Spring Tour: Week One in Pictures (of T-Shirts)

Hello, friends! Rob here.

Well, it's that time of the year again. The time of the year when we strike out into the wild blue yonder, taste the winds of freedom, and embrace our collective destiny as wandering spirits, as agents of love and friendship.

But more importantly, it's time for me to score some sick new threads. I have a long history of collecting t-shirts on the road, either during stopovers in this or that city, or on the road itself. (Okay, fine, at truck stops. I don't pick up discarded t-shirts off the side of the highway. Anymore. Learned my lesson.)

Anyway, I've been writing this band's blog since it was hosted on Myspace (true story), and after six years or so I often find myself looking for gimmicks to break up the monotony of saying "well, we went to a place and played a show and it was fun” exciting new angles, so I thought I might try using the t-shirts I've acquired on this tour to pace this entry. I'm told this is called a "framing device,” and that it has been used to great effect by many successful authors in the past. Plus, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then I'm about to pad the heck out of my word count.

After two extra-sweaty nights in Boulder and Denver, we made our way up to Aspen to play at the Belly Up. Before the show, we had the distinct pleasure of participating in a fundraiser/meet & greet at Escobar (a space down the street from the Belly Up which is primarily known to us as a thunderous nightclub and traditional post-show rallying point) to benefit one of our absolute favorite organizations in existence: The Roots of Music. The fundraiser was an unmitigated success. It was really great watching all of these wonderful people from all around the country get together and open their hearts and wallets for not only a noble cause, but one to which many of them had no direct connection. These weren't just New Orleanians trying to make their own city a better place; these were people from all over who simply felt compelled to give to a worthy cause. Altruism in its purest form. Plus, there was stirring keynote address by our own Zack Feinberg, and a show-stealing live auction hosted by Matt Schiffrin from the Breckenridge Distillery, who is about to get some more words-time.

BOOM. That, gentle readers, is called "foreshadowing.” Anyway, so that Matt Schiffrin fella and his distillery are both rad as heck. Two days after the Aspen fundraiser (and show, which we played and it was fun), we stopped by the distillery on our way out of Breckenridge (where we played a show and it was fun), and the guys were nice enough to give us a quick tour of the facilities and a brief sampling of their product. By coincidence, we happened to drop in while they were in the middle of filming some sort of promotional video, so if you see a feature on theBreckenridge Distillery somewhere, keep an eye out for some B-roll of your friends The Revivalists whiskey-toasting at like 11 AM before getting into the van and driving for fourteen hours.

(Don't worry. The drivers didn't drink, and the drinkers didn't drive. We don't do that, and neither should you.  And by the way, the blurriness of the above photo was a deliberate artistic decision, because it's a shirt from a distillery, and alcohol can cause blurred vision.  It has nothing to do with me taking substandard cameraphone pics in a dimly-lit hotel room and being in too much of a rush to verify their quality.

Now we are in the Pacific Northwest, where dark beer, legal marijuana, fresh seafood, and irony comprise roughly seventy percent of the regional economy. A good portion of what remains is Sasquatch merchandise, an economic sector which can occasionally overlap with dark beer, legal marijuana, or irony in ways that I, not an economist, am not equipped to adequately explain or explore. The point is, it's great. About a year ago when we came up here, our routing marooned us in Spokane for a few days, and we were all like, "what the heck are we gonna do in Spokane?” and, as it turned out, the answer was have a really nice time. Come to think of it, a personal highlight from that trip was also t-shirt related, as I won some merchandise from a bar called Mootsy's by participating in their weekly spelling bee.

SEE ALSO: Dark beer, Irony.

Speaking of which, we are currently in Portland. We played at the storied Aladdin Theatre last night (and it was fun- also, have you ever noticed how American music venues always use the British variant "theatre?” What's up with that? Not complaining or anything, but like, that's weird, right?) and are now killing time in the city before we need to go to the airport. I am actually blogging from a Starbucks in Portland and what have I become please help me.

See you in California!