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First show: Marguerite Tide

First show: Marguerite Tide

By: Ines Ravelo
In: Doors First Show
1 min read
Twenty-two minutes, six songs, and a guitar that went out of tune in the third one and stayed there. Unit 9, on a Tuesday, to about forty people.

Unit 9 is a railway arch with a bar at one end, and on a weeknight it holds forty people without anybody having to decide where to stand.

She did not retune. That is either nerve or not noticing, and by the fifth song it had stopped mattering which.

The tuning is the thing everyone will mention and it is the least interesting thing that happened. What matters is that nobody on stage acknowledged it — no wince, no apology, no stopping to fix it between songs — and by the fifth song it had stopped being a problem and started being a texture. That is a decision, made in the moment, by a band playing its first show, and it is worth more than three years of rehearsal.

The songs are short and they end early. The fourth one, `Gallery Rope`, ends about a verse before you want it to, which is exactly the right amount of too soon.

They are not ready and they should not be. There is no record, there is no plan, and the singer thanked the sound engineer by name, which nobody does.

Next: Unit 9 again on the 16th, supporting, doors at seven, twelve dollars on the door and no advance tickets. There is no record and no recordings, so the show is the only way to hear any of this, which is increasingly rare and worth an hour of a Tuesday.
Ines Ravelo
Ines Ravelo — Live editor. Writes Doors, from rooms under four hundred capacity. Files the same night, usually from a bus, and has never once got the support band's name wrong.

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