I watched the documentary Pearl Jam: Let's Play Two, which intertwined footage of the band's two nights at Wrigley Field and the Cubs' 2016 season, ending in their seventh game World Series victory. Excellent! I highly recommend it, even though hearing the hits off their album Ten temporarily rendered me a pile of depressed Gen X mush.
Lots of time to kill in Austin--we finished sound checking just after 5 PM and didn't play until 9, so I tried to go for a run. Unfortunately, it was 90 degrees! Slow going, but I got it done.
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| waiting for the bats to come out |
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| SRV. 5'5" in real life |
And the backline...we got some of the same gear that we had the last time we were in Austin. Different/rusty keyboard stands, and one of the Nords (Bencuya's bottom keyboard) was a crappy sounding Nord 2. The top keyboards were, unfortunately, the same, which meant that I ran into the same problem that I had the last time--the Fantom would not recognize my compact flash card, so I was not able to load my settings. Agh! Last Thursday, I saved a backup onto my laptop, though, so it wasn't a big deal to move that onto the keyboard--I'm an expert at it now. Didn't even break a sweat!
What else, what else...Ganesh subbed for Nick and Jason Nackers subbed for Mark Cobb...the crowd was, once again, full of beautiful women...the song that we learned by request, When the Going Gets Tough by Billy Ocean, sucks and I hope I never hear or hear myself play it again...we walked to our hotel from the gig...the Delta agent at the Austin airport ticket counter recognized us--"Oh, it's you guys again!"...jeez!
The flight home the next day was uneventful.
I watched 12 Strong, a movie about the first US soldiers in Afghanistan following September 11. It's very Hollywood, very predictable. Don't bother watching it. I was mad at myself for getting all the way to the end. Learn from my mistakes!
We're headed back to the northeast this week to reunite with our gear--dates in NYC Thursday, Boston Friday, a wedding in Brooklyn Saturday, and Washington DC on Sunday. Upcoming dates are here.
