Benefit Rock Shows. What more can be said, really? You get the r.a.w.k, you get the strange dirty-antispetic smell of the r.a.w.k. club, you get the self-satisfaction of having spent a millisecond or two maybe thinking about someone else, and you can have fries with your Dewar’s (cuz specifically I’m talking about The Echo here, sirs).

In Brief: this coming Wednesday, the 16th of April, come have your face melted by Afternoons, The Pity Party (that’s MY band), Karin Tatoyan, and The Franks at The Echo WHILE giving back to the community. Don’t you just love phrases like “giving back to the community”? I mean, what did the community ever give you that you owe it something back, exactly, except a hard time finding parking and disgruntledment at the post office?
»continue reading WARNING: THE FOLLOWING BLOG POST IS FOR PROMOTIONAL PURPOSES ONLY; ANY AND ALL ACTUAL CONTENT CONTAINED HEREIN IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL

Tonight is the last night of The Pity Party’s Spaceland monday night residency. Where are my pills? I need them. I don’t know how I am going to get through this. My whole life has revolved around this residency since at least November of 07. And after tonight it will all be over. All the adoring fans who got in for free. All the reluctant merch people who kept shoddy track of our moving units. All the middle-aged men handing out business cards promoting their home studios– all that will be over!

And yet something will also be beginning: the future of a band who has already played its Spaceland residency. What can such a future hold? Air conditioned tour buses? Millions of dollars? Relatives coming out of the woodwork? Isolation and token attachment to trendy social causes? The Pity Party is SO ready for all that.
»continue reading Residencies Are My Reason To Live

We, The Pity Party, do hereby declare that We Played Some Festivals Recently. And for the benefit of LosAnjealous readers and the LosAnjealous Corporate Powers that Be, we will herein compare and contrast these festivals, which are, in historical order: Sunset Junction Street Fair in Silverlake, LA Weekly’s Detour Fest downtown, and the Eagle Rock Music Festival in, you guessed it, Eagle Rock, Califor-nigh-ay.

Festivals will be analyzed on three different fronts:

1) our backstage experience,
2) audience attendance/reaction, and
3) our performance in general.

BACKSTAGE TREATMENT

LA Weekly’s Detour Fest takes the Blue Ribbon for Absolute Rock Star treatement of The Pity Party. Upon arrival, we found an air-conditioned trailer with OUR NAME ON IT stocked with beer, VITAMIN WATER, regular water, MONSTER ENERGY DRINK, cookies, chips’n’salsa, and chocolate. We hastily squirrelled the cases of Vitamin, Reg water, energy drinks, and chocolates into my Honda Element. The Pity Party rarely finds itself surrounded by such bounty! The energy drinks were post-hastily donated to our friends in ESKIMOHUNTER and the chocolates were put out in a dish at my knitting shop for ladies to gnaw on. The Vitamin Waters currently live in my fridge. And the beer was guzzled by TK, Darren Ravel, and Mark Sovel of Indie 103.1. Ah, the various fates of backstage swag. Detour also provided dinner, which we could not stick around for as we had to high-tail it north-easterly to Eagle Rock that very day.

Eagle Rock takes second place in the awesomeness-of-backstage-spread category, though M can testify more accurately to this, as, by the time we got to Eagle Rock, I was too drunk and surly to take advantage of the fresh turkey sandwiches and JAMBA JUICE smoothies provided for the talent. Yes, Jamba Juice smoothies. Now THAT is class. And did I not live by the creed “FOOD plus ROCK equals VOMIT” I would have inhaled several of them, as Jamba Juice is my weakness.

Um… Sunset Junction had a cooler full of water bottles that were hard to get to.
»continue reading We Played Some Festivals Recently