On the Road Again, Part V
No guitars? No problem!
By Gregg Troyan
Lipstick is band that has gone through numerous lineup changes in our short time as a band. We’ve only been playing out since late 2012, but we must have had over twenty people come and go through our band lineup. We’re Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
on good terms with basically everyone who has ever played with us, and a lot of them have come back to guest at shows with us. Even though they may not be able to commit full time membership, we have a lot of friends who want to play with us, so we’re always able to put on a good show. We’ve never once cancelled a show in our history as a band, despite illness, injuries and other unexpected occurrences.
However, there was a time in our history when we had a guitarist named Eric Penticoff, who is a great guy and a great friend. Last year, Eric became a father for the first time, and it was right around the time of our annual Halloween show: one of our biggest shows of the year. Lipstick’s first show was a Halloween show in 2012, and our 2013 Halloween show was a big hit as well, so there were a lot of expectations for our 2014 Halloween show. And our guitarist just had a baby and wasn’t able to play.
We scrambled looking for a guitarist. All of our friends who normally fill in for us weren’t available; they were either Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.out-of-town or had another gig that night. Now, most bands would just cancel the show: we had just vocals, bass and drums. But, Lipstick doesn’t cancel gigs.
So, we decided to play a show without guitars. Steve (our bassist) invented an instrument called The Abomination, which is a short-scale bass tuned to D D A D that uses three guitar strings and one bass string, so one is able to play both bass parts and guitar parts at the same time. So, we had Steve play Abomination, and we had me do solos for the show on keyboards. And, since we’re a theatrical band, we had a story go on at the start of the show where a supervillain destroyed all guitars in existence, and we were saved by Batman inventing a new instrument for us to play.
The show was amazing, and the crowd said it was one of the best shows we’ve ever done.
Watch Lipstick here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BN33efDNUms
