These last few days the tour has been on a grueling pace. We played Sedalia, MO, drove to St. Louie, arrived in the middle of the night, woke early, flew to Detroit, drove two hours to a County Fair, drove two hours back to Detroit, and finally flew to Buffalo, NY. Then we slept, deep and deliberately late.
Today we played in West Virginia, home of Jerry "The Logo" West. Despite the factory-style uniformity of the days, I won't forget this one for a while.
Drake (star), Michael (guitar), Steven (bass), and I were escorted around the fairgrounds by one of the bigwigs of the operation. We were ushered straight to the front of the line of any ride we fancied.
We were brave and went on a ride which I now dub "the propellor of doom". The ride's official name was "Speed" and it looked like a 75 yard airplane propellor with four seats on each end. We were launched into the sky and made to wait at the apex of the universe for an eternal three minutes while they loaded up the four seats down on Earth. With screams of joy and terror we were launched, spinning like a metal and flesh pinwheel, toward the ground and back to the sky again. Happily, no one crapped their pants or hurled the grilled cheese sandwiches we had recently been served by catering.
I was here:
Before this death-defying ride we had already gathered a crowd of kiddies who were eager to get close to Drake. We were on a whirling dervish going at least four hundred miles an hour, but the screams were the loudest from the kids when they saw Drake zip by.
We turned the bumper cars into a four vehicle demolition derby. They turned the power all the way up and let us free to injure ourselves until our guilt at forcing kids to wait for us made the ride end. Even at full blast bumper cars, at least these ones, are not fast.
Meanwhile, we actually had a gig to play. Before we could soundcheck we had to wait for a "farmer's horse race" to finish on the track that encircled our stage. During one of the final races we had the misfortune of watching a young woman get tossed off her horse right before the end of the race. She may have gotten kicked on the way down. It was not a pretty sight. Seeing someone get lifted on to a stretcher and put into an ambulance seems to have a deep physiological reaction on me. The woman was talking and moving her arms on the stretcher before she was put in the ambulance. I hope she's ok.
On a brighter note, I got to play a real Hammond organ and Leslie speaker combination on this gig. If you're not familiar, these are huge, wooden, monuments to a bygone era. They look like furniture from your grandma's house, and they sound like a buttery fireball. I was giddy for at least an hour after the show.
For ninety percent of the tour we have several tour buses that the twenty or so of us travel in. These are our occasionally messy, but always well air-conditioned homes for two months. For these last few days we have been without the buses.
In Detroit the coach bus we requested wasn't available so we hopped on a "Limo-bus" or a "Bus-o-zine" or some such contraption. This would've been cute had it been a birthday party. It was not ideal for roundtrip shoulder-to-shoulder drive that was two hours each way.
Today in West Virginia we are riding in a sixty-four seat coach bus. Corbin Bleu's band, the crew, and everyone in Drake's band are all in one mind-numbing party on wheels. This brings me back to the days of All State Jazz Band in Scottsbluff, NE. I vaguely remember that someone supposedly fell out of the window in the bathroom of another school's coach bus while they were driving down I-80 that year. I vaguely remember that each time I need to use the bathroom on a coach bus.
This bus ride also brings me back to trips to the Wichita Jazz Festival with the Two o'Clock Lab Band, and the long forested highways of Finland with the One o'Clock Lab Band. Our hotel in Finland somewhere between Helsinki and Pori, and was next to a gigantic tent with plastic chairs inside. The tent was a gigantic, mobile Karaoke bar. They didn't start singing until after midnight, and there weren't more than four people singing over the course of the evening. The walls were paper thin. Ow! Party! Don't stop believin'!
On a different coach bus trip with the One o'Clock Band in New Mexico I had a portable CD player (it's like an iPod, but with an actual CD inside it, remember those!?) and I had just purchased Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now". It was the first time that recorded music on a CD had moved me to tears (this is where I show my sensitive side, and my already questionable street cred plummets to rock the bottom). This was not an ideal time for this, seeing as how I was surrounded by trombone players.
There aren't any trombone players on this tour, but we're just as, if not more, rowdy. We still have a few hours to go (it's 12:19 AM, early Saturday) till we get to our hotel. I may partake of the merriment that is bleeding into my headphones and this blog in a few moments.
After some socializing, I'm hoping to induce a heightened state of emotion from my iPod (it's like a portable CD player, but with no moving parts!). If I'm lucky it'll feel like playing a Hammond, or being suspended a mile above the West Virginia State Fair. The air conditioning is bumping and it may help me grow a goosebump or two.
Until then, don't forget to recycle your plastic lemonade cups.
