In my previous posting, I detailed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity I had to be in the band Cold Slither and become a real-life part of G.I. Joe, my favorite toyline of all time. Well, turns out it was more than a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because we got to take a bite out of the Big Apple last October.
I knew before we played at San Diego Comic Con the previous July that there was a Cold Slither comic coming out in October. New York City Comic Con was in October. If we didn’t fuck up our initial appearance, I figured it was a shoe in that we would play in New York. Well, even before we left the backstage in San Diego, the Hasbro crew were like “so, we heard you’ll be with us in New York.” Can I get a “hell yeah.”
It wasn’t easy going to make happen. Finding a venue willing to book a single act and on Saturday night was no easy feat, I assume. Yet RPM managed to get us Gramercy Theater! We had no gear… SIR gear rental to the rescue. No place to jam? Monkeywrench found a studio with full gear. Plane tickets? Well, that was on us to front, and hopefully the show would cover it. This one was gonna be a pricey show to put on, but so worth it to show we could be more than a one-time advertising gimmick.
Oddly, the first order of business in New York was going to do a meet and greet at the con on Friday. The other boys were in an Airbnb somewhere in Jersey while I was with my girlfriend’s family in New York City. I met up with them at a hotel at the anointed time of 9:30 AM only to find out they’d changed the time to 9:00 AM while I hadn’t been with them. So technically I was on time, but also late!! I had to do Zartan’s make up and do my own costume change, after all. Hasbro and RPM had plans for us and we still had to walk the streets of New York in full costume to get to the Convention Center.
Our first obligation, after passing through what was the worryingly super lax security, was to “crash” Hasbro’s toy panel and act like Dreadnoks… basically, be ourselves. We tried to keep it to a minimum, so as to not totally ruin the panel, but hey… I couldn’t help myself after awhile. (video captured by Adventures in Collecting Podcast)
After we had our fun at the Hasbro panel, we shuffled off to the Hasbro booth so do some signing and general rabble rousing. Then we went to do a signing of the Cold Slither comic book elsewhere.
At the end of the day, we finally went to actually, you know, I dunno, rehearse the music we were supposed to be playing?
It’s debatable how much rehearsal we actually needed. Gus wrote some pretty simple, very catchy songs on purpose. But we did have one new song to jam that had recently come out as part of the Decibel Flexi Series. And I wanted to try out my NEW in-ear wireless module, as we couldn’t budget in the expensive Sennheiser rental this time.
At Gus’s recommendation, I picked up the Xvive U45 Wireless in-ear System. It’s relatively affordable and reliable. Our sound dude, Monkeywrench, was unsure if it would be strong enough to work in a big city like New York, what with all sorts of bouncing digital radio frequencies, but guess what? It worked like a charm. I highly recommend it as way to affordably up your game.
The next day we headed back into Manhattan for the show proper. There was a confusing thing where some pizza place made Dreadnok pizza and we thought it was like a promo thing we were showing up for, but then it was just me, Gus, and Matt in costume with a few other confused patrons. The staff was really nice, though, and we got free pizza and it was delicious.
Then we headed over the the Gramercy Theater. It was really, really cool and really, really weird to see the name “Cold Slither” up on the marquee. If you’d told me 10 year old would see the name Cold Slither up on a real life marquee, I wouldn’t have believed you. If you told me I’d be in the band, I would’ve punched you in the face and spat on you and called you a fucking liar.
I’ve played the Gramercy Theater before with Ghoul opening for Carcass, so I knew it was going to be a much different and bigger stage than the Brick-by-Brick in San Diego. I knew we had to go big on a no-budget. The gear was there, delivered by SIR, but I wanted to dress it up more than that. I got cheap, Halloween grade camo netting for that military look along with a bunch of fake boxes that we stenciled up with some Cobra logos. Luckily, Gramercy had a projection system in place which made it look even bigger.
Another thing I wanted to add was some more to the show. We have a song about fatal fluffies from the G.I. Joe cartoon. I wanted to make a real fatal fluffy appear on stage since this whole project began, but I hadn’t had time to construct it for the first show. This time I did, and if I do say so myself, it went hard.
I’ll go into the construction of that costume in a future post, because it was a bear.
The show went awesome! Matt and I did our signature patented TM rockstar moves right into the audience, people bopped to the new tune, and we did an encore of our eponymous theme tune! Afterwards we hung out downstairs by the merchandise and took pictures with all the friends and fans until there was no one left in the room.
The Hasbro crew seemed over the moon with our performance once again, so who knows? Maybe this is more than a two-trick pony. I really love this crew, I love G.I. Joe, and I love playing music and being a theater kid; so, I certainly hope so!
I also love being a living doll to be played with. Hell yeah.