Upcoming shows

Well, things are moving along quite nicely here in Rule 17 Land. We’re taking a little “summer vacation” for the rest of July and the first part of August, then our schedule of a gig a month starts in August.

On August 18th, we play the Shoreham Block Party, which should be a great time. It’s out by Detroit Lakes, right off the lake - we'll have directions available. It’ll be a nice “end of summer” type of gig. It’s open to the public, so if you want to go just B.Y.O.B. and a few bucks to chip in for paying the bands. Chris’ other band “Relevant” will be playing after Rule 17, and that show will be my final performance with “Back For More”.

Moving into September, we’ll be headlining two nights at Rick’s Bar in Fargo - September 21 and 22. We’re really looking forward to being able to play a whole lot more of our songs, since every show up to this point has been in the one hour range, and we have nearly two hours worth of songs. The extra time, plus the extra night gives us the opportunity to play with song selections and setlists a little bit more so we can offer a different show on Saturday night than on Friday night.

On October 20, we will be playing at the Nestor, which was the site of the final 7th Seal show in 2008.
More details about other bands and whatnot are forthcoming. This will be another full night for us, and once again we look forward to being able to play more new and new-to-us material for everybody.

If you have any ideas for places that you'd like to see us play, just leave a comment below!

Gig recap: June 30, 2012

So, it's been a week since Rule 17 officially played the last note of our "first" gig. Special thanks go out to everybody who came out to support us, and also to Vindictus for inviting us to play.

So, the last note was played, and it was hot - really hot. The four of us sweatballs hustled to get our stuff off the stage so Vindictus could get rolling, and the thought immediately crossed my mind: this is totally worth it.












Economics being what they are, we probably broke even money-wise that night. We intend to ultimately turn that around somewhat, but the important thing is what the real payoff was. We had a blast, and played pretty well too. Ultimately, that's what keeps you wanting to play music. There's a lot of work involved, and it's easy to get done with a set and wind up thinking, "well, that went okay". Nobody does all that work to wind up with "okay". Nobody writes a song hoping that it'll be "fine". Nobody spends years of their lives practicing an instrument in hopes that their playing is "competent", and nobody spends hours sweating in a humid basement with the desire to play a show that is "good enough". The Rick's show wasn't "good enough", it was just plain fun.

That all being said, we are planning on adding some more dates through the fall. We are finally moving into the position where we will have more material than we need for a given night, and intend to keep adding to that list. As I mentioned in the previous blog posting, there are a lot of new original songs to work up. Further, there are a lot more ideas for fun covers to do than we will ever have time to work up. That means that we will soon be able to offer considerably different sets for different nights. On June 30, we did a 7th Seal-heavy set, with a couple of newer originals and a couple of covers. Other nights, we might play more covers, or we might focus on new originals. Changing it up makes it more fun for the audience and for the band.

After all, if it's not fun, why bother?