Las Vegas Weekly

Evers McGee keeps his cool despite mechanical meltdown

Evers McGee lost the songs off his laptop. No, that PBR was not responsible.

Photo: Laura Davis

Sometimes you have to put on a happy face—even when your laptop falls to the ground and loses all the tracks off your new album, a week before your show. And even when the title of said new album is The Unhappy Meal, whose cover art is an altered dollar bill with George Washington sporting red, Ronald McDonald-style lips.

Evers McGee, aka Aaron Cattoir, formerly known as local hip-hop artist JLA, managed to keep his spirits up at his CD release performance at the Bunkhouse last Friday. While confessing to the mechanical malfunction—they don’t just come in the form of wardrobes, after all—Cattoir’s sheepish smile won the audience over, despite the proposed setlist suddenly becoming a whole lot shorter. The crowd circled the stage with heads bobbing and arms thrown in the air to the electronic beat.

“My computer literally crashed, it fell about four feet off a keyboard stand and wiped out everything I had saved on it. I’d intended to play the album,” he confessed both during and after the show. Instead, the crowd was treated to a last-minute improv set courtesy of Cattoir, with added help from fellow Macro-Fi member oKword. “The [song] that I played with oKword was cut from the Outside Looking In album. That track didn’t fit the album, but I had it backed up, so we were able to play that, then just some songs I knew how to play or had come up with that week,” Cattoir explained.

Cattoir might be smiling on the outside, but he describes the mood of his new album as “fairly dark.” “Our culture today is so filled up with corporate B.S.—prepackaged people [made] by the consumer culture. I’m not a Happy Meal. I’m mad that they did this.” Occasionally, you just gotta wear a frown.