May 2, 2009

Greetings from I-70. We’re en route from Ohio to Lake Latawana, Missouri. The weather is actually quite nice right now, blue skies with some clouds and sun, and dry roads. Woo hoo. We woke up at 8am on the nose this morning and we were pulling out of town by 8:30am, so we’re making good time to hopefully be able to relax a little bit before the show tonight.

It’s incredible how many windfarm machinery delivery trucks we’ve seen on the interstates on this trip – giant trucks moving giant pieces of machinery (usually blades from the wind turbines). We drove through a huge wind farm up near the Canadian border in Vermont, probably 100 turbines covering 300-400 acres of farmland. Just drove past three more trucks with blades as I was writing this sentence. Pretty neat. Hopefully the technological challenges of transporting the energy from the windmills will be figured out in this decade.

We just read the “Best of Boulder” list of winners from the Boulder Weekly magazine online, and the winner is an acapella group called “Face.” It was nice to see a talented group win it… the guys can definitely sing (and beat box). The down side is that they do 100% cover songs… so we’re back to the same issue again – making a successful career doing original music is damn tough. Form a cover band or play other people’s music from a laptop and you’ll fill venues. At one of the clubs we played this week, I was talking to the owner and he was saying that they’ve been forced to do live music only 3 days a week due to lack of people wanting to see live music, and that two of the nights are cover bands, and the other is a DJ (playing top 40 stuff)… and that he hates it. “It’s all the same shite,” he said. Amen, brother.

We’re cruising towards Indianapolis… just coming into the East side of the city. I’ll post another update later… hope you’re all enjoying your Saturday.

Hello from Ohio. The guys are all asleep and I’m about to hit the rack myself, just thought I should get an update up here on the Road Journal before the day is done. We’re staying in the little cottage that the owners of Peach’s venue provide to touring artists. We stayed here last fall when playing Peach’s, and this has to be one of our favorite stops on tours. The venue has incredible sound, an incredible sound guy (Tom), and some of the nicest staff in the world. Everyone is so accommodating and grooving during the sets, etc… and then to cap it off with a stay here in the little house is awesome.

We had a good drive from Virginia to Yellow Springs, decent weather the entire way until the last 30-40 minutes. We hit a thunderstorm “soaker” that dumped several inches of rain on I-70, leaving us struggling to see the hood of the van while driving well under the speed limit. Not ideal travel conditions, and evidently we’re in for more of the same on the way to the last show of the tour in Kansas. We’ve lucked out with weather the entire trip, so I guess we can’t be greedy. We’ve got a long drive in the morning (9.5 hours), so hopefully the storms don’t slow us down too much. We’re hoping to get to Lake Lotawana by 6pm or so for our 9pm show.

We played a killer version of Wartime tonight, a bit more up tempo than usual, but it really grooved. The bartender at the venue told us that “Diggin’ in the Dirt” is one of her favorite songs and that we ‘nailed it.’ So I guess that’s good… and we put our Sharpies to use, with people asking us to sign CD’s at our set break. we all felt good about tonight, and we’re looking forward to playing one more show and then sleeping in our own beds at the end of the weekend.

I didn’t get the photos from Anton’s camera yet (sorry!), but I’ll post them in the “charlottesville” post below as soon as I have them.

Dave Chapelle didn’t show up at the show tonight, if you were wondering.

Hasta for now, time to get some sleep… we’re up and out of here at 9am.