The stands are packed with people. On the floor in front of the stage are people of importance sitting on folding chairs in rows. The astronaut finishes his weekend-closing speech and Stephon cues up the loop station.
I enter, drumming four bars on a bucket. As I depart the mic, I notice the people on the floor are now moving onto the stage to take pictures with the astronaut. This isn’t supposed to happen.
Everyone hurries into place, just like rehearsal…and we wait. We’ve all rolled our drums into place and are now standing by for what seems like an eternity. In reality, it was about seven minutes.
Seven minutes of Stephon running out of improvised ideas with everyone’s samples. Seven minutes of everyone’s eyes shifting from one person to another trying to figure out what we should do, questioning how long this is going to continue. Seven minutes, and they’ve finally cleared the stage.
The click cues up in the ears and we’re off. The first song goes over fairly smoothly. We end and move on to the next, a Stikyard cover of “Shake It Off” by Taylor Swift. Lame, I know, but the drum parts are pretty fun. Also, the accidental stick juggle was entertaining.
THE ACCIDENTAL STICK JUGGLE:
The Setup-
Across the front from left to right,
playing snare, is John, Dominique, Tre,
Herrie, and Coop. Splitting the gaps just
behind them, playing quads, is myself,
Stephon, and Cottrell.
We play the first lick, which goes over well. We hit the downbeat, then move to our next spot. During that transition, Tre drops a stick, Stephon unintentionally kicks the stick up, he sees it and hits it back to the ground, and the stick bounces back close enough to Tre that he’s able to grab it and continue playing. While the stick is bouncing back to Tre, Stephon flips a stick and loses it off stage. Within a second, Coop sees Stephon missing and stick, so he tosses one of his to Stephon and grabs a backup from his stickbag.
From the audience perspective (with performance video evidence), it looks like an elaborate, well-executed stick trick. In reality, it was the perfect storm.
The rest of the show went well aside from some major exhaustion and a dash of over-exersion. Also, will.i.am was there.