Frat party

If you are a musician, you read the title to this post, and you involuntarily made a sour face. I'm making one right now just typing about it. Go ahead - ask any band you know.

See that look they just made? That's it. That's the face. They can't help it. They're being flooded with memories of mayhem and vomit.

If you're 19, mayhem and vomit may sound fun. But when you're trying to work in the midst of it, and you've got thousands of dollars worth of equipment in the direct line of fire of it, it's way less fun.

That's how Johnny and I spent this past Saturday - trying to protect our beloved sound system from the drunken destruction of a frat party.


It started a few weeks ago. We were hired by a band from New Orleans to run sound for them at an afternoon party this Saturday. It paid pretty well, and we were available, so sure - why not? We found out two days before the gig that it was at a frat house. Uh-oh.

I have friends who have played frat house gigs, and they had nothing good to say. They told of guys throwing up right in front of them, wiping off their mouths, then partying on, puke at their feet. They spoke of drunken fools hitting on them, while their inebriated girlfriends screamed at my friends to stay away from their men (so...leave the stage?).

But we were in. So, let's just hope for the best, right!?

We arrived about 12:30pm. We saw that our stage would be outside on a basketball court in a sort of courtyard for the frat house.

We were to set up in front of that big open doorway to the left.

No actual stage means you sort of *imply* a stage with your cords and gear, but the audience can just step on to your stage whenever they want. Not promising. There were also some makeshift tables set up in the middle of the court. When we started setting up, we discovered what those were for: crawfish.

This was to be a crawfish boil party. And the crawfish would be boiling all afternoon, directly behind us:

Eau du crawfish. All day. Oh boy.

When we arrived, there were a bunch of guys playing basketball on the court, while some other guys stood on a balcony catcalling at them with a bullhorn:

Note the beer in their hands.
No way of knowing how early they got started.

We then met the band and got to work. The band was called BRW. We really liked them - they were friendly guys and good musicians who sounded good and were cool to run sound for. They also had a female singer who came from Houston to sing with them, Terry Ely. Nothin' but love for the beautiful and talented Ms. Ely, folks.

Johnny busted out the fabulous new iPad mixer:

 He got everything mic'd up:

The frat guys very helpfully wandered around the stage chatting up the band, while we tried to set up, and played on the instruments...because they're toys.

Eventually, though, we got everything up and running, and the show was on!

When the show first started, things were relatively tame. I assume this was largely due to the fact that there weren't any women there yet, and the men were focused on eating crustaceans:

As the women arrived, though, things started to pick up. Speaking of the women, there was apparently a dress code: boots - with shorts, with skirts or with skinny jeans tucked in.

Uh-oh - someone didn't get the memo!

The girls all looked exactly the same. That's how I knew that these weren't my people - I couldn't tell them apart. The men mostly wore sports jerseys. I'm pretty sure that was planned, though some people opted for costumes. Actual costumes:

The dinosaur is wearing a jersey, though, so I suppose he's heeding to the theme. This, however, could not possibly have been anticipated:

My fashion observation didn't last long, though. Despite the fact that people only started really arriving just as the band got going, things very quickly got out of hand. I blame whatever sort of competitive beer pong game was set up on the other side of the courtyard from the stage:

People got very, very drunk very, very quickly. And when I say people, I mean every single person there except for the band and us. Johnny estimates there were about 500 people there when it was all said and done, and every one of them was straight-up stupid drunk. The kind of drunk where you go on stage and start pawing the bass while the bassist tries to play.

The kind of drunk where you hover over the monitors with your open container, dripping beer on them, tripping on wires and unplugging things, and your oversize, breakaway jersey hangs on for dear life.

But as drunk as the masses were, few were AS drunk as this bitch young woman right here:

This little slice of heaven didn't just dance on stage and muscle her face into the singer's face so she could sing into his mic with him. No, she also grabbed a microphone off its stand and tried to walk off with it, kicked out wires by stumbling over cords, spilled drinks and, best of all, almost knocked over one of our towers as her friends dragged her away. If I hadn't been there to grab it, it would've gone down.

I saw her a little while later, and not surprisingly, her legs looked she'd been fighting with a bear. And yet she still partied on. Youth.

The long and short of it is that for four solid hours, Johnny and I had to vigilantly leap to the rescue of our gear - wrapping up power strips to protect them from open containers, swiping open cans from our speakers (which people seemed to confuse for tables), plugging kicked-out cords back in, and just generally trying to make sure that people reduced to the mental capacity of 4-year-olds didn't do immeasurable harm to our gear.

We managed to come away with just one broken mic stand and thoroughly broken patience. After we took down the speakers, the instruments were put away and I was wrapping cords, a girl came up to me and asked, "Are they going to sing any more?" Yes, sweetheart. We're taking everything down so they can sing some more.

 That's it. I'm bringing Liz Lemon to gigs from now on.

I knew it was time for us to hurry up and get the hell outta there when they took a giant, empty beer tub, drug it up to the second floor, loaded it with people, and then rode it like a sled down the stairs, onto a concrete landing. I was much too tired to talk to the police or reporters, so I told Johnny we had to get gone before someone got killed.

We managed to escape, and I dreamed of bad 80s movies. I woke with much gratitude that I am no longer 20,  and that I survived my 20s with no permanent damage. I'm not sure everyone at Saturday's party will be able to say the same.

It's saying something when the rock n' rollers are the most responsible ones at the party!