The Eastern Regionals. Epicness Ensues.
May 7th, 2009, Afternoon: The Gurn Killers arrive at the Harrah’s hotel in Atlantic City, NJ.
Awesomeness is in the air.
Our Gurn Killers prepare for the competition in their luxurious hotel room. There, they unpack their costumes, props, and rockness.
At 5:00 PM, they descend upon the stage for sound checks, interviews, and band meetings. There they meet some great competition. Mario Speedwagon and The Strippers for Stephen Hawking just to name two. Mario Speedwagon hailing from Portland and S4SH hailing from the good ‘ol Village Pourhouse crowd. Awesomeness drips out of every pore of these two bands.
Before we get on stage, let’s quickly review the rules of the Regionals. Each band will play two songs, the first song is a random song (one of these six songs: Ramblin’ Man, Flirtin’ With Disaster, Bodhistattva, Cherub Rock, Battery, or Down With the Sickness) and the second song is one of the band’s choosing from a predetermined list. Each round is scored independently from each other and is scored as follows: 50% Rock Band score, 25% Style, and 25% Performance. Whoever has the most “points” after two songs wins!
So, our plan for the first song is to come out with a base outfit (which we call the “Metal Outfit”). Then, depending on which song we get, we will alter the costume appropriately. For instance, if Ramblin’ Man comes on, we have cowboy hats, flannel shirts, etc.
We get up on stage and draw Flirtin’ With Disaster. Not a bad song to get at all. We quickly get our Flirtin’ props and get ready to rock. And we did:
After a very epic and button-popping performance, we were treated with very un-epic scores. Distraught from our low style and performance scores, we head up to the hotel room to change for our second song.
After a quick pep talk, we are ready to go on and perform our next song, Ballroom Blitz.
We get to the stage to find out that we are almost disqualified! Luckily, we make it there on time.
The whole crowd is flabbergasted by our amazing drag-esc costumes. We get up on the stage and kick it up a notch with this most epic performance:
Now that’s what I’m talking about! Great style and performance scores! But wait! Why is our Rock Band score so low? We were doing really good! Oh no! Luca’s drum pedal broke in the middle of the performance! That’s not cool!
After a conference with the MTV staff, they informed us that we could redo the song, but we would be judged again on style and performance. After finding out that we were tied for first in the first round and with our really great style and performance scores, we decided to stick it out and take our second round scores.
A nail-biter ensues. We wait in breathless anticipation for the announcement of the winner:
And by one point, your band of destiny, The Gurn Killers take the Atlantic City regionals.
On to tomorrow, where we face the best of the best for national glory…
