SIR MILLARD MULCH
DRAGON*CON
SEPTEMBER 1, 2001
Hey ding-dongs,
Sir Millard Mulch here. For those of you who are new to the Couch-Into-Space! Mailing List, please be aware that there is only one rule:
1.) When Danger Woman asks you “Do you know why?” Tell her, “Cuz I’m a liar!!!”
OK, so it’s a bad Henry Rollins joke that Flail used against the woman who Battles Silence Everywhere. And it doesn’t work. I tried to tell her, “Yes, I do.” and she still proceeded to name off every item that was on the breakfast buffet at American Grill on the Garden Level. For those of you who were not there, shut up. Don’t look at me!
We had a great time at Dragon*Con this year, and we met a lot of interesting people. (Imagine this being said in a Sir Millard Mulch Monotone for dramatic effect.) No one bought a shirt, at least to my knowledge. What, none of you Goths out there think James Pitts is black enough for you? Moving on, I will now write a little summary of everything that happened.
ARRIVAL
We got there at about 3 a.m. on Thursday night.
SLEEP
There was a not a lot of sleeping going on for the first couple days. Quickly resolved in honor of the Mighty Mump-Dase.
FOOD
Every meal costs about $20 per person when all is said and done.
THE BOOTH
We ended up with this fantastic crazy thing that Jared overnighted to us. It was fantastic and crazy. A gigantic mural of Venice, FL, right near the Circle 7 at the end of Venice Avenue. If you haven’t been there, you are missing out. Harold and I used to jog there. Anyway, we had Devin’s mom’s iMac running OS X 10.0.4 or something, and iTunes cranking out a bunch of annoying Sir Millard Mulch tunes through my studio monitors (I had every single album imported as mp3’s. It was cool.) We were wedged in right next to a Goth Country band called Ghoultown who have a great gimmick and lots of girls in tight clothes standing on their table. Nice guys who ended up being fans of bands like Fantomas, and even complimented us on our little performance in the learning center.
THE PERFORMANCE
John Citrone (drummer) showed up as we walked into the Learning Center, which is basically a huge classroom. There happened to be a gigantic PA system hidden behind a big kind of curtain thing or something. A screen, maybe. Whatever you call it. So we plugged it in and proceeded to rock through it. All of my vocals and keyboards were pre-sequenced. Danger Woman walked in at the last minute and planted herself about 5 feet away from me in the front row and did everything short of declaring it was HER show. She heckled the heck out of us until Citrone began to threaten her, bad anime style. We played the set. We screwed up Broccoli about 5 times and started over. Luckily we had 90 minutes or we wouldn’t have pulled it off. I don’t know when I realized this, but we were OPENING FOR DANGER WOMAN’S BIRTHDAY PARTY. Not only was it a birthday party we were opening for, it was Danger Woman’s. And it’s not even as if we were performing AT the party. No sir, just OPENING. Pretty sad.
We then realized that the audience wanted to hear some Bon Jovi, so we busted out Livin’ On A Prayer, which rocked pretty good until the middle of the song where that little ellision and modulation happens. What a train wreck! The song grinded to a halt after a few choruses of really bad badness and we went back and overdubbed Citrone’s vocals and harmonies into it.
JOHN CITRONE DOES A THING CALLED SPINNING
John was doing this thing where he stuffed a T-shirt into each pocket and would ask random people to smack him on the ass. This got him a lot of weird looks. Eventually someone would do it and he’d launch through the air, grab the shirts, stick his crotch out, kneel down, and proceed to SPIN the T-shirts wildly at his side, sticking his tongue out, squinting his face all up, and yelling OH YEAH, OH YEAH! He also had a good time with some weird guy who thought he was a player in some RPG, Citrone had no idea what the guy was talking about. He kept hiding his belt buckle and asking him if he was a Feard or a Glitch or Klink or something. Weird.
WE GOT RID OF CD’S
We did.
SPOCK’S BEARD
These guys are amazing and I wonder when the day will come that I can sound as good as them. Of course, there was like 250 people watching them in a room that holds like 5000. http://www.spocksbeard.com….
BY THE WAY, LET ME TELL YOU HOW WE LOST OUR GIG OPENING FOR SPOCK’S BEARD!
