Thursday, April 6, 10:30 p.m.
I scurry out of Firestone, after an all-day JP-and-working-in-microforms frenzy to go "watch and critique" my band calico. perform an acoustic show for this Muse business that's going down in Chancellor Green. Of course, one of our lead singers, Jonathan, isn't here, because he doesn't go to Princeton and lives on Long Island. This, I'm sure you'll understand, causes its fair share of problems with rehearsal and shows. So the band plays its three songs, and I take notes, as I am the drummer and am not playing such a quiet show, and then we leave. It's good, though, in a strange way. The people respond to us. Or maybe they're applauding because we're done.
Friday, April 7, all day
Jonathan cuts school and hops a train down here for practice and gigs. Yes, "cuts" school. Despite what he or I may have told any number of the many, many girls who have mobbed him after shows, he is not a freshman at "a New York college" but a senior at East Islip Public High School. He's a musical genius, but getting a kid who isn't even old enough to buy cigarettes here every weekend is rough. Come he does, however, and we practice non-stop for seven hours. The other four play a great set at the "Muse" thing come nighttime. I watch. Two separate girls ask me about who "the cute singer" is. I lie. Sorry.
Saturday, April 8, 12 p.m.
We practice more. We are summoned to play the Quad "battle of the bands" at 5 p.m. To our amazement, there is no sound guy. For those of you who don't quite understand the problem, imagine being invited to a high-stakes-$500-jackpot-pie-eating contest and not being supplied with pies. So we spend half an hour trying to tweak our cheapo amps exactly to the right mix, which, according to Isaac Newton, is a physical impossibility without a soundguy. We play. The crowd loves us. The judges don't. My roommate is looking for them, so they'd better watch out. Much props to Menlo Park, by the way, who must have been great. I personally think the klezmer band should have won.
Saturday, April 8, 9:30 p.m.
We show up at Colonial to set up and sound check with a real sound guy. Take notes, social chairs of the world. You provide a good sound system, the people come. And come they do. After literally hours of practicing and performing this weekend, we finally get to play a plugged-in, indoor show with a sound system, like any normal band, and it lives up to its billing. Several hundred of Princeton's finest calico. fans make their way out to see us, most notably the wrestling team, who somehow ended up naked onstage singing about AC/DC. The five of us — Jonathan, Richard, Chris, Fletcher, and I — are playing our hearts out, and the crowd is dancing and jumping around. It is an amazing thing to hear so many people singing along to one of our very own songs, which they'd heard on MP3. We were called out for encores. We were forced to play cover songs because we exhausted our store of originals. It was great. After the show, I went home and went to sleep, dreaming of free time to finish my JP.
Sunday, April 9, 5 p.m.
We are a good band, I promise. But in keeping with the Sunday-after-a-big-Saturday-night tradition, nobody comes to see us play our show for the SVC's charity drive. There we are, with water-tight precision, perfect harmonies, a great stage — and a whopping seven people show up. Quite different from last night, but understandable. The very things that make Princeton students successful are what keep us from getting too good, too fast: homework, JPs, rehearsal for this or that, RA meetings, a complete disregard for civic responsibility and any number of other "necessaries."
So the show is pointless, and we're suffering from certain chronic fatigue syndrome, but we make it. I hope you Princetonians are happy with yourselves now. Pbbbbblllttt. In the end, I put Jon on a train back to Long Island, and several (older) Princeton girls cry their eyes out. Fletcher and Richard pack the car and bring our equipment back to the super-secret practice area that took us two years to find. Chris returns to his 17 classes, confident in the knowledge that if the rock star thing doesn't work out, he's smarter than everyone else at this school, anyway. And me? Well, I look around and wait for the warm weather to return. Because maybe, when it's summer time, and we don't have all these ridiculous distractions around — cramming all of our band activities in one single weekend out of every month, arguing over absolutely nothing every step of the way because it's so blasted stressful — we'll have the time to concentrate on the free-spirited, non-competitive and not-so-intellectual thing that we hear so much about and have yet to find here at Princeton: just being a band. Ian Martinez '01 is an English major from Bohemia, N.Y. He can be reached at ians@princeton.edu. Check out calico. at calico.princeton.edu, and catch the show at Campus Club on April 22.
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