Saturday, April 4, 2009

Bang Camaro - the party on stage

Another picture post today!  I went to see Bang Camaro on Thursday.  I first learned about Bang Camaro when I played Rock Band - one of their guitar players and one of their singers works for Harmonix (HMX), the creators of RB.  So when I heard they were playing in East Lansing, I had to go see them.  Here is my awesome RB shirt that I wore to the show:

I left shortly after work on Thursday, and I had to drive fairly fast to get there on time.  I guess the other people on the road were in an even bigger hurry!  Here you see me going 80 and STILL BEING PASSED BY EVERYONE:
I stopped in Fowlerville to get some food.  Fowlerville is exit 129 on I-96.  I have stopped there many times driving to and fro my parents' house, especially when I was in college:

This is the sky.  There are clouds and it looked cool.  I took a picture of it while I was driving.  That's probably not very safe.

This is a Lotus Elise that I was driving behind in East Lansing.  A Lotus Elise is a very sporty, expensive car that you don't see very often in the US.  It looks awesome.

This is my cousin JT.  He goes to MSU (eww).  He went to the show with me.  He is a pretty cool guy when he is not rooting for State.

The show started around 9.  The opening band was like Alco or Alpaca or something.  They were pretty good.  They had a lot of instrumental stuff that sounded really cool.  They also had a keyboard player who sat down instead of standing up (minus points in my book).  After they got done, Bang Camaro got on the stage.  Bang Camaro has a very unique setup - they have two lead guitar players, a bass player, a drummer, and a "choir" of singers (4 at this show, but more sometimes).  There are so many people dancing around and drinking and having fun - it's like a party on stage.  You can see (from left to right) one singer, Bryn (the HMX guitar player), a second singer (I think his name was Morgan, he was the other HMX guy), a third singer, and the bass player:


I got some individual photos too.  This is Bryn.  He is a lead guitar player and he works for Harmonix.  He plays a Gibson guitar:

This is Alex.  He is the other lead guitar player.  He plays a Fender.  He is wearing an awesome Rock Band guitar shirt:

This is the bass player.  I didn't catch his name, but he seemed pretty cool too:

Here is Bang Camaro playing their song Pleasure (Pleasure).  This song is featured in Rock Band 1 and is probably my favorite song of theirs.  The sound quality kind sucks and my camera work is shaky (since I was only using one hand to keep it above the people in the crowd), but here it is:




Here is the fourth singer headbanging with some random person in the crowd (yes, he was right on the edge of the stage, and yes, I was really that close):

The person that was headbanging with singer #4 got pulled up onto stage and sang the last song as singer #5 with the rest of the band.  This is just another reason Bang Camaro is so cool - pulling someone up on stage and letting them sing the last song with the rest of the choir:

At this point something awesome happened.  The person that I call Morgan jumped off the stage and told everyone nearby to gather around.  I and about 7 other people crowded around him and sang the next song with him...it was amazing.  Seriously.  It was unbelievable.  I was singing into the mic with one of the singers of the band.  Crowd interaction - yet another reason why Bang Camaro puts on a great show.

After their set ended, I walked over and talked with Bryn and (Morgan?) about how awesome RB was.  Morgan talked about another game that they worked on (Titan's Quest), and Bryn said he thought it was awesome that RB convinced me to start playing the drums.  I bought one of their CDs.  Lately I like to buy CDs from bands that haven't made it big yet - try to help them out.

After that, there was another band that was going to play, but it was 11:30 so John and I left.  We both had to work the next morning and I don't work very well on 5 hours of sleep.  I finally got home - it was kinda late but wasn't too bad:


Overall it was a great show.  I would recommend seeing them if you get a chance.

5 comments:

  1. So what was the last song?

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  2. The one I sang along with? Nothing I had ever heard before. But the majority of the words were WhOOOOoooooOOOOooaa and you just had to remember the pitch changes. Good times.

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  3. Ah-ha ! Now I know why you weren't able to turn on your blinker to change lanes on 696 - you were too busy taking photos of your speedometer ! Seriously, though. The box - what's in the box ?

    Love the headbanging pic, btw.

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  4. Yeah, it's a great pic. There was a time when Morgan jumped up on the bass drum and was singing from up there. I thought he was going to fall on the drummer. Wasn't quite fast enough to get a pic of it...

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  5. Yes, I'm in a blog. I now exist on the internet! Great show, thanks for driving up.

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