how i spent my summer vacation
First things first, because my phone has been blowing up about this: Yes, I am aware that a young man named Jake HaldenVang performed an inspired rendition of "Wish I Knew You" during the blind auditions on the latest season of The Voice. Clearly HaldenVang has unimpeachable taste, and we wish him nothing but good fortune throughout the competition, but did you know that he wasn't the first Voice contestant to cover us? BEHOLD:
Speaking of things people keep asking me about, in the last update I pulled a classic cheapshot from TV's playbook in that I set up a pretty serious cliffhanger and then disappeared for the summer. I know a lot* of people are wondering: did I toke on that pearlescent ganja with the legendary Willie Nelson? I'd like to say "a gentleman never tells" and leave it at that, but- considering I just used the phrase "toke on that pearlescent ganja-" I think you can probably guess whether or not I am a person who has ever smoked pot.
Anyway, here are the answers to some of your frequently asked questions about opening for the Rolling Stones:
"How did that even happen?"
In the wake of the Stones' canceled appearance at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, we caught wind of a make-up date in the works at the Superdome here in New Orleans and found ourselves jockeying for the opening slot on that show. Given the history that some other local acts like Ivan Neville and Trombone Shorty already had with the band, we had kind of expected that we would come up a distant third or fourth. But we apparently made the short list and caught somebody's ear, and so we were surprised, honored, and thrilled to receive the offer for Jacksonville.
"What was it like?"
Beyond the sheer "OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD OH MY GAWD" of it all, it was really inspiring in a lot of ways. Their touring outfit has the precision of a Swiss watch and the population of a small village in the Swiss Alps. It was cool to see such a massive, intricate machine in motion. Their outdoor stage has better air conditioning than my house. It was cool getting to play for such a huge crowd on such a huge stage, even if they weren't necessarily there to see us (my parents' homemade t-shirts notwithstanding). And of course, it feels trite to make anything of the band's age at this point, but- particularly given Jagger's recent health scare- it really is invigorating to see a bunch of septuagenarians put on a show with more spark and enthusiasm than half of the Hot 100 acts out there today. Plus, OHMYGAWDOHMYGAWDOHMY-
"Did you get to meet them?"
Yes, very briefly. If you've ever done a meet & greet with a band as a fan, it was basically that. Shortly after our opening set, we were ushered into a room somewhere, and the band came in for a quick hello. True to fashion, Charlie Watts was the first one in the room by several minutes. The Stones had just spent a few days New Orleans, so we chatted about what drummers he'd seen in town (Shannon Powell, Stanton Moore) until his bandmates showed up. There was a small amount of fanfare- Mick burst into the room beaming and exclaimed, "The Revivalists!" like he was introducing us in front of a sold-out Wembley Stadium, I didn't faint, everyone shook hands, a photo was taken, and we went our separate ways.
"Did you get a picture?"
See above. The woman from the Stones' camp who was in charge of coordinating our meet & greet (as well as several hundred other things, I imagine) said that they would send it to us "if it turns out okay." I heard a rumor that they don't go through those until after the tour concludes, so if we're lucky, and the photo doesn't end up in the warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, it could be any day now.
"Can you now die happy?"
Nope. Still haven't played the moon. But this would soften the blow.
The whatevereth annual Big River Get Down went off without a hitch- a welcome change from last year, when inclement weather actually forced the show across state lines. That's gotta be a first. Anyway, none of that nonsense happened this year, PLUS we got to debut our "hey look we're officially big time now" neon reviver monolith. If you haven't gotten to see it yet, BEHOLD:
(photo by the indomitable Mary Caroline Russell)
"Hurricane" Barry, A.K.A. "I filled up my bathtub for this?", brushed contritely past New Orleans like Hugh Grant stammering his way through some rom-com misunderstanding. Nearly three patio chairs were upturned. I am probably a terrible person for this, but I was honestly a bit disappointed when the weekend passed with nary a flicker of the lights. I was kind of looking forward to house-camping! I say this knowing full well that it would've been fun for about three beers and then I'd be DYING to put on some Netflix. My parents were supposed to visit that weekend and ended up canceling, which was probably the right call even though it just meant they missed out on a lot of day-drinking and a general "school's out" vibe.
