Grainy Footage and a Crumpled Napkin: How We Rebuilt Last Straw's Very First Gig, Note by Note

There's a saying among archivists: history isn't what happened, it's what somebody bothered to write down. In our case, history is a 4-minute-and-12-second video shot vertically on a phone so old it may have predated the band itself.

We're calling it the Setlist Archaeology Project, and it started with a simple question thrown out in our fan Discord: does anyone remember the first show?

The answer, it turns out, is five people. And they remembered everything.

The Video That Started It All

The footage is, to put it kindly, rough. Shot from the back of a room that held maybe 60 people, the camera wobbles, the audio clips, and at one point somebody's thumb covers the lens for a solid 20 seconds. But there we are — all four of us, on a stage that was clearly built for a karaoke night, playing a song we couldn't even identify at first.

That's the thing about your first show. You don't document it. You barely survive it. If it weren't for the fans, the whole night would've dissolved into legend.

The clip was posted by @marissafromdayton, who told us she filmed it "because my friend dragged me there and I needed proof the night happened." Proof, Marissa. We owe you our entire origin story.

The Paper Setlist in a Wallet

Then came the real artifact. A fan named Doug — yes, Doug, he's a legend now — reached out with a photo of an actual paper setlist he'd snagged off the stage that night. It had lived in his wallet for ten years, folded into eighths, faded to the color of weak coffee.

Half the song titles were illegible. One just said "NEW ONE??" which, according to our bassist, was a song that had been written three days earlier and rehearsed exactly once. "We played it and I could see the terror in everyone's eyes," he told us. "The crowd didn't notice. There were maybe twelve people actually watching."

Doug's setlist became our Rosetta Stone. Cross-referencing it with the video, the timestamps, and a half-dead Facebook event page ("LAST STRAW + openers, 9pm, $5"), we managed to reconstruct the full running order.

Interviewing the Witnesses

We tracked down five people who were actually in the room. Their accounts varied wildly:

• The drummer's cousin: "They were incredible." (Biased. Disqualified.)
• A guy who came for the openers: "Who?"
• The bartender: "They broke a mic stand. They paid for it. Good kids."
• Marissa: "The third song gave me chills. I've been chasing that feeling at every show since."
• Doug: "I took the setlist because it looked like litter. Then I heard the last song and stayed for the whole encore."

The last song, according to every single witness, was the moment. An early, unrecognizable version of a track that would eventually close our third album. No one in that basement knew they were hearing it first. They just knew it felt like something.

What the Dig Actually Uncovered

Here's what struck us most putting this together: the fans documented everything before anyone knew it would matter. Marissa filmed a band nobody had heard of. Doug kept a piece of paper for a decade on the off chance it meant something. That's not fandom — that's faith.

We've come a long way from a broken mic stand and a $5 door charge. But the through-line is the same room, the same songs, the same strangers deciding to care.

So here's our ask: if you were there that night — or at any night since — keep the ticket stubs. Save the setlists. Film the shaky videos. Someday, someone's going to go digging, and they're going to find you.

Archaeology, it turns out, is a team sport.