Why Did No One Tell Us?

I recently had the opportunity to look deep in to the past and watch a decidedly blurry video of Urban Rust, my old band, playing at the Fine Line Music Cafe in January of 1999. It was okay. Here's the thing, though:

We played every song too fast. Every song. Too fast. And every song speeded up as it went along. I don't remember anyone ever mentioning this to us.

Also, maybe it's just the blurry video, but I appear to have some kind of small animal gnawing on the back of my head.

Now I understand that maybe we were sort of an aloof, cool rock band and maybe people put us up on a pedestal. (None of that is true.) Maybe people thought we were doing these things on purpose - speeding up already too-fast songs, wearing glorious, fluffy ponytails on our bassists, etc.

I understand that criticizing people's appearance can be a very dicey proposition, so the ponytail thing is fine. It's by far not the worst hair mistake I ever made. But someone (anyone!) could have at least confronted us gently on the runaway tempos issue.

Oh, well. I forgive you. Thanks for coming to the shows anyway. The crowd was very enthusiastic and those were some fun times.