Surplus 1980-Elbo Room Oakland, Oakland CA; 11/21/19

Sadly, I never got to play Elbo Room in San Francisco. Saw some cool shows there, always wanted to play there, but just never had the right band circumstance. Needless to say, I was stoked that Surplus 1980 got onto a really cool bill at the new Oakland location, with Cash Pony and Atomic Ape. We got sandwiched right in the middle of these two fine, intricate instrumental Prog bands. A bit daunting, really. Surplus pulls from Prog, especially Bill and Moe!, but I don't feel that we play Prog per se. That's fine with me, I like things that are bit more on the Blues side, even though I do relish the challenges that Moe! throws my way in song writing.
We played pretty riskily, putting forward two new ideas that we'd been working on all week in rehearsal for some exciting events coming up in 2020. The first was a group composition with no name, the second one is being built from a set of drum patterns that I've cooked up! Hooray! The former went down OK, while on the latter I completely spaced out on a part that'd been added  a few days earlier. Oh, my. I did not even think of that until after our set. I hope that they sounded coherent to the audience.
Along with those tunes, be played some of our usual set, and had a really good energy. I felt as though we added the Punk Rock energy to the show, or at least the more ragged energy. This was fine with me, even as the back line bass drum was tending to creep away from me during several songs, necessitating Surplus bass player Tom to basically block the drum with his leg. Many thanks, Tom.
A fun night, with a friendly audience and great bands in Oakland. Can't really ask for too much more than that.

Below: the moving bass drum; proof of appearance, as I can't find a photo of our set on social media