Good Evening humans and frogs! Gnarboots greets you with most excellent happiness!

Fakeboots preparing to pirate the stage while...

When you play in rock band, strange things are bound to happen. Particularly when you play in a band as weird as my band: Gnarboots.

There was the time Cody Red, a Oakland homeless man, joined our band mid-way through our set at Mama Buzz Café. He was promptly tossed out of the band and allowed to rejoin three times.

At the Stork Club, our bass player Bob challenged the audience to an all out full-scale hip hop competition. He of course won all three rounds, but barely.

...Gnarboots unwittingly eat some burritos.

While opening for The Phenomenauts at Homestead Lanes, we lost our voices and had to program all in-between song banter using a computer voice. Careful to master the robot dialect, the sentences came out like, “Good Evening humans and frogs! Gnarboots greets you with most excellent happiness! Pleasure to make music sound good for all of your ears! Next song we will play has a lot of delicious guitar sections.”

But when we played Nickel City, something so peculiar happened, even I was shocked. The lights dimmed and the MC started to introduce us. Even though we were the first band, he was throwing around words like “legends” and “before their time.” I felt good. Before we had a chance to climb up on the stage, a different group of guys beat us to the punch. Huh? Who were they? Worse yet, they announced to the audience that they were us.

“Hi everyone. We’re Gnarboots…I’m Adam!” one said. “I’m Bob,” another said. “And I’m uh…Aaron,” the third said. No you’re not, I thought, I’m Aaron. I couldn’t move. Fake Bob looked at the audience and smiled. They quickly went into one of our songs. They knew all the words and everything.

I turned and looked at the real Bob and Adam. They were standing next to me. At least I was fairly certain they were the real Bob and Adam. What if we were the fake Gnarboots and only thought we were real? Time was slipping away from us. We had to do something. Fakeboots was stealing the show. The audience loved them! In a matter of minutes they would no longer care who was real and who was fake. I did what any sane thinking person would do. I pulled the plug on the power, grabbed real Bob and Adam and marched to the stage. As soon as the imposters saw us, they skittered off the stage. I shouted, “We are Gnarboots!” The crowd cheered. And now the show was just beginning…