Jumping right in…

The night before the first show, all three music videos were completed. The day of the first show, Oliver’s short film was completed. Four hours before the first show, the records arrived.

Those who’ve long endured my hopeless ways couldn’t be less surprised. Maybe I can blame my English heritage; I recently heard the assertion that an Englishman is at his best when it’s almost too late. But damn if it didn’t feel inevitable that this thing would come down to the wire.

We did it, though. I owe perhaps the biggest thanks to Oliver for his Herculean effort: creating the projections; finishing the “Midnight Diesel” music video; and finishing “Four White Owls” in time. During the shows he was also our stage director, making sure the stage effects and millions of props were ready on time.

Patrick Metoxen, who I’ve leaned on for countless live productions (including my wedding)… I’ve never leaned harder on him than for these shows. He was responsible for making sure each of the four videos worked; that the sound and projection were on point throughout; and switching to the music videos during the show, went off without a hitch.

The “cast”—Sam, Alex, Ryan, Jaci, and Zuzu—the fact that they were willing to do this with/for me will always blow my mind. I painted us into a ridiculous corner with these shows, and we somehow came out of it glad that we went through it! Unreal.

The venues: The Tarlton troupe were unbelievably cool throughout. Kylie is a pro’s pro. Ditto for Dana. And Tarl and Mark for accommodating the whole thing were just awesome. Kylie generously letting us rehearse there three days before the show proved indispensable—the sole reason the shows worked (to the extent they did).

And Gibson in Appleton, Melissa and Aaron were incredible for the day of. The absolutely huge thanks goes to Dave Willems for being willing to let us move the Saturday show to Gibson so last minute.

Originally the show was set to be at The Draw, which happened to be the site of what would be the last gig for The Priggs. We’d been working with John Adams who owns the building as well as first-floor tenants Coffee Wizardz (yes, Green Bay fans, they’ve got a second location in Appleton!) to pull it off. John’s a long-time amiable collaborator, and Sam from Coffee Wizards, shoot, we go back to freaking Kindergarten at Aldo Leopold, staying in touch when we both lived in Milwaukee in our 20s. The nature of these shows was entirely touch-and-go, but ultimately there were just one too many boxes we couldn’t quite check to make sure The Draw would be ideal. In light of it all, nothing but mutual love abounds.

The fact that Gibson happened to be available on a Saturday night was just a huge stroke of luck. My only regret is I hadn’t been able to promote the show’s happening at that location sooner, but it was clearly the right decision, difficult as it was to make.

For both venues, I also had to inform them the week of the show that I potentially would need to postpone; after monitoring the progress of my records being pressed, it was getting scarily apparent and increasingly likely the records might not be ready. That Tuesday was unbelievably stressful, when I had to absolutely decide whether to keep the dates as planned or push them back, and with only incomplete information to base it on: when you pay for a legitimate company to press your records, they can’t guarantee when they’ll be finished, because they need to inspect the records first, and there’s quite a bit of room for error in the vinyl medium. I’ve since heard from a friend who forced a company to jump the gun for his band’s records, telling them there wasn’t time for inspection, and later learned a good many of the records were damaged. I was not willing to risk that.

I was willing, however, to drive to Cleveland to pick them up if I needed to. I basically got to the point where if it took that extreme measure—even if it meant wiping me out with a 16-hour round trip before the show—I would do it. If there was any way to make it work, I’d make it work. I had numerous people traveling for these shows, including some from across the country. Another potential option was paying for overnight shipping, something to the tune of $500.–

You can imagine it sucked to consider all that. There were entirely logical reasons to push the bummer button and postpone the shows. I’ll forever be cosmically grateful that it worked out. Huge props to Gotta Groove Records for managing to hit my drop date. Bands, I know it’s tough, but I would not recommend booking your release shows unless you’re absolutely sure (even to the point of having them in hand) when your vinyl will be done. I left a three-and-a-half week cushion between my delivery estimate and my shows, and it was clearly inadequate and immensely risky.

Which is to say, this whole thing’s been decidedly less than assured. Would people come out to hear music they’ve never heard? Would people be pissed when they realized the shows wouldn’t have any live music? Would we—who’ve never tried anything like this—be able to make it not-a-disaster, let alone moderately entertaining—and with holding our first rehearsal just six days before the debut?! I also had nothing to base this on; the closest ideas were Alice Cooper, Tom Waits, and Sha Na Na, but those performances, theatrical and coordinated as they are, still had live music.

I had to just hope people would get it. Between all the different players and the myriad production magic, there was no way we were going to do these songs justice live. Not to mention, being absolved from having to play these songs live was a huge source of studio inspiration. But we needed to do something more eventful than just doing listening parties, too. So there you have it.

Still, once I’d committed to this outlandish release show concept, and even as I’d come up with the parts/scenes/vignettes/props/actions, and even after seeing Jake Phelps’ outstanding design for the programs for the shows, at least once a day I regretted what I’d gotten us into, and my cast mates probably more often than that!

And yet, the weekend worked. Even the ways in which it didn’t work, it worked. We got a standing ovation from a sold-out crowd at The Tarlton! And Appleton was just as cool—people being way too nice and telling us we should take this on the road. A number of people came to both shows! All the better, because as I’m sure is now understandable, we won’t be doing this show live again.

Tommy Burns did film Friday’s show—which we’re going to get together and watch at a private “wrap party” for the cast this week—but as a document it’ll be just that; if you missed the experience, what with the surprise of what we were going to do and all, now that that’s revealed there’s no re-revealing it.

On that note, it was very hard to keep this all a secret while promoting (necessitating Aaron Rodgers-esque obfuscation [Q: “Who’s in the band?” A: “The performers include…”]) and I’m just totally, completely touched people took a chance on coming to something so weird. I leaned entirely on whatever reputation I’ve built over the course of all the bands I’ve been in and projects I’ve done. I cashed in every favor and bit of goodwill to the point of indebtedness. I spent more time and money on this than any rational man should ever do, but hey, in the dada spirit, rationality is subjective, too.

Endless gratitude to all—cast, venues, audience, video producers—who made the “Meta Dada” Soirees possible. Here are some pictures people graciously shared—have a look (find even more on my Instagram highlights) and then see below for the plan on getting the music fully out there:

Right: The Music!

First, thank you to all who have bought the record! Either from the shows, from Green Bay UFO Museum Gift Shop and Records, Rock N Roll Land, in person (like at last night’s Rodeo Borealis show), or on my Bandcamp page.

For my Bandcamp page, to clarify, I set that up primarily so people could order records through it. I do not have the music streaming there, or anywhere yet, but that’ll soon change—or start to.

A lower-key idea I’ve had for releasing this album is to release the music online a song or two at a time. Tomorrow will be the first #MattyMonday of however many it’ll take to roll out all the tunes. I’ll also be writing blogs about the songs, putting the lyrics online, and publishing the music videos as applicable.

Again, I don’t have much precedent for this strategy, so it will likely not be perfect, but I wanted to do something different, because again, since we’re not playing this stuff live, once all this music’s out there, that’s kinda it in terms of whatever eventfulness I can do for it.

If this is the first way people hear the individual songs, cool! I hope it’s fun to get a new song every Monday. Or, if you’re already familiar, I hope you’ll enjoy the extra context/content for them.

Tomorrow I’ll be rolling out the first two songs: “Satan Gave Me Sunglasses” and “Media Casualty”.

The cheeriest of cheers,

-Matty