Meanwhile, two days prior to Barry's landfall, an unheralded Wednesday morning rainstorm brought intense flash-flooding that shut down half of the city. My wife was riding the bus to work and she got stuck. She tried to wait it out because there were garbage cans floating down the street, but after several hours she finally abandoned ship and splashed her way through about two miles of knee-deep trashwater to get to her office. Once there, she went straight to the building's gym, scoured her legs clean in the shower, sat down at her desk, and promptly opened an email informing all employees that the office had been closed for the rest of the day.
Flash flooding seems to have become more of a problem for New Orleans over the last few years. This summer was particularly floody (delugeional?), so the city came up with a revolutionary idea: let's actually bother to look at the drainage basins in flood-prone neighborhoods like Midcity and see if anything seems out of place. Did they find anything? I don't know- does a fucking car count as anything?
This story could be presented in a few different ways, from a lighthearted "only in NOLA" puff piece to a distressing portrait of civic negligence and the cancerous incompetence of our city's Sewerage and Water Board. So, what was the focal point of the story?
WE WILL NEVER BE OVER IT.
Our annual Nantucket double header/working vacation/shellfish apocalypse washed over us in a tsunami of rosé. Someone- probably Packy- told me this was our seventh trip to Rich People Island, which seems impossible. However many summers it's been, the Chicken Box shows always rank among my favorites. I have long held the position that sweaty shows are better, and these are invariably among the sweatiest of the year. I'm talking wring-out-your-jeans-the-next-morning sweaty. If you think that's gross, you should know that in the first draft I said "underwear."
We took a lap around the island in a boat that you could probably use as a down payment on the state of Delaware and shot a rap video for our merch manager.
LIGHTNING ROUND:
Got to catch up with some old friends in Birmingham. Boyfriend played an aftershow across the street and hot dang is she ever fun. Also, to whoever it was trying to holler at me on the street like, thirty seconds before that show and I just blew past them: sorry, I had thirty seconds to get to the side of the stage and start the show.
One of the cool things about being in your thirties is that all of these albums you were into as an angsty teenager are now twenty years old. Buzzfeed would have you believe the takeaway there is that your favorite media- and, by extension, you- have aged beyond relevance, but they miss the upside: The bands behind some of your favorite albums are going on tours where they perform those albums in entirety. Good trade.
I have discovered a new law governing the world of touring: Conservation of Absolute Audience Alcohol Consumption. Essentially, when you're playing music, you want your audience to have collectively consumed the same total number of alcoholic drinks, regardless of how many people are in the audience. If you're playing for an audience of two thousand people, then ideally they've had, on average, about 2-3 beers apiece. Some of them will be tipsier than that, there will be a few designated drivers (thank you), and on the whole, the crowd will be loose and friendly, but not smashed enough to start throwing beer cans at the stage or punches at each other. Conversely, if you're trying to rock out in front of one solitary dude, then ideally that dude will have drank about five thousand beers. CAAAC is actually the third law I have discovered since embarking on my decades-long research expedition into the world of touring. I'm pretty sure that puts me in the same intellectual echelon as Sir Isaac Newton. I humbly await my knighthood.
For most of the shows we've had in recent memory, we've been supported by the phenomenal Anderson East. Great bunch of musicians. We played their hometown in Nashville and Anderson threw a shindig at his loft afterwards. I love a good house party. There's just something about it you can't get anywhere else. The number of pinball machines owned by Anderson East is more than one. Much respect.
A really cool bug landed on Mike's mic during our set at Lockn:
LIGHTNING ROUND OVER.
Red Rocks. Enough said.
Okay, not enough said. It was a pretty great weekend. The thing kicked off with a really fun jam session at Cervantes Other Side featuring most of us and our good friends Alvin Ford, Todd Stoops, and Michelle Sarah. George put the band together, and he asked me to sing like three tunes, which was thrilling and challenging and maybe a little scary, but turned out okay I think. Anyway, if you weren't there or you didn't make it to the end, you missed me doing my best Anthony Kiedis, followed by me shotgunning a beer onstage because I was so hopped up on adrenaline. It was that kind of night.
The Red Rocks show- for some reason, the word that keeps coming to mind is "towering." There's something about those rock formations flanking the grandstands at Red Rocks that goes far beyond the obvious "mountains are pretty." The way the striations in the rocks sweep down toward the stage, it's like a natural conduit for the exchange of energy. It rained throughout what I'll call the third quarter of our two-hours-and-change-long set, and pretty much no one left, so that was cool. I made a point to get out under the downpour at one point during the show because I am a MAN OF THE PEOPLE.
