On MySpace, I found out about these local bands who were playing a show nearby. So, last night, we decided to check out the show. The venue? It was at the Venetian Village Hall. This is one of the strangest venues I've ever seen a show at. First of all, Venetian Village isn't really big enough to warrant it's own village hall (it's mailing address is Lake Villa). It's merely a small residential neighborhood. So, as you can imagine, the village hall is nothing spectacular. It's a small, one-story, white wood-frame building about the size of the dining area of a Taco Bell. It's also not on any main road. It's tucked away on a residential side street. The fact that they're playing a village hall leads me to believe that the so-called "village" is looking for some new forms of revenue, and decided to start renting out the hall to rock bands. The convienience factor was great though. It took 3 minutes to drive there.

Upon arriving at the hall, we paid our 7 dollar admission and staked out a location on the left side of the stage. There really wasn't a bad view in the place, because even if you were up against the back wall, you were only about 25-30 feet from the stage. People came and went during the show, but there was a constant crowd of about 50 people or so. We definitely fell into the older age bracket of people at the show, but the crowd wasn't as young as I thought it was going to be. There were an over-abundance of mutton chops in the crowd, however.

There were 5 bands playing that night. The first band already played and the second band was just starting when we got there at 8:00. They were okay. The next band was alright, but nothing special. Actually, I don't really remember their music at all. What I do remember is the lead guitarist losing his pick halfway through the set and having to ask the audience if they had one. Luckily, someone in the audience did have one, but come on...what guitarist doesn't bring extra pics anyway? The 4th band, "Headlights", was the one I was there to see. I had become recently obsessed with one of their songs. It was not available on iTunes, so I pirated it by recording their stream of the song off their MySpace page. (I eventually paid them back by buying their CD after the show). Anyways, so Headlights were great. Definitely the highlight of the show. It also made it better that I knew the songs since listening to them for the past couple weeks. After Headlights was done playing, there was still one more band, but we decided to leave the night on a high note (in case the last band sucked). We had also been standing for nearly 3 hours. So, after buying a Headlights CD, we left. I hope that someday Headlights makes it big and I can say that I say that I saw them at the Venetian Village Hall: Land of The Mutton Chops.