There I was, wheeling Sesar Sanchez’s half-stack amplifier over the uneven pavement parking lot as fast as I could without it taking a spill. I go back for the guitar and his home-made pedalboard, full of delay, distortion and overdrive. From reporter to roadie in about five minutes.
Well, how else were we going to make the third show?
Sanchez had double-booked — triple-booked in fact. He was playing with all three of his bands Friday night: Teeph, Red Giant and Dr. Yes! and The Soulgazers — the former two opening and closing a death-metal mash-up at Monstros Pizza, respectively, then a run to close a night of shoe-gaze space-out music at Cafe Coda with the latter.
With sweat dripping off his nose and his face twisted up in psychotic screaming — stamping his feet on the sawdust-covered concrete floor like a raging bull while he made noises on his guitar that sounded like a 747 crash landing — Sanchez made everybody’s teeth chatter with Teeph.
But it was just the first test in his night of live-performance gauntlet running.
“I wanted to make sure that I would remember how I felt at the end of this night to make sure that I’d never double-book again,” Sanchez said.
It was an exercise in extreme exhaustion. Sanchez was bleary-eyed and sweat-soaked after his first set with Teeph. No wonder — while playing he goes into a kind of wild trance-like state, closing his eyes, headbanging and hitting his slack-tuned guitar strings so hard they look like they’re about to break, combined with all his fret-melting guitar-neck-stroking.
Not to mention the vocal-chord-shredding, vein-popping screaming.
“You can’t replace the rush you get when you’re playing on stage,” Sanchez said.
That’s why he even plays music, because there really isn’t any money, fame or glory, he said.
When he was taking general music at Chico State, he started to think about music as effecting one’s “physical being,” Sanchez said. “How can you affect someone’s physical nature — without touching them.”
That’s what keeps him playing.
But Sanchez was counting on his triple-show plan going perfect. The two touring bands at Monstros were slow in setting up their gear.
“The problem is, at Coda, I have my other band waiting for me at 11 o’clock,” Sanchez said, starting to look nervous.
It was going on 10:30 p.m.
“Shit!” he shouted.
As the last band was finishing up rattling the windows and shaking the walls, Red Giant had already set up all their gear outside, just waiting to land on their audience like a napalm air-strike.
“I think he’s a son-of-a-bitch for trying to do that,” said Casey Schmidt, Red Giant’s drummer, on Sanchez trying to fit all his shows in.
But what’s better on a Friday night than playing one stage after another?
Red Giant obliterated whatever was left of their audience’s hearing — playing so wildly, their bassist Adrian Hammons’ strap broke mid-song, so he kneeled down on the floor, playing his electric bass like a double-bass.
Schmidt laid into his kit so hard — he jumped out of his drum throne to land his sticks even harder on his huge crash cymbals, vibrating the brass so hard the sound waves coming off of them were almost visible.
At one point he let a stick fly into the audience but didn’t miss a beat as he grabbed a back-up.
All this was topped off by Sanchez running around, jumping and nearly losing his guitar as he played with renewed vengeance. At one point, running up to within inches of the audience to hold his guitar up, letting all the strings vibrate open in cacophony. He even started screaming, though nobody could hear him in the rolling noise storm.
But when the last song was played, it was a mad dash to get out of there. Almost before the last note rang out Sanchez was unplugging cords.
Speeding through downtown, narrowly avoiding drunken pedestrians and pedicabs, Sanchez rolled up to Cafe Coda, nearly drop-and-rolling out of his car to grab his guitar and run in.
“It felt good, you know, I could finally hear myself playin’,” said Yestin Rowtun, also known as Dr. Yes!, on Sanchez’s absence from the first song-and-half of his closing set.
Sanchez started in playing way too loud, with the doctor having to scream, “Turn down!” at him more than once.
But once Sanchez shifted gears, it all fell into place — like he’d been playing smooth, spacey soul-rock all night.
“It went from like a very visceral, fucked-up feeling inside to more of a kind of letting-yourself-go, to being completely gone,” Sanchez said.
Nathan Collins can be reached at:
ncollins@theorion.com
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