Andrew St. Clair

My Nashville buddies, Heavy Cream, returned to New York for one day to play with Ty Segall at Death By Audio (a venue I had yet to shoot). The show space is about 1.5x the size of Maxwell’s in Hoboken and only half as dark. While there was lighting, but it was dim enough to need a flash. Especially to get pictures of the moshing that took place.

When I started shooting the first band, Home Blitz, my flash wasn’t firing properly and I was missing a lot of shots (mostly of the crowd pushing and shoving to the music). As it turned out, I had the wrong mix of batteries. Out of 4 AAs, 3 were 2650mAh and 1 was a 2900mAh which was somehow affecting the flash’s recycle time (taking as long as 25 seconds). Since my batteries were in my bag on the stage, I was forced to wait until after Home Blitz ended their set.

When I finally swapped out the batteries and I was back in business. Liquor Store were more fun to shoot. They have a a better stage presence and moved around a lot more.  I liked their set quite a bit. Next was Heavy Cream, who have a new drummer, Tiffany. She pretty much won me over immediately with her fun personality. And, unlike some bands I’ve met who’ve replaced members, she seems to fit in great with the rest of the group’s dynamic on and off stage. Heavy Cream’s set was so much fun. At one point, I was singing along to ‘Hawkwound’ and Mimi the (the lead guitar player) caught me and smirked.

As the night went on, the moshing got gnarlier and by the time Ty came on to the stage, the crowd was at the peak of it’s craziness. It was like being caught in a wave. The only way to get a shot (and to not damage my equipment) was to hold the camera above my head, as if I was wading across a river trying not to get my camera wet. I used live view to attempt to compose shots. For Ty, I was manually adjusting among the 51 focus points. When shooting the crowd, I switched it to 3D tracking, I pointed it in a general direction and hoped for the best.

Around the second or third song of Ty’s set, I felt like I got everything I was going to get, shot-wise. So, I stopped shooting, went to the back of the crowd and pounded a PBR. Another reason I moved was because I felt bad that I was getting in the way of a dude shooting video for either unartig or Big Ass Lens (not sure who). It’s not that I was standing in his way or anything, but as the crowd was shoving everyone around, I was getting knocked forward into the stage and in front of his lens. Yeah, I can be unselfish sometimes.

Heavy Cream are busy playing a few shows at SXSW, and will be back in NYC with Jeff the Brotherhood. If you aren’t busy seeing LCD Soundsystem’s very last show at MSG, go see Jess, Mimi, Tiffany, and Daniel rock out at Death By Audio on April 2nd. In the mean time, check out my photo coverage of this rockin’ show and a mini review by Andrew Frisicano over at BrooklynVegan.com