Friday: insanely early flight. Our carpool to the airport left midtown at 6:50 AM. Ugh. Worse still, I failed to sleep at all on the flight. Maybe I'm dying--I always sleep on the plane. I watched a movie instead.
First stop: our hotel rooms, where Mark Cobb and I discovered that we had those sleep-number beds you always see on TV (but never in person). 100 is hard, 0 is soft. Cobb's didn't work at first, and mine would change radically...and then we realized that he had the remote for my bed, and I had his.
Lunch stop in Austin:
I don't remember how you say "shrimp kebab" in Spanish, but that's what this was. Very good. This is the kind of Mexican/Turkish delight that The Great Bencuya would enjoy.
Our stage set up for gig number one in Austin. The Van Halen Hot for Teacher backdrop (for Mom: https://youtu.be/6M4_Ommfvv0?t=3m9s)
Lots of down time before this one got going. Here's Zach playing with his new computer. Somebody ripped off his laptop and iPad (and Kip's laptop and iPads) while the van was making a pit stop in between Chicago and Austin. Boooooo.
Here's our pre-gig meal (not pictured: salad, giant cookies). Woo! The picture does it justice.
Pretty happening for a corporate gig. The dance floor was full pretty early, and stayed that way consistently until the end of our set.
Post gig, we returned to our sleep number beds, only to find that the damn TV wouldn't work, so we called the hotel's repairman at 1 in the morning to come check it out.
At first he thought it was the cable box.
Later on in the troubleshooting process, he figured out that the HTMI jack on the back of the TV was dead, so he left with our broken TV.
And a great sadness fell across the land.
Minutes later, he returned with a TV from an empty room! Triumph!
Quite a tummy.
And the whole time, I was doing this.
Saturday: our public gig on this two night stand in Austin. Very snazzy gig poster!
I had some of that anti-Christian coffee from Starbucks. Whatever...
Austin has a really cool trail system along both banks of the Colorado River. I did the 10 mile loop.
Stevie Ray Vaughan statue on the opposite bank from our hotel. No statues of Double Trouble.
At 1 PM, we checked out of the sleep number hotel and moved across town (over by the airport) to a different hotel. Late check out and early check in equals much time laying on our backs watching TV.
I had lunch at a Subway. There will be no pictures of my footlong.
Around 4 PM, we made our way to the venue to set up. Much to our dismay, the stage was extremely small, and the lighting guy set up four lighting trusses against the back wall, making the space even more tight. Everybody found a place to stand, but was invisible to the crowd due to a stack of speakers directly in front of me, and Pete stood a couple of feet back from his usual spot so as to avoid being hit in the face with the headstock of Monkeyboy's guitar.
Pre-gig meal: a cup of chili, and then tacos.
The Great Bencuya had a sandwich and fries. Very satisfying.
Tight stage and no real green room, but we made the best of it, and I thought the crowd was great! Around 200 people, I heard. The sound was naturally great--Kip and Zach nailed it again. Good gig!
Look at all of this delicious pineapple that was thrown away. A great sadness fell over the land. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU, TEXAS!? I COULD HAVE EATEN THIS!
...and then we packed up the trailer and left. Once we'd finished, a DJ took over, and the music was so loud and obnoxious (and kept enough people in the only space where we could've packed up) that we pulled stuff off the stage and put it in cases out in the parking lot.
Yay Austin! I'd love to find a way to come here more often. Hopefully now that we've proven we can draw some kind of crowd, we'll be able to get into a room with a proper stage and dressing room.
Sunday: slept like a dead guy on the plane. I was home for about forty-five minutes before it was time to leave for double church gig duty.
In other news, it took ten days, five phone calls, and four unanswered voicemails, but that stinky hotel in Columbus, IN finally mailed my hat, belt, socks, and shades back to me. I guess I should be thankful that they didn't ask me to pay the postage. A few years ago in L.A., I left some things in a drawer in our hotel and it cost me forty bucks to get it back.
The final few shows of the year:
Thanksgiving Eve...sold out...never mind.
Brunch gig at Venkman's. Hopefully we'll play this gig before the details change again.
The Vogue Theatre in Indianapolis.
A few Christmas shows at Venkman's.
There's also a New Year's Eve gig at the Park Tavern, but the poster is not...uh...ready. I think the one that's out right now is kind of a rough draft. I hope.
