could easily burn through some of the rope I was hanging the projector platform with and we'd end up with a heavy video projector (that we didn't own) lodged in someone's skull on the dance floor.

So, we moved the projector back to the traditional projecting platform which is in front of the main mixing console at the back of the room on the balcony. The problem here was the picture was just too big and overlapped the on-stage screen on every side.

I figured if we could move the projector just 6 to 8 feet closer to the stage, we'd be fine. I started looking around for a piece of plywood or a couple of 2x4s that could do it and couldn't find anything. Well, I probably could have ripped up one of the floorboards out of the attic and used that since the Zephyr is closing in a week or so anyway, but I decided against that. Instead, I called my brother Tom and asked him if he could bring me a board and some screws ASAP and that I'd get him a free ticket to the show.

Tom brought the board and I screwed one end into the platform in front of the mixing console and suspended the other end from the rear light bar with rope. Then I strapped the projector onto the board. Bingo! The image looked fine.

I had moved all my computer gear to the front of the east balcony earlier because I figured on using the projector closer to the stage, so I had to move it all back once we settled on the rear mounting position.

Tim wasn't having much luck getting the airplane working the way he wanted. In the past, he'd used D-size model rocket engines in the airplane to propel it down a wire cable to the stage, but after the deadly fire at a West Warwick, RI nightclub in February, most clubs frown upon pyrotechnics and Tim wasn't going to push it. To propel the airplane for this show, Tim rigged up battery-powered propellers to the wings of the plane with a switch on the top of the plane to turn on the props. The trouble was that — I think — the propellers were too small and didn't spin fast enough to create any forward motion.

So, Tim rigged up a string-and-pulley system powered by his cordless drill to “pull” the plane down the wire cable. Carl — SoN manager — would control the drill and ignite the flashpots (which got the blessing of the club manager) when the plane reached the stage.

Tim tested the flashpots a couple times before the show and they worked great.

We had planned to do a soundcheck at 6:30 but didn't actually get around to doing one until around 8:30. The delay was partly due to members of the band showing up a little late and mostly due to the fact Todd, the sound engineer, showed up quite late. He says he would have come earlier if someone had called him.

Todd's a miracle worker, though, he worked at an amazing pace and got everyone's monitor levels set and even had time to patch in the sound effects coming from my computers into the rear speaker system we brought to create a poor-man's quadraphonic sound experience.

In the end, we were ready on time with everything prepped and ready to go.

When the Sons Of Nothing started playing their original set, they had maybe 15, 20 people in the audience. I could tell Thom was concerned the show was going to be a big disappointment. I was definitely concerned. I had gotten comp-tickets for a couple people and they hadn't shown up yet.

A few more people trickled in during the originals set, but the dance floor was bare until backup singer Juli got out there during the last couple of songs and started dancing and a few patrons joined her.

The band took a break after the originals set while a representative from Bikers Against Child Abuse (BACA) and Dave Smart spoke about their causes. Afterward, I started up the “Bike” intro music to prelude the FloydShow set. When the band started playing Shine On You Crazy Diamond, I looked down and there were a lot of people down there.

Early in the FloydShow set, the band was to play the song Sheep off the Animals album. For fun, Tim had designed a contraption he called the “sheep gun” which used air from an air compressor to eject small stuffed sheep (created by Juli) into the audience. That was a hit with the crowd. Everyone was clamoring for these stuffed sheep as they flew to different corners of the club. “That's a keeper,” I told Carl.

The band sounded terrific. They were tighter than they'd ever been before. Everything went great until it was time for the airplane to crash down into the stage at the end of On The Run.

Tim ran up to the sound booth to unsecure a string holding the airplane back (which had already been cut by Carl, but Tim didn't know it). Tim fought too long with the string and he missed the cue. Carl was having some trouble with the drill and couldn't get the airplane coming down consistently, so it kind of chugged or hopped down the wire. The effects reel kept going and “Time” started before the airplane had finished its journey. I quickly stopped it and rewound the film so we could start Time again after the airplane fiasco was over with. When the airplane made it to the stage, no flashpots went off. Carl said later that he did throw the switches, but there was just a small spark and then nothing. When Carl told Tim this, Tim slapped his head as he realized he had forgotten to fill the flashpots with any flash powder for the show.

