Raise Your Hand If You Aren't Here

Day Twelve.

Welp. I definitely shouldn't have downplayed the weather. Our original bus call was for 3:30 this morning, but we ended up lingering in Tahoe until 8:00 due to hazardous road conditions. Now that the sun is up, we're trudging our way back down the mountain. Not sure to what extent we will be behind schedule when all is said and done, but I'm not worried. I can't possibly be worried. Tonight is going to be a good night.

Sometime around five years ago, The Revivalists played in San Francisco for the first time. We were booked at an intimate jazzfunk speakeasy called the Boom Boom Room. It's a great venue, located more or less in the shadow of the legendary Fillmore.

I can't recall if we were playing non-consecutive nights or if we just had a few days to kill before striking further north. Either way, we had the weekend off, and, as luck would have it, Galactic was playing Friday and Saturday at the Fillmore. (I suppose it's only natural that they would keep popping up in these here blogwords, considering that we're both touring a very similar circuit right now.) My history is a little fuzzy, but I think it was around this time that they had just started collaborating with Dave and sort of taking us under their wing, and they were kind enough to hook the whole band up with passes to their two-night stand.

I couldn't believe the size of the place. Compared to the rooms we were playing at the time, it might as well have been Madison Square Garden. Or, I don't know, maybe the Grand Canyon. Galactic had sold out The Fillmore on back-to-back nights, with late-night afterparties featuring their rhythm section and some cats from the local Jazz Mafia at the Boom Boom Room.  Just a few days prior we had been scrapping for votes on Facebook in order to win a slot at the Hangout Festival. I couldn't envision a room like the Fillmore on the horizon. Not even over the horizon. It was the stuff of legend. I was standing right in the middle of it, but still, it felt like El Dorado.

I often compare our career trajectory to walking the length of an endless trench. Don't worry, it's not as grim as it sounds. All I mean is that you can walk for miles and miles and miles, but you can't really see how far you've gone unless you poke your head up over the edge every now and again and take stock of your progress. For all of our success and good fortune thus far, I've never really felt like we "blew up”- at least not in the sense of taking any huge, sudden leaps forward. I've always perceived our progress as a gradual continuum- more like a slope than a staircase. It's only every once in a while that we hit some obvious benchmark and I remember to climb out of the trench, if only for long enough to look back and realize I can barely even make out where we started.

Tonight, we're playing a sold-out show at The Fillmore. Tonight is going to be a good night.