You Can't Be Too Drunk For Country Music
Hello, friends! Rob here.
It has been, I don’t know, probably three or four years since we really started touring in the southeastern United States. Which means it has been, I don’t know, probably three or four years since we started hearing that we should link up with this band out of Nashville called Moon Taxi. We had never heard of them before, and then all of a sudden, like the flipping of a switch, there were traces of Moon Taxi everywhere. Stickers in green rooms. Posters on venue windows. They were here last night and it was phenomenal. They’re coming here tomorrow, do you know those guys?
The thing is, we didn’t know those guys. Eventually, we did a few one-off shows with them separated by a few years, but for a very long time it was like Moon Taxi was this extradimensional being existing tangentially to our reality and only leaving the occasional trail or trace. They were myth. Fable. The unicorn at the end of the rainbow. And all the time people were telling us we needed to go on tour with this unicorn.
I know that the term "tour de force” isn’t meant to refer to a literal tour, but the Moon Taxi tour has been an absolute tour de force. A tour of force. Whatever. It was awesome. Lots of awesome. Bucket-loads of awesome. It was such a parade of awesome that today, now that it’s over, it feels like the whole tour is over, even though we have another week to go.
Of course, this tour has also been a bit of a meat grinder. Although the Moon Taxi shows began at Auburn and Baton Rouge, we didn’t start being for real gone until the April 10th show at The Lyric in Oxford. After that, it was a long (looooooooong) drive to Tortuga Music Festival in Ft. Lauderdale. We took a day off and had passover seder at Zack’s mom’s house, drove all day to Charleston, played a show, and woke up before the sun to fly to the show in Philadelphia.
And then it got real.
We capped off the Moon Taxi tour with Thursday and Friday at Brooklyn Bowl and Saturday at the 9:30 Club in DC. We’ve been to Brooklyn Bowl a few times before, but the 9:30 Club, like Moon Taxi, is another one of those cryptozoological tour myths. For years, people in the DC area have been asking us why we weren’t playing the 9:30 Club (the answer was that we didn’t have enough fans yet). So, as with Moon Taxi or the Sasquatch, we had kind of built up this sense of anticipation and wonder about the place.
Anyway, we sold out the shows on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
Obviously, this is an incredible accomplishment and we are just absolutely floored at the love and support and friendship we have been receiving these last few days. Which isn’t to say that we haven’t seen all of those things in truly humbling quantities over the years, but this was a bit of a crystallizing moment. To come into The Place To Play in a big city and sell it out the first time we play there was just amazing. We’re all still kind of floating from that one. A few weeks ago, I compared a Revivalists/Moon Taxi collaboration to a classic superhero team-up, and I stand by that.
It was Batman and Superman. Sasquatch riding a unicorn.
Also, along the way we kept picking up more and more people. Since last summer we have been touring with a company of eight: the seven handsome gentlemen you see onstage, plus a sound engineer/tour manager/facilitator/cool bro. We added a lighting director(/cool bro) for the week, which is something we’ve been talking about trying for quite some time now. In Philadelphia we were joined by a lifelong friend of Dave’s who has accompanied us on the road on a few previous occasions. Some of the girlfriends (and one wife! I swear I’m more excited about that than they are) flew in for the Brooklyn shows as well.
When we drove from Brooklyn to DC, there were a total of thirteen people in the van. Today we’re back down to eight.
Also, we didn’t drive from Brooklyn to DC. After the second show at Brooklyn Bowl, we drove three or four hours to Towson, MD (which is a town in Maryland and not the title of a medical soap opera) and caught three or four hours of sleep in a labyrinthine Days Inn so that we could be at Sound Garden Records at ten in the morning to play a few songs for Record Store Day.
So between the resounding success of the weekend, the intensity of our commutes, and the steep reduction of population density inside our touring vehicle, today has the feeling of an ending. Fortunately, it is not even a little bit of an ending. In fact, we’re about to play Boston (another one of those mythical creatures) for the first and second time(s)! So one could argue that this is just another beginning.
The end.
