The Things That Started Happening
Hello, friends! Rob here.
We all survived Fridge Tour '14. The Arctic/Polar Vortex, Snowpocalypse, Wintermageddon, Blizzard Blast (that last one may or may not be a registered trademark of Dairy Queen), whatever you want to call it, was, well, cold. But what's that you say? It still is cold? Well, not in New Orleans, suckers! I'm writing this entry on my porch in shorts, gearing up for what may be the best Mardi Gras ever. Normally during Mardi Gras we're skipping in and out of town, running from thing to thing, missing the bulk of the street drinking and wrestling children for plastic spears cultural traditions or whatever, but not this year! This year, we have exactly one show, and it's a doozy. Friday, February 28, at Tipitina's, we'll be blasting off into the stratosFUN with our Floridian friends The Heavy Pets. Hope to see you there!
Oops, I skipped right from the intro part to the plugging our upcoming shows part. Okay, here is things we have been doing:
After an extremely productive eight-ish days in the studio, The Revivalists had about 24 hours to rest and mentally prepare for tour. Nothing really happened during this interval. We split the drive to Austin over two days because driving for eight hours and then loading in and playing a show is bad. Not much continued to happen. Then we got to Austin and things started happening.
At first, the things that started happening were fairly mundane. The Texas shows were wonderful in a perfectly usual sort of way, except colder. We had Friday and Saturday in Austin and Dallas, and then we started driving towards Colorado on Sunday and the things that were happening began to be more interesting.
First, we got a little stuck on the highway.
Not completely stuck, mind you, or even mostly stuck for that matter. Just a little stuck. It was wintry out there, and we had to back our way down an icy slope on a somewhat busy highway so we could hit it again with a running start. Nobody got hurt. Traffic was backed to a crawl with all of the skid-outs, wrecks, and generally cautious drivers. The sky was threatening to darken, and the roads were not safe. So, knowing we had all of Monday and some of Tuesday to make it to Fort Collins, we pulled off the highway somewhere around Wichita Falls and watched the Super Bowl at a Buffalo Wild Wings, because oh did I forget to mention that it was Super Bowl Sunday.
And then it got cold.
It would probably be more accurate to say that we came upon the cold than to say that the cold came upon us. Sure, there was ice in Louisiana, and temperatures were low in Texas. But Colorado was cold, and the cold was Colorado. This felt ancient. A majestic, barbarian coldness that had always been and would always be. Waning, perhaps, in the Spring, and waiting through Summer, but never fully absent.
It made load-out really super fun, you guys.
Overall, it was actually pretty cool. Sure, it's sort of unpleasant hauling band stuff in and out of a trailer at 9000 feet above sea level and six degrees below zero (this happened multiple times), but it made for good exercise, the roads got safer right after we spent $200 on snow chains, and the trailer only froze shut like, twice. The shows themselves were an excellent blend of tall-stage venue-type shows and punk rock-style crowd-in-your-face throwdowns (320 South in Breckenridge is a soaring example of the latter). We capped Colorado off with a packed show at the lovely Bluebird Theatre in Denver, and then it was time to get out of the mountains and out of the cold.
Just kidding! It was cold everywhere! Fun fact: Lawrence, KS, while a full 10-15 degrees (F) warmer than anywhere we were in Colorado at any time, actually felt the coldest out of any place I have ever been, because humidity is the bane of human comfort! Fortunately, the times were good. My anointed mother was at the show in Lawrence, so that was cool. We had big fun in equally-frigid St. Louis, and we even got out of the show early enough to get some quality time with our old friends down at Broadway Oyster Bar.
Everybody caught a cold in Nashville at about the same time. Usually, when a cold goes through the band, one person catches it first, and then it spreads through the band over the course of a few weeks, silently picking us off one-by-one. How, then, did we all get sick at once? Long story short (and it is a long story, I just deleted three rambling paragraphs on the subject), there were a lot of old friends in Nashville, we were passing around a jar of honest-to-god bathtub hooch, and apparently that whole "ethanol kills germs” thing might just be misplaced optimism.
Our optimism was not misplaced in Athens the next night. The Georgia Theatre is one of our favorite rooms in all the land, and Athens was extra-rowdy on Thursday, as the city had been completely snowed in for a few days prior and was just beginning to poke its collective head above the surface. Apparently whole sections of town didn't even have internet. Imagine! Plus, we were sharing the stage with Stokeswood, who are some of our tightest band bros ever. Things got rowdy pretty quickly. People were singing, dancing, crowd surfing, and this one guy who was right up front kept demanding that I give him one of my beers.
Sorry dude, I needed those. For art.
And then it was Aura Festival! I've spent countless bytes of wordpress' data storage talking about how beautiful the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park is, so I'll skip that if you promise to just picture everything in the next paragraph or so taking place under a canopy of spanish moss. We had a long day at the festival. The band's load in was mid-afternoon for an early evening set, and we could have made it a quick in and out, except that Ed, George, Dave and I were tapped for Joey Porter's (of The Motet fame) Aura Superjam, which was originally scheduled for right after The Revivalists' set, but kept getting pushed later on the schedule as a few bands found themselves unable to get to the festival on account of weather stuff. Aura was a long, fun day full of friendship, cool musicians, and kombucha (so much kombucha), but to my recollection nothing particularly crazy went down. Zack's anointed mother was there, so that was cool.
The next day, thankfully, we didn't need to wake up too early to get to Mobile. It's always great to play shows with Gov't Mule. The band, crew, and community are all wonderful people to be around. And finally, after years of ending tours in New York, or Seattle, or freaking India, the last show of Fridge Tour '14 was a mere two hours from home. Couldn't have asked for a better way to end the tour.
Now we are home, but oh drat I almost forgot to mention Musketeer Gripweed! Musketeer Gripweed is not only a very cool and obscure reference, but also a band. A wonderful band, at that. We did four shows with them, they were a big part of all of the fun in Colorado, and I would be remiss not to mention them here. So now I am whatever the opposite of remiss is. Don't know, not gonna look it up.
Happy Mardi Gras!
