PERFORMED WITH:
Grand Skeem, The Substance, Blake Ian Theory

THE STORY:
This was the first-ever Q*Ball experience at the now-extinct SHINE in NYC. My friend Darren was putting together a live show for charity & asked us to perform. Having just released "Q*Ball In Space" (we had done an intimate record release party at Halcyon in Brooklyn a few weeks earlier), it was a good opportunity to debut the new material. It was also ironic in that I had previously been a member of one of the other performing bands, The Substance - and now I was performing on the same stage, just in a different band. Being the "new blood," I relented & we went on before them, but we still managed to rock the joint (having a fairly large Q*Ball contingent didn't hurt). It was also the first time I got to play frontman in nearly 2 years.

SHINE was a nice room & a very good turnout. I recruited my old friend Rocky Bullets on drums, Bumblefoot recruited Bass Guy, and we pretty much found Boon sleeping under a park bench in Flushing. Sad but true fact: all five of us NEVER got into the same room to rehearse.....ever. Hopefully we did a fairly good job of hiding that fact, as everyone had their own ridiculous schedule (including me).

Regardless, we wowed the crowd with a rousing cover of Devo's "Whip It," & ended with a "Licky" encore singalong. The sweat stain on my shirt morphed from a smiley face to a skull to a heart as the show progressed. Women swooned, men wept.