The actual set was great except for Chris accidentally unplugging the power to our guitars twice. The first time it deprived him of the chance to play his killer solo on Red Integra, so you'll have to wait until another show to hear that.

For the second show in a row, one of us left some important equipment behind and had to come back in the middle of the night to pick it up. You'd think we'd be getting more professional, not less.

We finally got to open for Grant Hart (we were supposed to a year and a half ago but it fell through), and he was great. Unfortunately, he didn't hear our set.

I have no record of our set list but I'm sure it rocked!

We did have fun on stage, playing lots of new songs and rocking out in general despite a couple of charming mishaps. Remind me never to play a show in the middle of a week of 12-hour days at work, though.

We did manage to rock out without collapsing from heat stroke, though my guitar was getting pretty slippery by the end. For once we actually had more time than we had previously been told, so we were able to slip in an extra couple of songs, including our first ever request by email. Keep them coming!

Our set went fine. The size of our repertoire is getting kind of silly; of the 43 songs we've played in our last three sets, 37 were distinct and only 6 were repeats. Watch out, Guided by Voices. I hope that people enjoy hearing lots of different songs rather than the same ones over and over; for all I know everyone's annoyed that they don't get to hear their favorites each time.

Following us was Adam Brodsky, who terrorized the audience with his guerilla folk. Much hilarity all around. And he invited us to play down in Philadelphia! Do we have any fans there?

Oh, I forgot to say that we resurrected Ex-Girlfriend, in a new sorta Everly Brothers arrangement. Anyone still remember that song? It was our albatross around eight years ago.

I thought we were sort of sloppy onstage, but numerous people told us how tight we were, so go figure. Perhaps all the rehearsing is paying off. We did crash and burn at the beginning of one song, just like last time, which I hope was entertaining at least.

Anyway, it was just very pleasant and relaxed all around, despite the fact that that I was still working through a hacking cough, which luckily didn't manifest itself much as long as I kept singing. We will definitely be back.

Unfortunately, this left the other bands on the bill with no audience (they had come from California), so that was too bad. Our set was great, though; we had an excellent audience, we got to play a bit longer than we were scheduled to, and we got to play Terms anyway (which we certainly wouldn't have if Grant were around).

The highlight was probably me desperately trying to remember the first line of I Wish I Was Dead while the band desperately vamped beneath me. I got it after around twelve measures. Rock and roll.

Big thanks to our friend Tom for making some sense out of the dodgy sound system. And to the Cambridge Brewing Company for giving us free beer.

Remind me not to wear long-sleeved shirts on stage again.

What a great crowd -- we had an early set, and it was wicked cold outside, so we were expecting sparse attendance, but you all came anyway. Thanks.

The sound was great, thanks to super sound guy Tom Streit, energy level was high, thanks to seeing a Guided By Voices show a few days earlier; what more could you ask for?

We show up at 6:30 for load-in and soundcheck. The booking person at the club says, "Hey, do you guys have a sound guy?" I say, "No." She says, "Hey, we don't either."

It seem there was some sort of mixup about the schedule. But she says, "But don't worry, the third band is bringing a sound guy, and I bet we can get him to do the whole night." Okay, fine.

At 8:15, the third band calls. They're 80 miles out of Boston. (The first band is scheduled to go on at 9:00, by the way.)

There is a happy ending. Somehow the club gets in touch with some itinerant sound guy, he shows up at 8:30, minutes before the audience starts trickling in, no one gets any sound checks but other than that it all goes fine. And I was so busy being nervous about whether the sound guy would show up I forgot to be nervous about our set!

We had five, count them, five new songs, and we pretty much played them all correctly.

The new songs went over great. We also did one of those IBM e-business commercials, which mainly just confused the hell out of everyone. At the last minute, I decided that I wouldn't be able to remember the bridge to Love Defined, so I wrote it all out, but the sheet of words turned out to be a good prop anyway.

The most exciting part of the evening turned out to be afterwards, when it turned out that one of the other bands had thrown some wet paint around backstage, and people kept on leaning on the door and getting it on their clothes. That wild rock and roll life, I tell you.

The club was packed. And apparently a lot of the crowd was actually there to see us. Having a ton of receptive people in the audience makes playing a lot more fun. And we did have fun, despite the usual incredible heat.

We premiered four new songs, so that was pretty exciting. Greg and I switched instruments for Saag Paneer, which was so much fun that I forgot to sing backing vocals on one chorus. The other big embarrassing moment was stepping on the wobbly mic stand, causing the mic itself to hit me in the teeth. Oopsie.

Other highlights included a brand new a cappella three-part harmony break on Thalassocracy, and My Dinner with Laurie played at precisely twice the usual speed.

Thanks to everyone for showing up! Y'all come back again!

We were actually going to leave out Laurie this show since we were all sick of it, but we were ahead of schedule in our set, so I ad-libbed it in anyway, earning glares from a couple bandmates. As penance I agreed to finish with I Wish I Was Dead, which I'm usually all embarrassed to do because I have to put down my guitar and scream. During which Greg and I engaged in some Really Lame Slamdancing but I think I separated my shoulder anyway.

It looks like Head Like a Hole is going to be one of those songs we have to do every set. Pretty soon every show will have exactly the same set list!

Moxy Früvous came back to MIT for a return show, and kept their promise to have us play with them again. It went even better than last year, if that's possible. The sound wasn't as great this time, but other than that, it was a scarily good time.

