I’m the first to admit my band’s set last night was bad. Guitar solos were flubbed, vocals were way off key and the only pocket our drummer cared about was the hot pocket he’d munch on between every song. We’ve all agreed that from now on we’ll spend practice practicing songs instead of comparing fantasy basketball drafts.
All that said, we were not bad enough to warrant Rod Serling coming on stage and monologuing to the crowd about the karmic repercussions of man’s hubris.
I first saw Rod in the crowd during the back half of our set since he was the only one smoking a cigarette wearing a full three-piece suit at a basement pop punk. His arms were crossed, and you could tell on his face that he was going to soliloquize us into the fucking stone age.
Sure enough, Rod got on stage as we tore down and said, “Submitted for your complete lack of approval, a nightmare in five songs, each one tuned to the key of D, for despair. It was a ghastly performance by four inept musicians stranded on the shores of saccharine mediocrity like a quartet of tone-deaf beached whales. Consider it just another show at that moribund venue known as The Twilight Zone.”
First of all, ouch. Second, I don’t care if he created “The Twilight Zone,” no venue should just let some random guy grab the mic and start shitting on someone’s set. More distressing still was that the other bands were happy to let him talk into their set.
The lowest point of the night was our cover of “Welcome to the Black Parade,” which went tits up because our bassist exaggerated their piano skills. Rod seemed especially offended by this, saying, “ Humanity once again proves itself the moth to the flame of failure. Any band, any musician, any artist which fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the power of a My Chemical Romance cover…that band is obsolete. A case to be filed under ‘P” for “Posers.’”
Rod then made some Icarus comparisons, but those were a stretch. There was no attempt to ‘fly to the sun.’ All of the other songs had like, two fucking chords.
Once our rhythm guitarist was fully in tears, Rod ended the monologue by saying that there’s “There’s no moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact: This band is ass.”
I tried to confront Serling after the show, but the entire venue suddenly turned into a German bunker, and I was Adolf Hitler.