DC Games

After another luxurious day relaxing at the Hyatt, we jumped in the van to make our wonderfully late 4pm call time. We showed up to an empty stadium.

After a quick reunion with our buddies the Jonas Brothers and band, we popped up on stage for the most disastrous sound check we've ever had.

The setup went well. How hard can it be to plug stuff in?


But once we started getting levels, it was your basic 72-car freeway pileup. Nobody could hear anything. I, for example, was missing the left side of one of my keboards, my vocal, the click, and Miley's vocal. Not good.

And Vish, our regular dependable sound guy, was at the mercy of the Master of Incompentence - otherwise known as "the guy Disney supplied." The Master had confused the mixing console with Whack-A-Mole, as he randomly slapped buttons and knobs hoping for some sort of accidental miracle.

Halfway through this total catastrophe, in poured the Miley fans. Tons of 'em.

Perfect.

Full of enthusiasm, they didn't seem to notice our perplexed faces, as we struggled through one roughly-mixed song after another. Eventually we got our mixes to a place that wasn't awful, which seemed about the best we could hope for.

So it was off to dinner in the food tent. While we were eating, the weather did an about-face.

The sky began pelting the crowd with the largest raindrops I've seen in ages. Grape-like droplets. I could feel them explode as they hit me. I was fully soaked in ten seconds.

But the crowd was loyal. They weren't about to go home just because of some soggy clothes. Not when they were waiting to see Miley Cyrus, and the Jonas Brothers, and the Cheetah Girls, and...whoever else was playing.

In typical fashion for these sorts of things, we were then shepherded to a room far away, where we then filled out our paperwork and sat around for several hours.

Then we got the word. We were going on early. After all that waiting, now we had to rush. We threw on our costumes and jumped on golf carts, which whisked us over to the stage. We grabbed our gear and hurried up to the wings. One of the show runners saw us and said, "What are you guys doing here? You're not on for a while. The Cheetah Girls are on before you."

But we didn't have enough time to go back. So we just hung out in everybody's way, in the wings.

Miley sauntered up about fifteen minutes later, and we had an impromptu singing jam session on the side of the stage.

We all took our places. The dancers came out in their big long tailcoats. We rocked the place out with "See You Again," and two new songs: "Fly on the Wall" and "Breakout." The crowd totally ate up the new stuff. And of course, everybody loved "See You Again," which has become quite a huge crossover hit with Disney fans and on mainstream rock radio.

That was it. Funny how these things are 98% waiting and 2%playing.