This is not an emergency

On Friday, September 4, 2004, I had invited a neighbor to come see my friend Chris Hiatt perform his SRV-tribute act in Phoenix.  I woke up that morning in disbelief that nothing had caused our plans to get canceled. Yet.  There was still a thought in the back of my head that something would.  But I never imagined that those changes would be for the best.  Much less change the direction of my life for the next several years.

When I called her to finalize plans, she said that she misunderstood and thought that the show was last night (so she assumed I flaked on her, or maybe she was trying to flake on me? Sometimes the more thought you give girls, the weirder you think they are), and unfortunately, she had already made plans with her friend to go see their mutual friend perform with his band downtown at First Friday.  I didn't know many local bands in Phoenix, but I knew the ones I had seen were awful.  When we arrived, I expected the worse because the band was nowhere to be found, but their equipment was set up, consisting of an acoustic guitar, an electric bass, and a small trapset.

The band started their first song, which was very good, so I assumed it was the one decent song that deluded them into thinking they were a good band.  Then, the next song was at least as good, and the song after that was also good, and before long, I had listened to at least a dozen songs by this band and all but one song was very enjoyable.  Normally it takes me a few listens to enjoy a song, so the fact that this band had so many songs in one set was almost unprecedented for a local band.  The band was named Caterwauls, and I took a flyer in expectations of seeing them again, although I wasn't exactly sure when that would be.

When I turned 30, I celebrated with the Caterwauls.

A few weeks later, I was at home on a Friday night and complete irked and I wanted to get out, but my Plan A (Chris Hiatt) wasn't playing in town.  That's when I noticed the Caterwauls flyer on my fridge, and I immediately decided that was where I would be going.

The first time I saw the band, they were very good.  This night, they were AMAZING!  It was truly a magical night, and even the singer (Kyle Sonnenberg) noted a couple times throughout the set that the band was playing better than it had ever before.  Over the next 15 months, I saw them perform almost every time they had a show.  While I had started following Impact Zone Wrestling every other Tuesday night, I always told my friends there "weekends are for music," because I'd often skip local wrestling events to watch Caterwauls if they were performing anywhere.

On July 25, 2005, I purchased a video camera to record matches in Impact Zone Wrestling, as well as the Caterwauls and Jeordie (whom I met when she booked the Caterwauls for her show a month earlier).  I put the footage I recorded on DVD-R's, but that was about all the further it went.

Live album cover, if all goes well.

After sitting on this footage for the past six years, I recently learned how to convert the DVD files into a file compatible with YouTube, so I have added a lot of matches to YouTube but not as much musical footage of Jeordie or Caterwauls.

This past week, however, I finally learned how to convert the files into a .mp3 (as well as extracting specific songs out of a full set) so my free time has been drastically altered because it has gone to rummaging through all the old footage and finding songs that the Caterwauls have never recorded.  The goal from this new hobby is that I should be able to compile enough tracks to fill a CD, and then my favorite band ever (who quietly broke up at the beginning of 2008) could release a live album.