A few weeks ago we landed a gig opening for Spock’s Beard (http://www.spocksbeard.com). They are a progressive Yes /Emerson Lake & Palmer type band from California. Very, very talented. We were to perform on the main stage on Saturday night, under the condition that we allow them to use our backline (drums, amps). This was OK except for the fact that John E. Citrone couldn’t risk his drums being damaged before leaving on tour the next day. There was no problem with providing an additional drum set for the other band to perform on, but I, being the dumb-ass that I am, failed to mention this while responding to the promoter. We promptly lost our gig.
This sent Flail into a stiff and silent state of fury. I had no idea what to do, but wanting to be sure I’d get to at least play with John and band, I looked for an alternative. I ended up booking a show on Saturday, Sept. 1 in Orlando, Florida at a small coffee house / video store called Stardust. This kind of depressed me, kind of like one of those “Where Are They Now?” things on VH1, where people go from playing huge stadiums to trying to get into open-mic nights, or worse yet, painting street signs for a living. The place sounded kinda artsy-fartsy and neato, and the gurantee that we’d have complete control over the sound (they have no house P.A.) sounded good to me. But this still didn’t sit well with Flail, who demanded that we go to Dragon*Con with explosives strapped to our chests. Citrone on the other hand, was happy he wouldn’t have to drive all the way to Atlanta to play. We’d also have to drive all the way to Atlanta, play an unplugged set at 11:30 am on the “concourse area”, and then haul ass back to Orlando to play, and then all the way back to Atlanta to perhaps find a table still available. Mump-Dase and Jessica are to fly into Atlanta to hang for the weekend, and this also made Flail all the more discontent.
Needy to say at this point, I called Dragon*Con the next day and was told that I worry too much and that I need to calm down and that everything would be taken care of. I called the promoter about 6 times the following day, not being able to stand not knowing if I was playing a coffee house that holds 40 people in Orlando or a neato show that we’ve already spent thousands of dollars preparing for in Atlanta. We have coordinated several things (CD release, hotel reservations, band equipment, long-distance band rehearsals) around preparing for this show, and for it to be up in the air drove me nuts.
We ended up doing our final rehearsal (our third one, by the way) yesterday in Jacksonville and still had no news for the rest of the band. At the end of practice I called Dragon*Con one last time and was given the wonderful news that we have secured a timeslot:
5:30 – 7:00 p.m. in the Learning Center, across from the centennial ballroom, which is a room kind of like those neato college classrooms on Good Will Hunting, where it kind of curves around and has terraced steps and really nice desks for students to sit at and learn things. We can bring our own P.A. and have complete control of the room for an hour and a half. It is to be a Sir Millard Mulch Masterclass / Workshop, during which I will systematically brainwash people into understanding that my music can actually be enjoyed if you are in the right state of mind. I will show off lots of Steinberg software and computer crap, and will perform an entire set at the end with my band. It holds about 100 people.
OK, now that that’s over…
PICTURES
Flail took a lot of pictures. Around 400 actually. Most of them will not be shown here. Most will never be developed. I don’t know what else to write. It’s late and I am still tired from the weekend. I still haven’t even brought / bringed everything in from the car. My girlfriend bought me a Ween poster. It’s hanging over my computer and is psychedelic colors.
I left my dog and cat with my mom for the weekend. I was not at all surprised that the only thing she fed her was a big box of dog biscuits (and intended to start into the second box if I hadn’t picked her up in time). I guess it’s better than the time I went away for the day and came back to find the dog had been eating Croutons the whole day. Yes, my mother is insane, now you see how I turned out this way. I remember one summer I actually lived on Oreo cookies.
P.S. Thanks a hell of a lot to all the crazy kids who stopped by the booth and listened to our CD’s and took CD’s and even ran the booth at times. It was our first Dragon*Con that so many people liked us. Thanks for asking technical questions, and thanks for hanging out and telling me about Freemasons, and all of that crap. Thanks for drawing funny pictures of us, and in general making it worth it to release CD’s.
Neato, people like us finally.
Special thanks to Flik and Drew and Walt and Harold and Flail and Mump-Dase and Jessica and Felix a.k.a. James Pitts, and Frank and Ted Hayes (no relation to Paul Hayes or Ted Goldman) and Tom and Citrone and Jackyl and Paul Cashman and Changelings and and and and and Nothing Inside (what was the name of that book again? We ended up renting a car, also, so you won’t have to mail us our booth) and Diana Obscura and Ghoultown and Dave from Spock’s Beard and Darryl (Frank’s friend) and Steinberg and Roo and Henry and his girlfriend and the dude from DC and most of all, I would like to thank Ed Kramer for supporting us and encouraging us for so many years.