Friday: Yacht Rock traveled up to Nashville for a show at Marathon Music Works, a venue that I was excited to see. We've been searching for a better room to play for quite some time, and this looked to be a winner--good size (1500 capacity), big stage, nice green rooms.
Post-soundcheck, I walked a couple of blocks over to a vegan place called Vege-licious, which was a weird whole-in-the-wall kind of place behind another shop. I had a vegan Hot Chicken Sandwich and roasted potatoes. Excellent! Very spicy (also, a near-lethal amount of sodium). Still, it was nice to try something different.
I still had plenty of time after eating to go back and warm up, and hang in the really nice backstage area (apparently the owners of Exit/In also own Marathon Music Works, so there's lots of memorabilia here).
On to the gig! Yay! Big crowd, good vibes. This is definitely the best place we've played in Nashville. We were told that the guy who owns this place also owns The Signal in Chattanooga, and there are definitely many similarities. I like it. Easy gig.
Saturday: This was a long day. Things started with a late checkout from the hotel (with an hour run in the heat before that), then Chipotle for lunch, a couple of hours in the van, and then we were in Birmingham to headline a festival. We were scheduled to play at 9 PM and we got there in the middle of the afternoon, so the van dropped us at somebody's office/clubhouse place about a block away. Nice room! Non stop Grateful Dead played on the sound system, though.
Over the course of the evening, people (and these two sweet dogs) filtered in, and I ended up in a thirty minute conversation with one of the owners (of the dogs and the building), and the whole time he was sipping nitrous oxide out of two large balloons. At one point the guy asked me, "Does this offend you?" (what?) and I was thinking, "No, but it's really fucking weird!"
On to the show! This was a throw-and-go situation (throw your gear on stage and start playing), but we were able to uncase and preset some things off to the side, which cut the set up time down to maybe fifteen minutes.
Pretty decent gig. Pretty good crowd, and the weather wasn't nearly as godawful as predicted--I think it was maybe 80 degrees when we started. It felt longer than the night before, which usually indicates to me that the energy isn't quite there, but sitting around all day doing nothing didn't help with the flow either. Anyway, we did it, babe.
After the show, the local crew guys started grabbing our stuff and running it off stage (I took that to mean that their day was probably finished when the stage was cleared), and once we insisted that they leave everything and let us pack on stage, they were kind of worthless. So it goes.
Slice (major sponser of Slicefest 2019!) came up with some pizza that REALLY hit the spot.
After we loaded the trailer, we headed back over to the clubhouse to change, but things had gotten even weirder over there (nitrous, alcohol, fatigue, "bros"), so we took off for the hotel. When we got to the hotel, it was suggested that we just drive back to Atlanta, which we did. That kind of wrecked Sunday, but you never know if getting up and driving the next day is any better. I slept on and off the whole way home anyway, so I guess it doesn't matter.
North Carolina this week. Stay tuned.
