Thursday: We flew to Indiana for two shows, one public and one private. The first was an evening at The Vogue, our midwestern home away from home.
It was a bit on the cold side when we arrived.
I don't miss icy sidewalks.
The Vogue show was pretty great. We came within a hundred people from selling it out (on a Thursday night with tough weather!). A week later, I can't recall any specific moments of greatness--just good vibes all around, on and off the stage.
A few of my favorite post-gig tweets...
Friday: After sleeping late, we took a field trip to the movies for a midday showing of Rogue One, the new Star Wars movie. Good stuff! I was glad to see fewer of the already established characters--bringing in Han and Leia on The Force Awakens felt a little like they were sucking up to the audience.
Anyway...back to work! Friday afternoon, we loaded into a restaurant for a holiday party in Carmel.
Our exciting green room situation.
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| Zaaaaach |
This party was about what you'd expect--nothing too exciting, though the drunk people lingering at the end of the night were pretty annoying.
While we were playing, Indianapolis had been covered in a sheet of ice. Not good for load out, not good for drunk people. The interstates were closed, meaning we had to crawl back to the hotel on smaller roads. The van and trailer left that night for the next gig (south of Atlanta!), and they had to wander south until almost Columbus, Indiana, where the roads were finally clear enough to resume highway travel.
Best of luck to the guys laying tile at the hotel. When we arrived Thursday afternoon, they were installing new tile in the lobby. Friday morning, they tore it all out (and jackhammered the grout off to get back to the concrete slab), and put more tile down Friday afternoon. Saturday morning, they probably (hopefully) couldn't get there to mess with it.
Saturday: We went to bed late and got up early for a flight back to Atlanta. The ice made things exceptionally difficult--our plan of taking taxis or uber to the airport took an extra half hour just to get a vehicle to the hotel, and then (because the roads were still icy), the travel to the airport took nearly an hour.
We eventually made it, with only minutes to check our bags in before the cutoff. To the gate! Unfortunately, one of the two security checkpoints for the airport was closed, and everybody was funneled through the open one. I didn't make it through the metal detector and had to go through the hands-up screener thing, but they had to recalibrate it first. After clearing that, I had to wait for the TSA guy to go through my backpack (the bananas were suspicious?). Finally, I ran back to the other terminal. We were the last guys to get on the plane. I was really glad I wasn't trying to fly with saxophones--that would have been a nightmare.
We returned to Atlanta around lunch time, giving everybody an hour or two to regroup before we headed south to Lagrange, GA for a wedding. Easy stuff--the second worst of it was hanging out in the green room for a few hours before we finally went to work.
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| Ganesh subbed on drums |
The worst of it was after our performance when the DJ kicked in, which inspired a pretty frantic load out. I drove Nick (who spent the entire weekend in some sort of gastric distress), so we ran like hell to get out of there.
The cake was great, though, and the room/barn was beautiful. Yay gig! Home by 12:30 AM.
