Smokin' Hot

As a band, I'd have to say we're pretty lucky when it comes to our practice space. It's smallish, but it is in a house (as opposed to a basement, a rundown industrial warehouse or a cave...although a cave would be pretty cool in terms of rock 'n' roll aesthetics, but the accoustics would be terrible), it's in decent shape and we don't have to worry about pissing off the neighbors.

It's a far cry above our previous practice space, which was in fact in the basement of Clinton and my place over on Chandler Street. We literally had to deal with water spurting through cracks in the cement walls during practice once as a heavy downpour kicked up outside. It had us considering the "Drowned Rats" as a band name for a while, and probably wasn't too good for the thousands of dollars worth of equipment we left stored down there either.

But when we play in the practice *room* at Strutt and Parker's place, it gets noticeably warmer in that cramped room--probably in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. I like to think it has everything to do with the musical fury we're unleashing in that confined space, but in all reality, six bodies in a 144-square-foot area are going to heat it up, whether they're rocking out or playing Parcheesi.

Of course, as the drummer AND the progeny of a long line of sweaty German dudes, I tend to perspire the most out of everyone. Once we get warmed up, I'm basically at the aerobic equivalent of a jog for the duration of practice, which can last up to three hours. Add to that the climate control issue, and it's no surprise I can whip my shirt against the wall and have it stick after a heavy session behind the set.

Strutt and Parker don't appreciate that though.

I don't complain: it keeps me in shape, and I imagine with the heat and humidity I'm putting off, it's like being in a sauna for everyone else. But I'm a little worried about what's going to happen when summer rolls around.

You see, since we started playing in our practice space, the temperature outdoors has usually ranged between 55 degrees above zero and 40 degrees below zero. Simple heat transfer has kept our sauna from turning into an oven.

But summers in Wisco get hot, as we all know, and while the basement practice space was soggy, grimey, moldy, mildewy, vermin-ridden, crumbly, leaky, creepy and filled with empty boxes of cat litter from several tenants ago, it was always cool. Parker and Strutt don't have air conditioning, to my knowledge, and even if they do, I don't know of any Trane system that can keep up with our kind of fire.

Cracking the windows will certainly be an option, but that makes us all the more audible to the neighbors who, thus far, have not phoned us in for a noise complaint.

So in all likelihood, there will come a Sunday evening when we're practicing in a 95 degree heat wave with the windows closed, stoking the temp in that room to points on the thermometer that would liquify lesser musical acts. It will be a chance to prove our mettle as a band, or end up slumped face down onto our instruments, surrounded by our bandmates in a 12-by-12 room that will serve as our tomb for weeks to come until authorities finally find the corpses.

I'm hoping it doesn't come to that, but it would be a very rock 'n' roll way to die.