6 YEARS OF MECHANISMUS - PART III OF VI

When Mechanismus moved to the Rebar it had a very different tone to the shows. Sometimes good, other times not so much. Sometimes goofy and other times a very serious vibe. We pissed people off and at the same time managed to gain a small following. Again...the Rebar years were like the Roger Moore era of the James Bond films.

Opening night for our new venue was in July 10th, 2008. There was no band but just a DJ show. Small crowd as we were still trying to figure out how to promote our new base of operations. The venue was certainly a step up in some respects to how the CHAC was but the sound equipment just wasn’t as good. We never quite ever sounded as good as we did at the CHAC. 




The theme of the shows during our reign of the Rebar became a lot more focused. The imagery now was more concentrated on particular social/political themes and strayed away from generalization. The themes went from child soldiers, the Zapatista, to anti-confederacy. The visuals during the shows were very strong and in your face. We even had someone get pissed off at one of the videos playing and leave. Hey, if you don’t piss someone off at an Industrial show you are not doing it right! 




We came upon our first year anniversary show in February. This was a big deal. I had survived a whole year of this shit! I spoke with Byron whom at the time was a vocalist for God Module and managed to book them for our 1 year anniversary show. We had almost a 100 people show up to the show and was probably thus far the best show we had done. The goal after this became to focus more on band shows. I started hitting up as many local bands as I could find and try to book them. As we went into our second year of Mechanismus, I realized the true challenge in running a show. You can have a successful show one month and the next month have 5 people show up. Seattle is stubborn. You have to convince people that they need to come to your show. You have to show them WHY your show is worth the $5 entry fee. Simply having a band play is not enough. There needs to be more. I went from ads in at the time alternative magazine called The Sinner to having Paul Aleinikoff announce the Mechanismus shows on his sunday night radio show. 




The struggle continued as we had hit and miss shows following all the way up to our 2 year anniversary show...

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