So on Saturday night my band, Sutures, played its first show. My bandmate set up a gig at a musical establishment I have been avoiding for the past dozen years in DC, the Grog and Tankard in Glover Park. The Grog doesn’t have the most sterling reputation, and is definitely not hip or trendy. But I didn’t avoid it (just) because it is relatively uncool — I never went there because it is out of the way and no bands ever played there that I have ever heard of.

So I was slightly leery of performing there, but not unwilling to do so. It seemed like a safe environment to play, with a crowd likely to be mostly people we brought with us. And it worked out okay. People (mostly our friends) seemed to like us, and the sound was good enough (though not great). My friend Rob recorded a large portion of our set on video and I listened to it once yesterday and once this morning. It is kind of embarrassing — so many mistakes, off-key singing, out-of-synch guitars, forgotten lyrics, bass too low in the mix, etc. But it is not horrible. I broke a string on the first song, which seems like kind of an omen, but otherwise nothing too disastrous happened.

I guess I am satisfied. We are as good as we can be without practicing a lot more. I mean, if we performed every night in Hamburg like the Beatles did, we would get a lot better, but as things are, as a bunch of aging and extremely busy dudes, we’re at about the limit of our talents. People were very complimentary after the show, but me, I’ve seen enough bands to categorize our performance as “strictly amateur.” It’s fun, but it’s not good enough to take the world by storm. But enough of my analysis: here’s one of the videos, for a song called “Better Traps for Better Mice.”

And here are a bunch more of the videos.