Once the airplane situation relieved itself, the rest of the show went pretty much unfettered. They played Echoes as the encore number and it went swimmingly well. There were still people coming in to the club when the band was playing Us And Them - four songs before the end of the show.

My brother Tom showed up. One of my clients, for whom I arranged a free ticket, came. My sister-in-law Jennie came and brought two of her friends. Thom's childhood friend (and acquaintance of mine) Krista came with her sister Suzanne.

All in all, a great show.

And there's talk about some out-of-state dates coming up. Scary and exciting.

Then, I got sick

I woke up Saturday morning feeling like crap. My stomach was uneasy and I was so sleepy. Christine had planned to go with her sisters to lunch and window shopping in Layton, so I stuck it out until she got home around 5 p.m. and then I crashed until about 9 p.m. I still didn't feel good- was cold and sluggish. Christine was nice and went to the store and bought me some soup and heated it up for me. I watched an episode of Angel with Christine and Jennie and then went to bed with Christine, but I couldn't sleep. After tossing for 45 minutes or so, I got up and did some stuff on the computer for a couple hours until I felt tired enough to go to sleep again.

I woke up again around 6 a.m. with a stabbing pain in my gut. Instinctively, I rushed to the bathroom expecting to vomit (don't you love these stories?). It didn't happen. The pain was pretty bad and I knew it would subside if I did vomit, so I managed to make myself vomit a little to ease the pain and it worked. I went back to bed for a while.

Today, I've spent a lot of time in bed or just watching TV. I had some soup, but I've mostly tried to take it easy on the eating. I hope I feel better tomorrow.

Hecticity Manor

When my brother-in-law Jay was working with Chadd and me in Iodynamics, Chadd I used to joke about Jay's common anecdotes and sayings. He was always saying, “Things are really hectic.”

So Chadd and I informally named Jay and Jennie's house Hecticity Manor. It has certainly lived up to its title the last couple of weeks. On the surface, it would appear Jay and Jennie have gone from a happy young couple planning to adopt a child to a bitter couple on the verge of separation within a couple of weeks.

Of course, it's never as simple as that. The forces pulling at their marriage have been there for a long time, but I think they've only recently all converged at once.

In Christine's and my opinions, it mostly comes down to Jay. He's got some strange, simple-minded, sexist ideas about how a marriage should be and can't seem to handle Jennie not wanting to be under his thumb.

I don't want to go into too much detail right now, but the summary goes like this: Jay's been mentally and verbally abusive to Jennie for quite a while, but his abuse has been intense the last couple of weeks. I think he's craving attention and just doesn't know what to do about it. When Jennie doesn't give into his threats and insults, it makes him more frustrated and he's gotten to the point where he's saying divorce is the only way to proceed.

Of course, I'm a fairly isolated third party - even for someone who's living in the same house. I've tried to stay out of it, but Jennie talks to Christine and I (Jay doesn't talk to anyone), so we still get part of what's going on upstairs.

To make a long story shorter, nobody supporting Jay right now. Everyone — even Jay's parents — have moved to support Jennie in this ordeal.

Of course, we're only going to be in the house a few more weeks and then we'll be moving into our house in Riverton. I just wonder who's going to be living with us then.

Coincidentally...

Tonight, I went over to the Sons Of Nothing site to see if Thom had written up some kind of synopsis of his perspective of Friday's show and found none. I thought maybe Krista had written something, so I went out to her LiveJournal blog to see. I didn't find anything about Friday's show, but I did find out some disturbing information about Krista's sister Suzanne and some BS she's had to go through with an abusive husband.

It's sad to see stuff like this happen, especially when there are children involved.