Remembering the New Year's Eve That I Got Big-Timed By Third Eye Blind

It happens to all of us

Third Eye Blind in 2000. (Image from Scott Gries via Getty)

This story involves the radio, so to some readers, this will be like a story about steam-powered streetcars.

In the late 2000s, radio was still in full bloom. Every city had several flourishing stations, and most of them featured a wacky drive time duo whose names followed a regular-dude-plus-vaguely-inappropriate-animal-nickname template, i.e. Curtis & The Sweaty Beaver, Mikey & The Splooge Hound, and so on. These princes of prank phone calls had developed lucrative media fiefdoms, and no one at the time knew that their empire would soon be swept under the sand. I suppose it was sort of an Ozymandias & The Wet Weasel situation.

At some point during that era — I think it might have been New Year’s Eve 2009 — I got booked to do standup at a local radio station’s Big Overpriced New Year’s Eve Bullshit event. It was at a hotel in DC attached to the convention center, one of those sprawling complexes that normally hosts The Oral Surgeons Of America Annual Conference or The Garbage Pail Kids Worldwide Trade Show, or something like that. For $30, people with no better idea of what to do on New Year’s Eve could go from room-to-room and partake in different forms of white-person fun, so: One room was for dancing, in one room you could meet Davy & The Skunkbox (or whoever it was), and one room featured me and a big-time comic brought down from New York (!!!) alternating 30 minute sets.

This was a big gig for me. I’d been doing stand-up while working a day job for a few years, and I was starting to get some legit work. I was also wondering if it might be possible at some point to ditch the day job — if I could just book three “showcase” gigs a night all 365 night of the year, I might clear 20 grand. The New Year’s Eve gig had me brushing up against the big time, and — not to brag — I got paid three figures for it.

But the main attraction at the event — the draw accounting for about $27 of the $30 cover charge — was the band Third Eye Blind. For you uncultured inbreds unfamiliar with Third Eye Blind, they were a ‘90s band in the ernest-dudes-in-leather-jackets-singing-slam-poetry-lyrics-over-major-key-chord-progressions genre. Here’s a link to their big hit, but fair warning: Opening that link might be like a ‘Nam vet returning to Hill 55 — you really don’t know what long-suppressed memories might flood back. My thoughts on Third Eye Blind today are that they seem to be a bunch of guys making music that people like and have stuck with it for 30 years, so good for them — I’m much more agnostic about music than I used to be. But back then, I would have described Third Eye Blind as “a mix of rock, pop, and having a bear trap shoved up my ass sideways.”

There were maybe 300-400 people in the room when I took the stage. It was around 8:00, and people were on their first or second flute of $15 champagne, which put them in the comedy sweet spot: Just drunk enough to be loose, but not drunk enough to randomly yell out “ART MONK SHOULD BE IN THE HALL OF FAME!” (which happened during my set one night). My set went well. The comic from New York also did well, and my second set went even better than the first. It was the rare instance in my standup career of things going well and everyone having a good time.

This was important data for me. I was starting to reach big-fish-in-a-small-pond status in DC, and was wondering if I should push in my chips and move to New York. I was nearing 30, which meant that something needed to happen soon if I was going to prove to my parents that I was right to go to Clown College instead of law school. This show had me thinking “I can do this. I’m holding my own next to a real professional from New York. The crowd loves me, I have ‘it’, and now I need to see how far ‘it’ can take me.”

By my third set — around 10:00 — I was feeling good. I had had some champagne, which was free for me (because some people had left half-full glasses on tables). My third set started like the first two: Hot, lively, I was a comedy golden god. And then, about five minutes in…

I didn’t even know that the hotel had an intercom system. So when I heard an electronic “CLICK” and the sound of someone blowing into a microphone, at first, I didn’t know what was happening. But someone started speaking, and I quickly recognized the voice as either Timmy or The Muff Rat (I never knew which was which). And — in a disembodied, God-like voice — one of those two spoke to his throngs, saying:

“HEEEEEEEEY THERE NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY PEOPLE!!! JUST WANT TO LET YOU KNOW…RIGHT NOW, TAKING THE MAIN STAGE — FRESH OF THEIR WORLD TOUR OF THE FLORIDA PANHANDLE — BROUGHT TO YOU BY DC101 AND SASQUATCH VENOM ENERGY DRINK…THIRD…EYE…BLIND!!!”

The room would not have cleared out more quickly if he had said “Snakes loose in the building — RUN!!!” People stampeded out of the room — for a second I worried that we might have a The Who in Cincinnati in ‘79 situation. And look: I knew that people came to see Third Eye Blind, I knew that I was a time-filling distraction much like the skee-ball machine in the room next to me, but seeing the speed and — dare I say — desperation with which people left the room caught me off guard.

Time amplifies memories, so I can’t swear to the accuracy of every detail here, but what I remember is this: A big cloud of dust lingering where the crowd had just been. Tumbleweeds. Person-shaped holes in the wall where people had cartoonishly blasted through when they couldn’t access the door. A family of raccoons rummaging through a trash can, demonstrating their conviction that this space was no longer occupied by humans. That’s what I remember, and though the specifics may be fuzzy, I’m sure about the upshot: That room emptied out fast.

If there’s a lesson here — and there doesn’t need to be, but let’s go nuts — is that life has a way of cutting you down to size the second you get full of yourself. Because the crowd didn’t abandon me for Led Zeppelin, or even Matchbox Fucking 20 — they abandoned me for a band that 80 percent of people don’t remember, and most of the 20 percent who think they remember are actually remembering Deep Blue Something. And the worst part is: The crowd wasn’t wrong. Third Eye Blind at least play instruments — I was a guy in a polo shirt observing that there’s not much chicken in chicken noodle soup. I was devastatingly — but wholly accurately — cut down to size.

Eventually, I did move to New York. I flopped hard, but got bailed out by my writing chops, and as judgements by the universe go, I’m not going to appeal that one. Third Eye Blind are still making music, and since anyone who scratches out a living doing what they love officially wins, I’ll say again: Good for them. I hope they have many years of cucking adjacent standups still to come. But every New Year’s Eve, I’ll remember the time they reminded me that the universe really doesn’t like it when you get too full of yourself.

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