At least he didn't park his Prius in the pool
Rock Band is a video game that bridges the gap between gamer and non-gamer. Get yourself a bottle of whiskey, a case of beer, two or three friends with no reservations about really selling the backup harmony in Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead Or Alive” (even though the game doesn’t require it ) and you’ve got a recipe for a pretty decent Saturday night. People who would never think of picking up a controller and sitting down to play Grand Theft Auto will happily strap on a plastic guitar and pretend to be Ace Frehley. With the right mix of people the game becomes a cooperative event. Instead of competing against each other as you do in most other games, you’re providing support and encouragement to your band mates; working together to quote, RAWK, un-quote.
On some occasions, the ‘band’ I normally play with, “Arsenio, Hall, and Oates” gets so into the groove that we begin to act like real-life rock stars. The drummer smacks his sticks together in the air to count out time as the song begins. The guitarist calls out the tried and true, “Ah one,two, Ah-one, two, three, four.” And the lead singer gets drunk and destroys the stage.
I’m serious about that last one. Arsenio, Hall, and Oates (or “Spuckwheat and Wanky” as we sometimes call ourselves when playing incognito in smaller venues) had its first Rocking Related Injury, or “RRI” this weekend.
Miss Viking graduated from her Masters program on Saturday and we threw a party to celebrate. As usually happens when our friends get together, Rock Band gets pulled out when the group has achieved a collective BAC of about .09. What began as a large group activity; four people playing together while three or four others waited their turn and cheered the band on, devolved into Miss Viking, myself, and a lead singer, whose name shall be withheld for his protection, playing long after everyone else had gone to bed and/or passed out.
We’d all been drinking quite heavily, for quite a long time, and the quality (if not the enthusiasm) of our rocking had been going steadily downhill for about 40 minutes. We knew it was almost time to take our curtain call when both the bass player and guitarist began to see the scrolling bars on the TV screen as a blur of rainbow colors instead of the easily recognizable notes they usually are. Our lead singer recognized that the rest of the band was losing focus, and took his act up a notch to spur us on.
He increased his vocal projection, he called out encouragement during long guitar solos, and he began to dance wildly about the living room. On a hardwood floor. In athletic socks conspicuously lacking in non-skid traction control devices of any kind.
You see where this is going. During a particularly hyperactive dance breakdown, that reminded many in the crowd of a young Jack Black in the midst of some kind of bourbon induced seizure, he lost his footing. Badly. Luckily, the most expensive piece of Rock Band equipment in the room was there to break his fall.
As he crashed to the floor, the arm of our lead singer came down solidly on what would have been the symbol on a real drum set. In a ‘real’ band, that would have resulted in a solid and satisfying crash, much like a drunken singer falling into drum set. In our little fantasy world, this fall instead resulted in the thin and decidedly unsatisfying sound of a plastic drum pad snapping in two.
Minor wounds were inflicted on our fearless band leader. A long and nasty scrape required Miss Viking to dust off her civil war surgery skills. Luckily, we still had a little whiskey left, and since the drums had been rendered useless, we had extraneous drumsticks to aid in the fashioning of tourniquets. What could have been a VERY awkward closing song was mitigated by the fact that we were playing on the singer’s own drums, and not mine.
That’s right, my group of friends has more than one full set of Rock Band instruments among us. I can tell you’re impressed.
Labels: I am a dork, I'm a drunkard
posted by DC Viking at 11:54 AM
2 Comments:
Who is Ace "Freely?" Is he a guitarist like Jimmy Hendricks?
He's more like Eddy Van Halan.
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