Our tour of Texas--before it gets too hot. Actually, it got really cold there for a day! Check it out:
Thursday: Houston House of Blues. We flew to Houston early enough to take a long lunch before load in. Around 4:30, the gear started coming up from the street.
I'm trying to think of the last House of Blues we were in that didn't sound that great...maybe New Orleans? This stage is really nice.
There was still time to kill after soundcheck, so I went for a short run around the city. The weather was overcast and low 70s, which felt pretty good.
So, on to the gig...which was just really sloppy. We were tripping over each other all night. It was not good. I couldn't wait to get off stage.
Friday: We had a private event scheduled in Stafford, TX tonight as the monetary anchor of the trip. Stafford is right outside of Houston, so we had most of the day to kill. I did some more exploring on foot.
The fundraiser was at a place called the Redneck Country Club, and it looked to be a predictably Guns-and-God Republican shit show of a place. I mean, Ted Cruz was there the week before us, and his name was still on the marquee. Fuck that guy.
A little pregame basketball--it was warmer outside than it was in the venue.
There was a menu full of dinner options, but finding one without meat was impossible. I had a salad and french fries (do they still call them freedom fries here?).
What a pleasant surprise! This gig was really good--we bounced back and played really well, the crowd was excellent, and we helped to raise a ton of money. Plus, no guns and no rednecks. We survived.
Saturday: On to Dallas.
We played four nights in Texas, and the daytime temperature for three of them was in the low to mid 70s. The ONE NIGHT where we had an outdoor gig, the high for the day was in the low 40s. Conditions in Dallas were tough.
We stopped for gas at a Buc-ee's. I didn't go in.
Lunch in middle-of-nowhere Texas was difficult. We pulled into a shopping center with a Wal Mart and a Mexican restaurant so that a few of the guys could buy some warmer clothes for the evening. The restaurant menu had no meatless options, so I tried to order fajitas with no meat, which completely baffled my waitress. She didn't seem to understand, and I was trying to ask without explicitly saying "I'm a vegetarian and I'm not going to eat that" (which probably would've been better than just asking for meatless options). Eventually, I said, "Can I get fajitas with JUST the vegetables and no meat?" to which she replied, "Soooo...do you want chicken?" "This isn't going to work" I said, and walked out. Kip was nice enough to let me borrow the van and drive to a Subway for a veggie sub.
Onward! The wind was particularly brutal today, but lucky for us, the back of the stage blocked it, and the venue rented two heaters for the stage. We smelled of kerosene exhaust, but no frostbite.
This is the one on our side of the stage, with its replacement just outside. The first heater that they brought in would occasionally (once every few minutes) belch a stream of black smoke and seem to stop working, so the swapped it out.
After all of my griping about the temperature, the gig was fine. I was cold for the first hour, but I eventually was comfortable enough that it was no big deal. Once my hands were warm enough, I was fine.
Most surprising of all was the crowd--we thought nobody was going to come out and freeze with us, but there were several hundred rabid fans at The Colony. I would never have predicted it.
Load out was chilly.
We got to our hotel around 1 AM, and they'd sold some of our rooms. Three of us were bumped to the place across the street, but the guy across the street didn't seem to know anything about it. Then he locked up his computer and couldn't check us in. Then he was on the phone with their corporate help line, but they were no help. Then he couldn't run the credit card to pay for the rooms. Then he made keys for us, but wanted to follow us upstairs to make sure we could get in. It was not a good situation. Evidently, he woke Pete and Nick up in the middle of the night because he didn't copy down the credit card number correctly, too. That's some one star service right there.
Sunday: To Austin, but first, Buc-ee's. Yee haw.
We were under a time crunch today--the venue (3Ten Austin City Limits) had booked an early show in front of ours, so we had to soundcheck and get out of the way pretty early. We picked up lunch along the way into town.
We got there right as a church service was letting out--this room gets used a lot. Finally, it was our turn to drag the gear in and set it up. We plugged our stuff in, sound checked, and then pushed as much of our gear to the back third of the stage as we could, and put several things in cases in the storage room. Still, the early show band (6 pieces!) was not happy about having to work around our stuff. What was 3TenACL thinking, booking two big bands to play on a pretty tight stage?
Anyway, we had a few hours to kill, so we went to our hotel. I went for a run. The weather was perfect.
We came back right as the early show was finishing, reset our gear, and line checked everything.
Pre show porn watching? Everything was pay-per-view, so we stuck to scrolling through the options.
This show was easily our best playing of the weekend, and the crowd was electric. Was it sold out? Not sold out? The internet said yes, but maybe there were a handful of tickets available at the door. So if it didn't sell out, we can really close. Great gig.
One little hiccup: my laptop did the "mouse cursor moving all over the place on its own" thing for the first third of the gig, and a couple of times, the MainStage page would fly away and it'd just be my desktop (though it didn't close MainStage, so I could still play). It was a piece of dust in the track pad or something. After some clicking on it, everything calmed down. Fun!
Monday: A waffle for the road.
Our flight home was delayed, first by a half hour, and then by a full hour. Lots of time to wander and/or sit.
Apparently, our plane had a tire problem earlier in the day. Once we finally boarded, things were smooth--I slept the whole way home.
Georgia Theatre and Venkman's this week! See you there.
