Here it is! Americans in France has entered the blogoverse! We do so in honor of the tour we are now on, of which it is the end of day one.
I guess you should have a bit of a sense of the strange circumstances in our lives going into the tour:
Casey works for an architecture firm in New York city from our home in Chapel Hill. With the tour approaching, she was gearing up to crunch in some extreme late night hours in an attempt to cram a months worth of work into the 4 days before we hit the road. Her hard drive crashed on day two and took another couple of days to fix. This would have pissed her boss off a lot more if he wasn't an extremely cool dude (and a traveling musician himself). Big props to J.C. (not that one dummy).
Kent recieved word the day before our first show that he would not have a job to come home to when we returned. He is taking it very well considering it was a big-boy job. There is something excellent about what Aerosmith would call "livin' on the edge". His van has a brand new transmission and we are just going to live in the motherfucker if we have to.
I had just spent a month working the potato harvest in northern Maine and returned to Chapel Hill to play some shows and finish work on the Shithorse cassette tape (now available). On the way south I decided to stop in New York to break up the trip and stay with Kent's sister and our dear friend Anne-Marie Howard. With a pocket full of farm money I racked up a big-city bar tab.
Later at the apartment in Brooklyn, I tried to stay awake with Anne-Marie until she left for JFK to fly to San Francisco that morning. I was exhausted by this point however and failed.
I woke up a few hours later to find the place empty and got my stuff together to finish the drive. All of my stuff that is, except for one crucial element: my keys which turned out to be en route to San Francisco. In her defense we have the same key chain.
Unaware of this, I propped the door of her building open with a pack of cigarettes and used a coat hanger to break into my truck. Finding no key's within the vehicle I walked a few blocks in the cold rain back to her building and found my cigarettes lying out of reach behind the locked door to her nice, warm and dry building.
This was an expensive situation to remedy and when I got back to town I struggled to pick up shifts at my old job and left town with 50 dollars.
It's a long way to the top indeed. However, if our first show in Greensboro was any indication, this is going to be a great trip. Greensboro is one of those towns with a revolving door of venues. Places open and close shortly there after (or stop hosting shows) and a new one will pop up somewhere. I hope Artistika (ARTISTIC-KA) sticks around.
The show was put on by Wuag 103.1 fm. The station has been playing our record a lot since it was released and we were happy to meet all the dj's that have been playing it and thank them. We played first to a crowd that seemed to top 100 people and the sound in that place was incredible!
Lake played after us, who more or less started out as a Fleetwood Mac cover band (I am told). They had about 8 people in there band and were very talented musicians and nice people. They also served as the backing band for Karl Blau, who headlined the show. He is a prolific character by the looks of his merch table. He had 15 LP's on that thing! This made our one album, one t-shirt, one sticker operation look like the equivalent of the kid's table.
We decided to drive back to Kents place and stay in a comfy sleeping situation. The morning finds us pumped to drive to Virginia.
No comments:
Post a Comment