Oxygen (Live @ The Rage)
LIVE AT THE RAGE
In the spring of 1992, after we finished the record but before it was released, Mike somehow landed us a gig at a small metal club in Baltimore called The Rage. I had never heard of it before. It turned out to be downtown in Baltimore, a couple blocks away from the waterfront, up some side street.
We didn’t promote it broadly, so not a lot of our usual crowd showed up that night. Too bad, because it was pretty hilarious. We sound checked early on, and then we were told to go on stage while the house lights were down. They started a fog machine LOL, and as the stage filled with foul chemical-smelling clouds, a voice came over the PA saying something like “ladies and gentlemen, the Shit!” Then the lights came up — a whole rack of colored spotlights, right in our faces! I could hardly play, I was cracking up so hard.
Anyway, I think we eventually won over whatever little metal-head crowd was there, through sheer drunken enthusiasm. I remember some cheering after each song. Definitely not the fare they were used to! But the funniest thing about that night was that in between songs, Mike would give mini speeches in support of Ross Perot, who was running for president at the time. He had become obsessed with Perot, and his point was simply — hey! this guy is not part of The System, so what do we have to lose? Get out there and vote motherfuckers!
We were thrilled to get a cassette of the soundboard mix at the end of the show, but when we listened to it later the mix was horrible and reverb soaked, hardly any guitars, a little bass, a lot of drums and vocals. I took it home and buried it in my pile of cassettes. Years later I listened to it again, and the one track that stood out was Oxygen, a newer song that I hadn’t really found my way into yet. It was toward the end of the set, and we said what the hell let’s do it. At that point I was a little too drunk to navigate the chord changes LOL but the lyrical delivery was great and we come off sounding like a drunk country/western bar band. Pretty funny.
After the show, we were spread out at the bar drinking and a short guy, neatly dressed, walked up to me and started asking me questions about the band. He said he really liked the set, and he thought we had potential. Wanted to know who’s in charge. I was already pretty drunk, and pretty much disinclined to believe him in the first place (who would want to manage us?) so I pointed down at the of the bar where Chris was sitting and I said you need to go talk to him. He went down to where Chris was, who passed him off to Lex. Lex sent him over to Mike. He then approached Mike who proceeded to talk his ear off for a while (probably about Ross Perot) after which he guy appeared to give up on us in total frustration and left.
That’s a pretty good example of how totally unmotivated we were towards any sort of career in music. In fact around that time something Mike used to say a lot as a way of parting was “It’s never a business doing pleasure with you” LOL
