Chicago is a very large city

We've got some great timing on this tour. And by great, I mean maybe not so much. Fourteen hour drives! Texas in the middle of August! Little college towns when school is out! Denver on the exact night Obama accepts the Democratic nomination for president!

So let's talk about Chicago instead. Our timing in Chicago wasn't so bad. Well, there was a Cubs game across the street from the Metro where we played, but there's no accounting for baseball, and anyway we managed to get there and load in before the game ended and the fans poured out. Chicago winters tend to be long, cold, and miserable, so when those precious summer months come around, everyone just goes buck wild crazy in the streets. Made for some slow navigating later on. But the Metro was a fun ol' party, and things really got wacky when the show's promoter came backstage to tell us he had just got us another show in Chicago the following night, opening for a Mexican rock/pop band called Motel, where there was "guaranteed" to be 1500 people.

We were confused.. ALL three bands? How is it that they still need and want three more bands, the night before the show? Well, it was at the Congress Theater, this HUGE cavernous place that makes the Metro look like your local watering hole. And they were just gonna start early and have a whole lot of bands play before the headliners. So hell, why not? We didn't have any show scheduled for the night, so we stuck around Chicago and played the show.

Thing is, when you're the opener (or one of FIVE openers) for a larger act in a big venue, the house crew is not so focused on getting your sound and monitors right -- they just wanna get you on and off. So suddenly you're on this huge fucking stage with this sea of people staring at you, and it's what you've always wanted.. except when you start playing you can't really hear your own band. Instead you hear all these muddy reverberations off the domed ceiling, and the back wall... back there somewhere... and of course they have this huge lighting rig but it's not set up for your own show so they're just flashing the lights around generically.

All in all, it feels very much like a dream you might have about being a rock star (except we weren't naked, sorry.) All the iconic elements are there: big stage, big crowd, big lights, but you're weirdly disconnected from what you're doing, so kind of going through the motions and hoping that somewhere out there this is making sense to somebody.




This last picture has nothing to do with anything, but hell, it's a lot of time on the road. Things happen.