Think of a small bar, less than a hundred square meters wide and maybe about four hundred square meters long. It’s so small even its roadside sign seems to apologize for its size; you won’t be able to spot the place when you drive down Shaw Boulevard unless you know where to look. The bar doesn’t have air conditioning. What it has for ventilation are three large windows, waist-high up until the ceiling. The windows have no glass nor a screen, giving you a clear view of the narrow gated alley beside the building.
You enter the bar through a glass door. In front of you is a stage. It’s a very, very small place.
This is Cuerdas Bar. This is where I spend some of my Friday and Saturday evenings.
It’s not the kind of place you and I would go to unless you have a friend or a boyfriend playing there tonight.
I am the only female in the room who isn’t an audience member.
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Zoo and friends
The second band just finished playing their set. They’re called Bittersweet and they sound like 90’s Green Day. They’re also the only band I listen to here. Everyone else sounds like a ripoff of a ripoff of My Chemical Romance. Angry teenagers and college freshmen too young to know how shitty life can get. My eardrums ring with the sound of their pubescent screaming. For the life of me I can never figure out just exactly what they’re screaming about.
At Cuerdas, nobody really listens to your band so much as they wait for their turn to play.
This is how I spend some of my Friday and Saturday evenings. Waiting for our turn to play.
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Our band is called Zoo and we play the same set of four original songs every time. Until our last gig, I didn’t know what the lyrics to our songs were about. So I had our other guitarist write them down because I wanted to sing back-up. I changed my mind when, during rehearsals, my elementary Tagalog made me sing like a dyslexic child.
It’s already ten-thirty pm and I’m writing this down on a piece of paper I took from the bar because I am bored. We’re tonight’s main band, which means we won’t be playing our set til way past midnight. The next band is setting their equipment up, and it looks like I’m in for another round of indecipherable screaming. I’m amazed that I can still think above Paramore’s new song blaring from the speakers.
In a sea of stripes, skull-patterned canvas sneakers, and checkered fedoras, I amuse myself by giving the seventeen-year old bassist of Bittersweet a long lecture on the importance of going back to school and graduating from college. I am completely sober while I do this. That is how cheerful evenings like this make me.
I go here because our band plays here and I want to get used to playing in front of people so that when I start my own old school punk/grunge band, snarling like Courtney Love will come to me naturally.
During my first performance with Zoo, I set up my equipment with cold hands and pretended not to know which jacks go into which sockets as an attempt to delay the inevitable. I don’t remember when or how I stopped being nervous. I don’t remember why I used to get nervous to begin with. Playing on stage is a safe, legal serotonin fix.
Tonight, I set up my effects with the swift, practiced movements of a guitar veteran of five or six performances. I’m bursting at the seams with four hours worth of waiting time and eardrum death.
Bottles of cheap beer make our skin three shades redder than they should be.
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On stage, nothing else matters. Not the papers I haven’t started, not my insecurities, not the constant dread of the future. It’s just me, my four chords, and an audience made invisible by strong stage lights.
Ten minutes and four songs fly by and the fun part is over too soon. I’m still grinning from the rush even though my stomach is starting to sink. I stick around for high fives, a couple of laughs, a gulp from someone’s beer bottle, and a picture. Then I go home.
This is my life. This is one of the things I live for.
We’re playing at a bigger, air-conditioned bar next month.
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EDIT: At band practice last night, I found out that Cuerdas Bar closed for good when the karaoke place next door ratted on them to the police for not having to a permit to serve alcohol. WTF.
