SAYING GOODBYE TO ONE OF BOSTON’S GREATEST BANDS
As anyone who follows our band, reads our blog, visits our Facebook, or comes to shows, you know that us and the band Keep Me Conscious are attached at the hip. I’ve gotta be honest – I’ve never understood why these guys have been so nice to us. We are a bunch of assholes. When we play shows we are always courteous and friendly enough to the other bands – always offer to share gear and display proper band etiquette – but most of the time we usually hang out in the back corner of the club and drink, make obscene inside jokes that nobody else but us nerds would understand and, if there’s a marker and a piece of paper nearby, we draw pictures of penises. Huge, towering, vainy, grotesque penis drawings. If you are one of the few who do follow our blog you would know that we’re lazy too. How far apart are our last 5 blog posts? And they were probably promoting something that was just days away. Way to go us!
Be patient. This isn’t supposed to be about us. This is going somewhere…
So then there’s Keep Me Conscious. A band that works harder than any other band we know. Play out all the time and all over the place any day of the week. They kill it every night, get home at 4am and go to work a couple of hours later. And when they play a show the night after that you would never know they were going on two hours worth of sleep. They’re approachable, down to earth, and professional (minus a van in a ditch outside of Cleveland, but that was pretty much our fault).
We knew their drummer Robbie from his old band Monas and we had mutual friends with the rest of the guys in the band, but we didn’t play our first show with them until Valentine’s Day 2009 at Bill’s Bar in Boston. Seeing them play was a “holy shit” moment for all of us. These guys were fucking pro. When people ask “What’s KMC like?”, the response is always, “They’re fucking pro!” or “If there’s one band that’s going to really make it, it’s them.” After that first gig (and if memory serves, we drew like 10 people vs. their 150) they asked if we wanted to play more shows. Why they asked us I cannot tell you. They were leaps ahead of us. I remember thinking, “Other than really good poop & pee jokes, we can offer them nothing!”.
Within a few months, we had moved into their practice space with them and booked a tour together. That tour will probably serve as the best two weeks worth of memories ever. Watching Maty Vamp fret every night we got a campsite instead of a hotel room, hearing creepy ghost stories from Bob in the middle of the night while driving on the back roads of Kentucky, John flashing his enormous dangling cod piece out of nowhere, Robbie with a mystery illness sleeping for 36 straight hours (yes, we thought he was possibly dead), Dan prank calling his mom and putting her on the phone with country star Alan Jackson (it was Ben!)… All of it was priceless. And they’ve always taken care of us. They made sure we always got paid, gave us a great time slot, let us use their stage lights. We always looked forward to the day where we’d be in some great position where we could really repay them, but unfortunately, at least for now, it looks like that day may not come…
It’s with great sadness that we write tonight because this Saturday, August 27th, at The Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge they will be playing their final show as Keep Me Conscious. The good news is that they are also releasing their new CD, Merci (available now on iTunes!), which consists of the best songs they’ve ever written. We will gladly be supporting them on this bill. It won’t be the same continuing on with Roman Traffic without KMC, but these guys are too fucking talented to not do great things elsewhere. So we look forward to that day. Until then, this Saturday let’s celebrate one of the best bands Boston’s had to offer in years.
You can buy advanced tickets for Saturday’s show on the Middle East’s website or at TicketWeb.com.
Keep Me Conscious – Two Vans, One Trailer tour – the most hilarious, exhausting, blacked out two weeks of our lives. Maybe some day down the road we can do it again.
These chicks HATED us.
Love,
RT
