October 3, 2009 : Casbah : San Diego, CA
Van games are starting to unfold. Today’s was a game where you try to think of celebrity names that are full sentences – Tom Waits, Pete Rose, Ben Folds, Andy Fitts, George Burns, Bill Withers, etc, etc. Blake got kind of upset with himself because he couldn’t think of one for almost the entire car ride, and then once he thought of “Jeremy Irons” he was on a roll – there was no stopping him.
We pulled in to San Diego in time to park (finding somewhere to park a van and trailer when a venue doesn’t have band parking is unpleasant at best) and get some really awesome food at the Waterfront, a bar a couple of blocks away from the venue. After that it was off to the venue for load-in, check, etc. Blake performed some surgery on Eric’s guitar, I set up merch, and we all got to take our time. It was nice.
The show was, of course, fantastic , something which I feel redundant reminding you about. It was another very full room, a few people shy of selling out, and the crowd seemed to be pretty equally into the new stuff and old stuff, which is always nice. Afterwards, a severely inebriated dude and his lady friend told me I looked like “Jim from the Office,” and wouldn’t stop talking about it until Blake came out and they told him that he was the most amazing lead guitar player ever, before asking “that was you on lead guitar, right?” Alcohol is always an interesting catalyst in the conversations of strangers, one that never ceases to amaze me. The venue sound bro also made some pretty-close-to-creepy comments that made Barnhart a bit uneasy. San Diego, stop being so creepy.
A nice thing about the Casbah is that it’s right next to the San Diego airport – as in, one with a powerful arm could hit the landing planes with a baseball, and while that may sound like a classically humorous example of rock club weirdness, it actually makes for A: Something really fun to do while the band soundchecks, and B: Really awesome sound effects. Believe it or not, there are very few applications for a Jet landing noise that don’t sound awesome in a Bazan song.
Los Angeles is tonight. Let’s see what you’re made of, traffic.