Something 4 The Weekend # 186

Eleventh Dream Day: Beet: "Go (Slight Return)" [mp3]

I saw Eleventh Dream Day at Marquette University's union sometime in the early '90's, playing in a medium sized room in a lower level of the building to a crowd of about 200 other people, including "Pogo Man", a Milwaukee legend of sorts in those days.

Anyways, this room had a dropped ceiling of the kind you might find in somebody's finished basement, or a typical office environment, and with the band playing on an actual stage, there was a fair, but limited, amount of head space above their heads. Well, at some point, singer/guitarist Rick Rizzo did a Pete Townshend sort of jump, which including swinging the neck of his guitar above his head.

This caused the headstock of the guitar to hit that dropped ceiling, which proceeded to collapse a rather large section, so that it was hanging down, nearly touching the stage itself. In the process, the falling/hanging ceiling hit one of the PA speakers on the side of the stage. The speaker was pretty big, and mounted atop a rather sturdy tripod of sorts, and the whole thing came crashing down onto the stage.

The band didn't miss a beat or a guitar solo as it appeared the entire ceiling would eventually collapse upon the entire room full of drunk and stoned kids who were driven nearly ecstatic by the bedlam and destruction of it all. Eventually the rent-a-cops cut the power to the stage and cancelled the remainder of the show, which only fueled the bedlam, and prompting the crowd to take to streets, with a mini-riot breaking out on Wisconsin Avenue.

Eleventh Dream Day were/are a great fucking rock band, and you really truly had to be there.

GO!!!!!

Hotcha! Hank