In 2016, Team San José reached out to my band and offered us a paid slot to play at 'Super Bowl City'.
That sentence is infinitely funny to me because like, we generally got silo'd into nerd stuff being a partially chiptune band; we primarily played video game festivals and events1 and like, I haven't voluntarily watched a football game since maybe 2012?? - but a paid gig is a paid gig!
So what was 'Super Bowl City'?
The San Francisco 49ers had a new-ish stadium and it was going to be the host for Super Bowl 50. San Francisco planned a big, week-long event called 'Super Bowl City' that amounted to closing off Market street between Main and the Embarcadero and turning it into a weird tourist trap with events and vendors to 'show off' San Francisco. Despite being the host city, the 49er's stadium itself was located in Santa Clara, California which is uhh
not close
so! they partnered with other Bay Area cities to 'liven up' the event, and what it boiled down to was we got paid to drive from our studio (located about 20 mins southeast from Levi's stadium) to downtown San Francisco (~1.5 hours in traffuck) and play our end of the world chiptune meets violin pop music on an outdoor stage that had an '#IKnowtheWayToSanJosé!' banner to a crowd of mostly cold football fans wondering where the beer garden was.
It was a surreal experience. I played our entire set without knowing who was even in the super bowl that year. It also didn't help that Team San José and San José Jazz were essentially interchangeable orgs, so the wording of who was sponsoring the event and or what type of music to expect was never the same twice. We are not a Jazz band lmao.
The other wild thing was like, we've played at a fair amount of festivals and fancy private events but this is the only time we ever had to go through an honest-to-god counter-terrorism checkpoint and had all of our IDs verified by CPB. One of my bandmates even had their pocket knife multitool confiscated at the checkpoint. There were golf carts with swat teams armed with automatic weapons everywhere. The whole thing was WILDLY militarized.
Oh and for some reason the stage had bamboo flanking (a true hallmark of the silicon valley) and this pin thing on loan from the San José Children's Discovery Museum which you could only really access FROM the stage which meant it could only be used between performances but we got a good use out of it at least.
Joey(drums) and Josh (bass) lookin sharp.
Anyway I wish we had photos or videos of us actually performing but I think they're all lost to the sands of time or deleted Instagram accounts. These are all photos I snapped myself. I did however catch a gif of Alan (violin) warming up on the side stage before showtime. He was playing a bunch of star wars and final fantasy music for the fuck of it.
Footnotes
1 - While writing this I realized that we were probably one of the first artists (maybe even the only??) to perform with a Nintendo Gameboy at Shoreline Amphitheater. I'm 100% humblebragging here because I think that's nerdy as shit lmao - but if anyone knows a chiptune band who played at shoreline before or after summer of 2015 lemme know
