Pleather, mohawks, sequins, and braces(?!) - Eat your heart out, Fashionistas! This may be the earliest video that we have on the web. It's from March of 1997 at a benefit concert in the Stock Pavilion at UW-Madison. This is before we called ourselves Sunspot and we hadn't even been playing together for a year yet. The sound quality is a little rough, it's a transfer from a VHS copy of a Hi-8 tape, and our friend, Kyle, had to keep coming onstage to help Wendy fix her bass drum (Hey man, thanks for that.)
Thinking back on that show, it was a pretty awesome experience. That was the first show that we ever played with BoRd and we got to share the stage with Pet Engine (who I thought was the coolest band in Wisconsin in the 1990's.) Originally, the organizers advertised the show as being headlined by The Gufs, but something happened and they had to cancel (which caused Ben to have a grudge against them for years, ha. Since it was a benefit for Camp Heartland , Ben's response when anyone used to bring The Gufs up was "Those heartless bastards hate kids with AIDS", in fact he still might say that.) We were all about 20 years young in this video and for some reason, I was determined that a beard made me look more like a badass, especially with a bandana. Yeah, I was wrong about that.
These are two songs that don't make it out at live shows anymore, either. We hadn't seen it (or thought about it) in over a decade, and when you see how many ridiculous chains I'm wearing, we thought you'd be glad we shared it.
Anyway, next week we'll start seeing new Sunspot Road Manias as we kick off the next six weeks, which is going to be our busiest season ever! Brand new live show, new songs and we'll be bringing it all around the country and then doing a final Homecoming show in Madison on August 14th to make our first live DVD. So, this will be a pretty short trip down Memory Lane because we're in the process of making a lot of new ones.
