ROELANT – CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the indie rock band, ROELANT, reveals one of their stories form being on the road. You can check out the story, after the break.

Our first record got stalled in the mixing process, taking longer than 6 months to get final mixes back and constantly pushing our project release dates further back. It was all supposed to have been done in 2014. Sometime around March 2015, we got the call to do an event as the opening act for a more established artist. We didn’t really know much about the gig other than that it was a huge stage which would be a fun change from the rock dives we normally played. I remember I had pretty severely injured my knee while moving earlier in the week, and so I had a knee brace underneath my jeans trying to keep it from literally buckling out from under me. Our shows are generally very active and we move around a lot, so having to basically stand still in front of my mic stand was a buzzkill. We sound checked and everything sounded great and they opened the doors to the venue – probably a hundred people or so came in, nothing close to the 4,000-5,000 capacity of the room.

We went back to the green room and chilled for a while until show time. When we were announced I did my best to hobble discretely into position as Josh, our drummer, kicked things off. In front of the stage the crowd had filled in nicely and the vibe was good – the people were super engaged and into it. Somewhere during the second song of our set, they started hitting the big wash lights from behind us, lighting up the crowd. We had walked on the stage with really no idea how many people were actually there because we could only see directly in front of us, but the whole place was nearly full. It was awesome. The feel was electric, there were at least a few thousand people there, and they were into it. Those were the kinds of shows we always talked about playing, even despite being immobilized by a knee injury.

When we finished we went to our merch table to greet people. The response was amazing, we must have had nearly a hundred people ask about buying our music, but we had nothing. We only had posters. 4 years later we now we have multiple records, t-shirts, posters, and hats, and we have played many a show in dives with only a handful of dimly lit faces, but we still joke about how one of our first shows was one of our best, and it was the one the got away. We’re still trying to get back to that stage.

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