i'm not crazy; i'm just wrong
Hello, friends! Rob here.
Shows are fun, you guys. We just came off of a really enjoyable work weekend. Thursday and Friday were both throwbacks- offhand, I couldn't tell you the last time we've even been to Lafayette or Jackson, much less piled in a van and drove to a show. We even drove home after the Lafayette set! Like a bunch of twenty-somethings! How positively bohemian of us!
The set at Cathead Jam in Jackson got pretty out of control. Call me crazy, but maybe having a bunch of rock bands play a festival at a distillery isn't the most responsible idea in the world? Just saying, their whiskey goes down pretty smooth, especially when Zack is pouring it down your throat during the intro to "Soulfight." I think some of my favorite onstage moments tend to happen when we get out of "this is how this is supposed to go" mode and just let loose. Anyway, that was probably the best sixteen-and-a-half-minute version of "Soulfight" we've done in a while.
Saturday was a travel day. I like travel days because they count as work days even though all I have to do is schlep through airport security, sit in a series of chairs, check into my hotel room, spend twenty minutes grappling with the frustratingly limited settings on the TV in my hotel room to get my Switch to work, go out for Indian food with at least four other members of our touring party, and then brush my hands together like, "welp! All in a day's work!" This job is magic.
I know the entire process of air travel has been deliberately engineered to be as unpleasant aspossible, but I've never really minded flying. Unless I happen to strike out and end up sitting next to some guy who's like, 70% elbows and 30% farts, I can sit on a plane for a very long time without getting bored or distressed. Turbulence doesn't even faze me anymore- not since this one time a bunch of years ago when we were on a direct flight from Vegas to Miami and we had like an hour-long stretch of rough air that stress-tested the tensile strength of our seat belts and sent our drinks flying. The pilot actually came on the intercom after a few particularly bouncy minutes and- I swear to gosh- said "yeah, that was pretty miserable." I had been sure that the wings were going to snap off (pro tip: do NOT look at the wings of the airplane you're on during heavy turbulence), but the captain assured us that we hadn't been in any danger and he sounded so nonplussed about the whole thing that I haven't ever worried about sky bumps since then. So flying isn't an issue for me. Walking through airports is another story.
Speaking of airplanes, for some reason I just remembered this story from a little while ago about a guy on an airplane who realized that the entertainment console on the back of the seat in front of him had a camera pointed at his face the whole flight, which like, on one hand, that's pretty creepy, but on the other, don't think about what a smartphone is.
Anyway. On Sunday we pretty much flipped the table over. Saturday we flew into Philadelphia to play Sunday's show at the 104.5 birthday celebration. We've been playing more of these smash-and-grab radio festivals lately. They're usually pretty crazy- they cram like twelve bands in nine hours and you get to see a lot of great music. We did one in Maryland a few weeks ago where we got to play after Tom. Freaking. Morello. As a band whose live identity was at least partially sculpted by a series of three-hour, two-night engagements at a beachside bar in Pensacola when we only knew about eighteen songs (see, for instance, the above recap of Cathead Jam), it can be a bit disorienting to play a strict forty-minute banger, but when you've been jogging for years, it's fun to mix in the occasional wind sprint. They had a ticker at the bottom of the jumbotron that displayed recent tweets using the event's official hashtag. Those things are fun, but I kind of wish they'd position them so they weren't visible from the stage. I couldn't help spending roughly one third of the show watching it to see what (if anything) people were saying about us. Okay, fine- me. I am sure this is the behavior of a healthy, well-adjusted individual. Anyway, the show was fun.
Random tidbit that I've spent way too much time thinking about this week:
When the 1988 buddy comedy Twins was in pre-production, co-stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito agreed to do the movie for nothing up front in order to accommodate the film's relatively small budget. It's pretty wild when you think about it- at the time, Schwarzenegger's name was synonymous with quadruple-A Hollywood megastardom, and DeVito, still well known from his Taxi days, was coming off of a Golden Globe-nominated performance in the previous year's black comedy hit Throw Momma from the Train. Both men agreed to star in this movie with no guarantee that they'd see a dime in compensation. They were paid solely on the back-end, each receiving ten percent of the film's profit. This turned out to be a highly lucrative gamble: while we might today remember it as a mediocre screwball comedy with an outlandish premise, Twins was one of the highest-grossing films of the 1988, raking in over 200 million dollars against a $16 million budget. Both stars ended up earning the biggest paychecks of their careers. Inquisitr (there aren't a lot of respectable publications talking about this, for some reason) estimates their respective earnings at around $40 million apiece- in 1988 dollars. Adjusted for inflation, each star made over $120 million for starring in a movie that can adequately be summed up as "tall man and short man are brothers." The lesson here is twofold: First, don't be afraid to bet on yourself. Second, holy shit you guys inflation is nuts. Money is worth like, one third of what it used to be. Good thing wages have increased proportionately in the intervening decades, otherwise we'd- oh. Never mind.
Huh. It feels kind of weird to end an otherwise breezy entry on a sour note about wage stagnation, so here's the Dazz Band with their 1982 dance hall smash "Let It Whip":
