"The Beach" (from the collection of Greg Rabel)
This is the story of the time Miracle Room played the Beach on mushrooms.
We had booked a Friday night, and got our friends Nice Strong Arm and San Antonio band Raging Woodies to open. The idea was to invite both of the other bands up on stage at the climax of our set for a massive percussion jam, so we brought a bunch of extra sheet metal and car parts that we had laying around the studio. What could go wrong? Well, first of all, the Raging Woodies weren’t all that into the idea, as I recall. Or did they even show up for the gig? We brought it all in anyway, and ate our veggies to prepare for the show.
By the time Nice Strong Arm were completing their set, I was feeling it coming on strong. It was everything I could do to get my guitar pedals plugged in the right way. Every once in a while, I would glance over my shoulder; the mic stands were looming over me like impatient Death. It didn’t make things any easier that the soundtrack to the setup was provided by our own Richard “Runt” Smith: his solo tape entitled “Solid Shit And Piss” was creeping into my earholes and wouldn’t let go. Competing for space in there was the squeaky voice of a woman sitting nearby talking with her friend about hair or something. All I could see out in the room was a blue light way at the back.
We began our set with a song we did at the time called “Downtown Beirut”. I had to get a rhythmic loop going and then play a Middle Eastern-sounding melody on the guitar to get it started. When I looked down at my fretting hand to make sure I was hitting the right notes, my hand suddenly looked like it was about a mile away! By focusing with all my might, I was able to get through it ok. Once that song was behind us, everything took off!
We built to our conclusion, a spacey, ambient piece called “Sacrifice”. I intoned the lyrics through a long pipe into an echo, while Ed Greer layed on a thick bass drone and Runt rattled and thrummed sporadically. At the end, we gave the cue and started a heavy percussion workout. And then everything seemed to go into slow motion; there seemed to be a swirl of sound and matter going on, like being in the middle of a sonic tornado! I was still wailing maniacally into the pipe while the noise just seemed to keep building. And in the middle of this overdose of sound, KRANG! I heard a sharp, deafening sound that was louder than everything else. KRANG! There it was again! I turned around and saw Runt holding a 3 foot length of 8 inch diameter iron pipe over his head. He was standing in a clearing on the concrete floor in font of the stage, and while I watched, KRANG! He slammed it onto the concrete floor! OW! He picked it up and lifted it again, but I couldn’t take another one of those eardrum destroyers. So I got his attention by poking him with the end of the 6 foot long pipe I had been screaming into. While everything else around us continued to pound away, he looked at me with that mischievous face as if to say “I’m gonna do it!” I held my length of pipe like a baseball bat and said with my eyes “I wouldn’t do that if I was you”. We stood there, outside of time, daring each other for a while. Finally he put down the pipe and went back to making his more “conventional” sound of destruction on the oil drum!
Everything eventually played out. The show was over and the audience went outside. We stuck around after loading out our equipment to clean up and sweep the place. Then my wife drove me home; I hung my head out the window in the night air and said hello to the anthropomorphic street lights hovering by. At home, I lay awake for a long while, staring at the room in the dark. I could make out various features of the room, but layered on top of everything was a constantly shifting mosaic in Dayglo tiles of various Mayan rituals.
Quite interesting…