During the brief moment I played in a punk band in the early 2000s, we were given a completely unwarranted first gig, opening for a popular underground band on our college campus. We had written four or five original songs that extended our set to a hefty 15 minutes. We landed such auspicious beginnings when our drummer struck up a friendship with a local music manager who either heard us practice in our basement or saw us at an open mic night doing covers. Either way, he was hooked to our sound and landed us an opening slot barely a month after we formed.
Our set proceeded accordingly. None of us could recall how any of the songs progressed, often leaving the five of us playing different sections of the same song at once or one of us shifting to a new riff from another song out of pure frustration despite not finishing the first one. With a healthy dose of embarrassment and self-respect, our drummer and two singers fled the stage around ten minutes in as the music devolved into a cacophonous wall of sound. The bassist and I, however, refused to abandon our posts. In a later debriefing over beers, we both figured this might be our first and last gig, so we should make the most out of it.