Hi and welcome to the blog.  We’ve returned safely from our 21-day tour of the east coast.  It was quite an amazing time and best summed up by Chase (our road manager and friend since childhood) as “Four months worth of life in three weeks.”  So , I’m going to be recounting our  happenings with pictures and videos. I hope you enjoy them.  Feel free to leave comments. Especially if they come at Alejandro’s expense.  :D

June 18, 2009: Raleigh.  I spent my youth there.  I started music lessons there.  I lost my virginity there.  I learned to drive there.  I graduated from high school there.  I met a lot of incredible people there.  It was the gig I was most looking forward to on the entire tour.

My pal Seth (who, in his own right, is an excellent manager of our friends Ever So Klever) helped me put this tour together.  He is a much better salesman than I and was responsible for booking us in most of the venues on the tour.  And yet, as good as he is, he could not cement us in Raleigh.  I thought that of any city on the tour, a date in Raleigh would be the easiest to secure.  I was sure of attracting twenty or thirty people to the show and that’s good enough for most places with regards to a touring band. One of my sisters still lived there, some of my very close friends still live there…No problem.

Or so I thought.

What makes this business….this business, is its hypocrisy.  Until you’ve proven yourself, the people higher up the ladder rarely look down.  There are a lot of horribly boring and tedius details that I will spare you so just take my word for it that when we had STARTED the tour on June 9th, we STILL HADN’T BOOKED A SHOW IN MY HOME-FREAKIN’-STATE!!  Ask the guys, I was a nervous wreck.  In my mind, a 2009 east coast tour without a stop in Raleigh wasn’t complete. 

We got to Raleigh a couple of days early (free place to stay, laundry to do, people to see, rest to catch up on) and I went straight to the venue.  I was not going to take “no” for an answer.  I had been told about this place called “Slim’s” that was on the up and up in the Raleigh music scene.  I hadn’t heard of it but that morning, I knocked on its doors and the owner answered.  I asked for my contact (Seth had established an opening a few days earlier) and he said he wasn’t here.  I told him that my band was booked for the following night and that I lost his number and had a few quesions (I lied, so what.)  He immediately called him up.  I told the promoter, “I’ve got a lineup set for tomorrow night, I know you’ve got it free AND, I can guarantee a crowd of at least twenty people.” And he gave it to me then and there.

DAMN that felt good! I wanted to get up on the bar and do the fuckin’ macarena to celebrate.  Now, I could tell all of my friends who kept asking, “are you playing in Raleigh?” that I was playing in Raleigh!

We worked pretty hard to ask our friends to bring their friends and I was really hoping that with some good fortune, I would live up to my guarantee and who knows, maybe even eclipse it. 

We got there early and started setting up.  We advertised the show for 9 p.m.  and the opener, Jesse Clasen (an old friend of mine who is amazingly talented) was due on at 9:30 p.m.  There were a couple of people that I didn’t know at the bar and a few of my good friends who showed up early with us by the time Jesse hit the stage.  If we were going to meet our quota, it wouldn’t be by much.

At 9: 45, I went out back to warmup my voice and do my routine stretching.  I ran into the promotor on my way there and in passing, he looked at me with a dissaproving look. I assured him (with not a lot of confidence, mind you) that more people would come.

Downward facing dog…breathing excercises…major scales…breathing excercises…sip water…breathing excercises…

When I went back in, half the bar was full!  I started recognizing old faces and new faces.  “Amazing! That guy came! I remember him. What a good friend! And look, she came as well. And she brought a new friend, ‘Hi, I’m Tristan.  Thanks so much for coming.’” I was overjoyed and relieved.  Almost fifty people had showed and Jesse was still playing!  I ran into the promoter again shortly afterwards and he muttered sheepishly “I’m a lot happier than I was a half-hour ago.”  

My old neighbor, my first crush, my childhood friend, my very first bandmates, my classmate in algebra 2!  Everytime I finished catching up with someone and thanking them for coming, I saw another person I needed to speak with.  Thankfully, the guys all understood this and started setting up without me.   We were due on in fifteen minutes and the bar was packed!

In complete honesty, it was a little difficult returning from fifteen-plus years of memory lane and arriving immediately at the performing realm in less than a minute.  Normally, before a show, I like to get into my own little world.  Well, this time, I didn’t really have time so I had to make the transition in the middle of a song. 

Ale's Back

And the show went well but I didn’t really feel like a performer until midway through the second song.  I felt like “Tristan, the guy you knew way back when, singing a couple of dittys.”  But soon enough my sixth sense kicked in and said let’s rock this fucking place.  Alejandro slid in seamlessly in his first show back and Dan and Colin were their normal badass selves.  With my sister in the front row, we played our guts out for over an hour to a packed, vibrant house who thought we could do no wrong. 

Everyone in the world deserves to feel this good at least once in their life. The amount of love that that building gave us that night is what makes me love my job. 

Doin' Work

At the end of the night,  after stressing over whether the gig would even happen or whether we did enough to ensure that we could get twenty people,  someone told me that the bar had run out of four different types of beer and that over one hundred and sixty people had paid at the door.

It was the greatest compliment I had ever receieved in my life.

Thank you to everyone who came that night and contributed in making it one that I, personally, will never forget.

The Setlist

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 6:10 am and is filed under Four Months In Three Weeks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.