LSC is the organization that shows movies and stuff on campus, and they ran this show, so we started with our arrangement of the little theme that always runs before the movies. So it took around 30 seconds to get all the MIT people, at least, all excited. Again, it was great to see how everyone (500+ people) really "got it" the whole way through, laughing at all the jokes and everything. We got tons of people on the mailing list, and hopefully some of them will stick.

The other debut song was our interesting interpretation of Head Like a Hole, about which I will stay mum to keep it a surprise for people who haven't heard it yet.

After our set we relaxed and enjoyed Moxy Früvous; they're incredible entertainers. They mentioned us around four times in their set, working us into lyrics, complimenting us (I think it was a compliment; the upshot of the whole dialogue was that if you were in a diner and you heard Honest Bob on the jukebox, you would sigh contentedly and order the fish), and of course good-naturedly mocking us. About which Mike seemed kind of embarrassed after the show; he insisted that it was meant as an honor, and I assured him that it was taken as such.

The only bad thing was that our CD wasn't finished yet; if it had been, I bet we would have sold a hundred copies! Patience, people, patience.

I don't know what to say, because nothing went wrong. We played well, the mix was great, we got in a couple of Drew Bledsoe jokes. The highlight of the set was probably the segue from My Dinner with Laurie to that highlight of 80's German technopop, Da Da Da. Our repertoire of stoopid cover snippets is rising...

And actually, everything turned out great. The sound guy was really good, it wasn't too hot, we weren't too loud, we could hear ourselves on stage. It was eerie.

No new songs tonight; it had only been a month since the last show, and we've all been busy. But there are a few waiting in the wings.

Postscript: After a zillion years, The Rat closed one month after our first show there. I guess we were the final nail in the coffin.

This was, like, the night of musical references. We managed to sneak some bits of Weezer, Led Zeppelin, Meredith Brooks, and the Breeders in there. How freakin' postmodern. I hope for your sake the trend doesn't continue.

Alan made a return appearance on lights and did a great job, despite flashing all sorts of crazy lights every second and a half while I was desperately trying to look at my guitar. (Usually that song is an instrumental, but this night it had extra lyrics in the second verse: "Alan... Don't take the light off my fretboard. Thank you.")

Thanks to everyone for staying out so late to see us.

It was a great show. The sound system was the best we've had in years (as you might imagine), despite the fact that we had only 43 seconds to do our soundcheck. We had more space on stage than we knew what to do with. I think a few people may have even spotted Bill on the drums!

It was the biggest crowd we've had in years too, three or four hundred people. It was really nice that almost everyone who came to see Früvous came to see us too (well, mostly they were reserving their spaces) and gave us a great reception. Thanks, audience people.

Moxy Früvous enjoyed our set too, and during their set said they'd like us ("Handsome... uh, Honest Bob") to play with them again. Apparently they're serious, as evidenced by the following exchange:
Dan: We'll see if you still mean it after you sober up.
Mike: Unfortunately, we're sober now. Hey! Murray! Where'd you get that beer?
So we'll see if anything comes of that.

Their set was fantastic, of course. We had a good one too, despite Bill's floor tom falling apart in the middle of I'm Still Around. Best moment: Jian looking on in horror from the side of the stage as I announced, "In honor of Moxy Früvous, we're going to start our last song with an a cappella introduction." Which of course turned out to just be me singing an E for 15 seconds. Ha ha, we are such jokers!

You can find a two sentence review of us by going to the Früvous page and following the "Live show reviews" link to the MIT show. We also have a bunch of pictures from the show.

Finally, I'd like to thank Moxy Früvous for finally getting me to figure out how to do umlauts in HTML.

What went wrong this show? Not much, actually... we were kind of worried that our show the next day would siphon off a lot of the usual crowd, and with five minutes to go before our set things looked pretty bad, but lots of people showed up at the last minute, thanks! I'm going to have to start claiming earlier set times in our publicity.

Lots of new songs tonight, and a lot of short songs, as we managed to pack 16 of them into a 45 minute set. You Don't Love Me Yet and Hale-Bopp seemed to be the big hits of the new crop, plus lots of people got a kick out of Greg's I Won't Find My Wife in This Bar. Which turned out to be true.

Because we had 45 minutes (Friday!) we were able to stretch things out a little more, and basically had two sets, separated by a three second break. The two-climax approach seemed to work great (that's what she said) so we may reuse it in the future.

But things went smoothly after that, Greg rocked the house, we all got to scream a bit, and a good time was had.

The exciting news this time was that our friend Alan has been doing lighting for bands recently, and volunteered his services for this show. Unfortunately, the lighting equipment at T.T.'s was a little flaky, so we got some unintentional effects. Everyone agreed, though, that the lighting in I Wish I Was Dead was the highlight of the show.

Tonight's "Intro of the night" is for I Wish I Was Dead: "There's a reason that all my friends call me 'Dancing Dan.' It's because I have a lot of really sarcastic friends."

The show did go really well, considering that we were all dripping with sweat and could hardly move. Doug had amp troubles (what a surprise) around a third of the way through, but we made it through the crisis and rocked to a rousing finish. The atmosphere was particularly celebratory since John just finally finished his PhD thesis.

Lots of new songs in the set, which were received well, even Over You (introduction: "I'd like to dedicate this song to my friend Greg, since he's going to be the only person in the audience to like it. I don't think he showed up, though. Oh, this bodes ill").