Tonight, The Debacles played Impro Sundae as a house band. It went far more smoothly than I’d dared to hope, and I’m really impressed by Brent (guitar/bass) and Matt (drums) for their sterling effort in completely unfamiliar circumstances. Brent, in particular, because he’s currently sleeping about 3 hours a night while raising a 2-month-old child.
It started shakily when the host (Dave Williams) introduced us and asked us to play a little riff; we stumbled through 30 seconds of dissonant garbage as we tried in vain to come up with a funky progression. However we soon found our feet, conveniently located at the ends of our legs, and that made all the difference.
Probably the most challenging game for me personally was Balladeer, in which a player sings a few verses, then the players advance the story, then he sings another few verses, and another advance by the players, and so on. We played a completely different tune in a different style for each verse and some of them worked really well, like the Nick Cave one where Andy managed to put in a Red Right Hand reference right at the end. We’d played none of the tunes before, we just agreed on them while the players were acting out the scene, and then jumped in.
Another fun game was Greatest Hits, which tonight was Greatest Hits of the Gatekeeper (?). Cam named himself something like Oleg the Dirty Fuck (or similar) and announced hits along the lines of Youse Cunts Stay Out. My mother was really impressed. At the end, Cam started groping co-host Janelle’s breasts in a scene that can only be described as highly unlikely to appear on broadcast television any time soon. Perhaps it’s his frustration at the relatively gentile constraints of his own Cable show(s)? It was, however, absolutely hilarious.
As was Nick throwing the word Zimbabwe at random into a word-at-a-time story about an anorexic swimmer.
Anyhoo, we played pretty well and improvised as well as could be expected, and none of the players seemed to have any complaints.
Three word assessment: Hard But Fun!
We’ll be back.