We bookended Red Rocks with two weekends in California. The one before started at the Greek Theatre in Berkeley, which is right in the middle of UC Berkeley's otherworldly-gorgeous campus. Our dear friend Ian Bowman of Naughty Professor happened to be in town for a wedding, so he came and jammed with us. It was good. And then:
If you're reading this, then what I'm about to say probably isn't news to you, but I would like to talk about it anyway: The greatest and most unbelievable (like, I still can't believe it really happened) moment in the annals of Revivalists history transpired at approximately 5:40 PM on Sunday, September 15, 2019 during our set at Kaaboo de Mar:
The significance of this moment reaches all the way back to the nascent days of the band, when, as a goof, we had Bob Saget listed as our manager on our Myspace page. He's always been a bit of a unicorn for this band- particularly Zack, who spurred the campaign to reach out to him when we realized we'd be at the same festival on the same day. The whole thing lined up fairly easily and painlessly. Bob couldn't possibly have been more more gracious. He was totally into it and was comfortable with the song after having sung it on an episode of Full House many years ago. He came out and complimented Michael on his “lovely organ” and tackled the performance with verve and aplomb and gusto and all sorts of other splashy adjectives. I still can't believe that any part of this story is real, even though this exists to remind me:
That was the weekend before Red Rocks, and then two weeks later we were back out west. In a nice bit of symmetrical storytelling, the last California show was also at a Greek Theatre; this time in Los Angeles. Dave and I did an interview and they asked us about the history of the place and I just about bit my own tongue off not saying anything about how much of an honor it was to be playing on the same stage as Aldous Snow's legendary comeback performance.
Bit of a digression here- I know I have already discussed the Tour Time-Compression Phenomenon (AKA Ingraham's First Law of Tourodynamics) at great length, and I've only recently discovered my third law, but have I ever touched upon the second? It's called the Inverse Durational Property of Hotel Quality. The name is a bit of a labyrinth, but the law itself is pretty straightforward: the nicer your hotel room is, the less time you get to spend in it. See, for example, our outsized suites at Loew's Hollywood Hotel last Friday- each the approximate square footage of a typical McDonald's. The bathroom had its own antechamber. It was a legitimate schlep to get from the bed to the living area. Bathrobe? You betcha. And we didn't even check in until after sound check day of show. Compare/contrast with any random two days off, which will inevitably be spent milling about the parking lot of a Days Inn three miles off of Interstate 42 in Elk Neck, VA.
Anyway. They don't call it the Golden State just for funsies. The sunlight is different in California. There's a certain glow to it. There's also a glow to the last show of every tour. There's a lot of emotion. You're anxious to get home and spend time with your family, you're sad because it's the last day of summer camp and you're going to miss all of your summer camp friends, you're glad to take a vacation from that dragged-around feeling you get dashing from place to place on a minute-to-minute schedule (always late though). You're wondering what you're going to do with yourself next month, even though you know that it will flash past you like a Corvette on an empty highway. You feel fried but giddy, drunk but alert, sore but content, spent but victorious.
Summer, like Tour, has no definitive end. According to astrology, the last day of summer is September 22nd. Meteorology places it at August 31st, which is how I tend to think of it- to my mind, August is a "summer month" and September is a "fall month." I'm sure there's some EGGHEAD out there who'll tell me it changes year-to-year based on average temperatures and aggregate minutes of daylight over a given three-day span, or whatever, in which case summers are probably getting longer because we're turning our planet into a furnace. Most kids will tell you summer's over the day they go back to school.
I think it's just something you can feel, really. There's a sense of turning a corner- of closing one chapter and opening a new one. The kids are a grade older. The leaves on the trees turn from a lush green to an explosion of color like fireworks frozen in time. The air changes. Someone on my grouptext posts the Han Solo season meme. Looking back on all of this and seeing it all in one place, I am reminded what an amazing summer this has been, but I know it's over- even though when I went out to get groceries at 8:30 this morning it was already 86 degrees and climbing.
Back at the Greek in LA on Friday, some of the guys from Anderson's band joined us onstage to close out the tour with a big, fat cover of "You Can't Always Get What You Want." A lot of friends and family were there. I tried to hug every single one of them.
