"We've Arrived at the Good Work"

Total distance driven: 1268sm

Currently listening to: Neil Young -- Harvest Moon

Only 47 miles outside Indianapolis we encounter some seriously heavy rain and a full rainbow (the end-to-end, totally legit kind of rainbow). I’ll take this as a sign that the show tonight will have …seven different colors and a pot of gold at the end.

The past several days have been hectic but great: we trekked from St. Louis after an okay show to Champaign, IL where we played great and drew a good crowd from playing an outside stage. It’s fun when passers by stop outside the fence of the venue to ponder what they’re seeing and hearing. Several people who came up to talk to me after the show informed me that they had, in fact, wandered in because of the sights and sounds. Successful night, complete with an awesome breakfast at a local diner the next day:

The following two days landed us in beautiful Chicago, a town famous for deep-dish pizza, the Sears Tower, Grant Park and not giving local/touring bands the time of day. It was great to meet up with some friends and have a clean place to stay. I am ceaselessly amazed at the hospitality shown to us by friends and “strangers” (usually bands we play with or venue people) alike. Having a floor to sleep on is a tremendously coveted opportunity and Julia was kind enough to have coffee and eggs made for us when we woke up.

Back to back Chicago shows: the first, Friday show was a disappointment, leaving a sour taste in our mouths. It was our third show in the Windy City and our third time to face the fact that Chicago is difficult. When you have a city so large and so densely populated, there is music everywhere. The same goes for towns like Austin and NYC. The city is calloused to new music because every band in the contiguous US wants to be “from” there or just play there (it looks great on paper – “yeah, we’ve got a gig in Chi-town next weekend). The result of this attention paid to a city like Chicago is a population so disinterested in small-scale, touring bands that you can find yourself playing for the only sound guy and the other band dudes/dudettes if you book the wrong club.

On a more positive note we had a really GREAT show in Chicago the second night, Saturday. We played at a place called Ronny’s (different than the previous night’s venue) for a solid crowd and did well in the merch department. Talk about a 180 degree flip. It just goes to show you the complexity of a city as diverse and huge as Chicago. There is, of course, a lot of promotion, emailing and other assorted media moves to be done before any show but, for the sake of simplicity and “zeroing that out,” we’ll hold that all constant; it levels the field of these shows and lets me compare them objectively, the bad one night and the good the next.

Saturday was an excellent day off. With no driving necessary to get us to the next show (excluding the consistently hellish Chicago driving which can often lead to 30 minutes of car time to traverse five miles), we had the full day to embrace the town. Zach and Mack went west to visit Chris at I.V. Labs, the studio that we mixed “Tadaima” at last summer. Wil and I opted for a cold swim in Lake Michigan with the skyline in full view, on a beach inhabited by everyone from toddlers and parents not much older than us to elderly couples and solo, urban women working on their tans.

Wil, you beast you.

One kid, walking down the beach with his father in tow, pointed to my American flag bathing suit with an ear-to-ear smile and excited laughter. “Yeah, you’ve seen that before, haven’t you!” the father cheerfully remarked. I smiled and simply said “World Cup.” “They stand a chance,” the father said, supportively. Despite my good spirits and the light nature of our brief exchange, a voice in my head screamed “man, it’s OUR team, it’s WE, not THEY! USA, USA, USA!” Being a World Cup - excuse me - a United States fan, I was pretty torn up about our loss to Ghana not an hour earlier that afternoon.

--Man, Ghana played a sleazy game. Sure, they won “fair and square” and I’m not by any means a sore loser but come on—any time we got a lead they would trip our players or just pull them down by the jersey. I can only wonder how much jersey grabbing and other illegal behavior was going on during those corner kicks. Seriously, faking injuries during added time to get a fresh player in? Filthy. The differences in how we played the game and how Ghana played the game really points to implicit differences in national cultures, in my eyes. That’s a whole separate conversation!

After our time at the lake we hopped on a bus to Jefferson Park where we slid onto the metro Blue Line, road a few stops down to Logan Square where we disembarked and walked about a mile to the venue, arriving promptly at the predetermined reconvening time of 8pm. Showtime.

We headed out mid-morning the following day, Sunday, for Indianapolis. The Non-mobile, AKA The Burb, drank $100 in fuel as we stopped to heat up a pleasant meal of Easy Mac with a side of peanut butter and honey sandwiches at a gas station just off I-64 out of Chicago. Living on the road is just as glorious as one might expect!

The drive to Indy lead us into a sever storm, exactly where I began writing this gargantuan blog post. We played a pretty good show at a venue run by a couple of not-so-nice people, the kind that have absolutely no interest in returning any gesture of kindness or good natured interaction and got out of dodge. I stuck myself behind the wheel and drove two hours to Louisville, Kentucky (a city and state I have never had the opportunity to visit before) where we stayed with a recently graduated and married friend of Wil’s. Serving as an example of the spontaneous hospitality I keep talking about, they sheltered us after a midnight phone call and soaking wet, 2:30am arrival. Man, people are great. It’s really incredible.

So, we find ourselves on the drive yet again. I now sit backseat passenger side as we pass through more intermittent, heavy rain showers. We are now about 70 miles outside Nashville and the local time is 12:17pm. What’s interesting about today is a meeting we have with a SESAC (Society of European Stage Authors and Composers) representative at 3:30. SESAC is now essentially a record label and publishing rights organization along the lines of BMI. We’ll see how this goes, it should be exciting. We have a show tonight at a place called Open Lot in Nashville, which should also be pretty awesome.

[The sun is now out and the clouds have cleared away! As a situational update –

Total distance driven: 1565sm

Currently listening to: Candy Claws – In Dream of the Sea Life

What a long freakin’ post! I had a great time writing this one.]

--Life on the line continues!