Hello, friends! Rob here.
First tour update! Yaaaaaay I guess.
Colorado is actually probably the best state. Yes, I know I live in Louisiana, where you don’t have to show your ID or get out of your car in order to buy a daiquiri for the ride home from the gun show where you just purchased “the dick-stompin’est 9mm that forty bucks can buy” with no background check or waiting period, but Colorado is just really… Nice.
Perhaps too nice.
Colorado is sort of like the Ned Flanders to your state’s Homer Simpson. Its yard is cleaner, its family is nicer, and no matter what you do, it always seems so much happier than you. Everything is clean and healthy. Everyone is good-looking and nice.
It’s kind of annoying after a few days.
Not really. What’s really annoying is the constant van-trouble we’ve been having. We’ve blown like 75 fuses in about a week on the road. Maybe it’s because our dear friend Michael Girardot (with us through Chicago this Saturday) has introduced us to the holy grail of forbidden (yet convenient) road trip technology: the cigarette lighter-to-AC outlet converter. Hopefully, our electrical systems aren’t experiencing any sort of strain related to the electronic braking system and hilarious size of the newest member of Team Revivalists, Jonathan Trailer Thomas:
One such instance found us unsure of what to do after a fantastic show in Boulder. We had never played in Colorado before this weekend, but there was a great crowd at The Lazy Dog made greater by about ten people up front who already knew the words to our songs and stuff. Thanks to those wonderful people, because you guys really made that show for us. It’s such a fuzzy feeling.
And as long as we’re doling out gratitude, many thanks go to our dear friends in Frogs Gone Fishin’ for your hospitality and general coolguy-ness. Glad we’re gonna roll with you guys in Ohio in a week.
But we’re talking about van-trouble, aren’t we?
Yes. Anyway, after the fantastic show in Boulder (which, in case I failed to mention, was fantastic), we had some van-trouble. The fuse for our trailer’s brakes had blown, which caused them to go into emergency mode. It’s good that this works. It really is. But at this particular moment it was inconvenient that “emergency mode” roughly translates to “MAXIMUM BRAKING ALL THE TIME”, because sometimes you kind of want the wheels on the trailer to roll, and when the trailer is hitched to a vehicle that you are trying to drive is almost certainly one of those times. So we pulled the trailer into a safe parking spot for the time being and resolved to fix it the next day.
Obviously, it was a fuse in the van. No complications. We were on our way.
But we weren’t on our way. Some jerk had parked his (call me old-fashioned, but women just aren’t jerks) Honda Fit in front of our trailer, despite the fact that it was an illegal spot, so we couldn’t back the van under the hitch. Solution?
Move the trailer. By hand.
It’s not easy to move a very large trailer filled with a very large amount of rock band equipment. Fortunately, we just needed to lift the front end off the ground and turn the hitch out into the street so the van could reach it without driving directly through the problematic Honda (hereafter “JHF,” for “Jerk’s Honda Fit”). We succeeded, but not without the guidance (and in the case of one particularly wonderful human being named Spiros, hands-on assistance) of some of Boulder’s fair citizenry. We blocked one lane of traffic for a few moments and attached the trailer. Unfortunately, we hadn’t given ourselves enough room for Jonathan Trailer Thomas’ extra-wide track, and the wheel well was going to scrape against the JHF if we kept moving forward. At this point, the trailer was already hitched up, so we weren’t about to detach it just for more lifting. Solution?
Move the JHF. By hand.
It’s not easy to move a small Japanese automobile filled with a very large amount of car guts and lack of consideration (how you can be filled with a lack of something, I’m not quite sure, but, um, leave me alone). Fortunately, we just needed to lift the back end off the ground and move it a foot and a half closer to the curb so we would have room to pull out. With three or four people on each wheel well, we managed to reassign the JHF’s back end to a more convenient location.
We finally pulled away, just in time to get out of Boulder and make our way to our next show at Gish’s Getaway, an event which defies descriptive categorization. I’m just going to paint you a picture:
After an hour or two of interstate, you drive over 45 minutes’ worth of winding, pastoral mountain road. You wind. You wind. You wind and wind and wind. You reach a small collection of houses along a gravel road that your giant band-van cannot possibly traverse. You wait for the rain to pass. Your equipment is brought via pickup truck into the gravel-paved residential while your van is parked at the marina a mile or so up the winding road. Yes, marina. You’re 9000 feet above sea-level, parked at the shore of a massive lake surrounded by mountains. So, whenever you picture stuff in this paragraph, there are jetskis in the background. Remember that; it’s important.
Anyway.
On foot, you follow your gear down a hill, up a hill, and down another hill. You carry it to the waterside and pile it behind a stage presently occupied by a sweet bluegrass trio. You wait. You play music. You eat a pig. Other people play music. They stop. It’s quiet for a bit.
It’s dark now. You’re playing a djembe. You know exactly some of the other people playing with you. One of them was a stranger, but he shares both your first name and hometown. You know some people in common. You are now friends. An older gentleman with a thick accent is passing around a plastic bottle filled with a clear liquid. It finds you. Its only label is a strip of masking tape with the word “SLIVOVICE” written on it in blue sharpie. It tastes like danger.
There’s a campfire. There are more new friends. There’s more slivovice. It’s time to go. You have exactly one person capable of driving right now, and lucky for you that’s plenty, but your van is still far away. Fortunately, as you were instructed to remember, it is parked near a marina. And the party is right on the water, just further up the reservoir. Solution?
Move the band to our van. By boat.
So that was our Saturday. Sunday we scraped ourselves out of bed and mucked about in Breckenridge for a while. There was shopping, dining, sightseeing, and, of course, this:
And then it was time to music again. We had a fun time doing music. The Dirty Dozen Brass Band was in town, and their phenomenal guitarist, Jake Eckhart, stopped by the show and sat in with the Frogs. Jake was an awesome fellow and he had lots of very nice things to say.
Monday, after some deliberation, we took a few hours to drive up into the mountains and enjoyed an incredible view of America (the best country). We took some silly pictures on top of rocks that will probably trickle onto Facebook within the next few days. We started driving.
Now we’re in Tulsa. For me, it’s home. It’s weird. Since I left for college almost seven years ago, coming here has always been vacation. Suddenly, I’m here for work, along with six colleagues, who all need air mattresses. Worlds are colliding.
I’m glad we’re here though. It’s long overdue, and I’m especially excited that my first hometown show will be with my brother Andy and his group, X-Cal. Anyway, this has been way too many words. It might be a personal record for the highest number of words. And now I have written over thirty words about how many words there are.
We’re done here. Tour is good, see you around!
Loading...
I have to say it was a little wordy.