In Round 1 we were the first band of the night and there was a decent size crowd in front us. For this regional round we were the fourth band to go on and The Empire was totally packed. We were pumped and couldn't wait to hit the stage. The thing I was most concerned about was the tear down and set up time. There was a total of fifteen minutes for the previous band to get off the stage and for us to get on the Stage. This included Switching out the drum sets, getting all the mics in place, getting the amps on stage, plus setting up the backdrop and a getting quick line check on all the instruments. That's really only 7 minutes and thirty seconds to set up. Thanks to our crew and the professionalism of Paum the sound guy everything went smoothly.
I'm getting ahead of myself a bit and I'd like to mention that I rehearsed a lot of the details for this performance. Now I didn't know exactly what I was going to say during the talking parts but I had everything planned out as far as when I was going to pick up my staff and when and where I was going to put it down and when I would take off my sun glasses, lol. I originally had planned to have two mic stands, one normal one and one for the killing backwoods song but one of the other bands must have accidently taken the normal mic stand so I used the Killing Backwoods one the entire set. This definitely worked out better and somehow at the end of the night the normal mic stand reappeared. Maybe it was some divine Intervention going on there. Anyways we were up against some tough competition but I believe our crowd was the most enthusiastic of the night and they really inspired us and added a ton of energy to our performance.
At the end of the night when Seth from SBS Live was roasting all of the bands a bit he said our main inspiration was ABBA and that if it wasn't for ABBA there would be no Stage of Dreams!! We laughed our asses off at this, though our laughter quickly turned to cheers when he said to the road to Wacken goes through The Youngstown/Warren Regional airport Congratulations to The Stage of Dreams!!
I myself was truly surprised and had no expectations but of course I wanted it to be us. Through all of this I had thought it was amazing just to be apart of it and maybe we could get noticed some.
Well now it was on!! The Stage of Dreams was going to Hollywood to compete on the Sunset Strip for The Wacken Battle USA 2022 National Championship!!
One of the coolest thing about all the bands were how they congratulated us and told us to go kick ass in Hollywood.
