April 2013

Hi, All,

We’re in the van on I-80 in western Iowa, on the long road home (we fondly refer to this part of I-80 as our “long driveway”). Had a really fun show last night in Des Moines at the 4th Street Theatre. The acoustics in that room are fantastic, and we ran our own sound, which we’ve got dialed pretty tightly from the tour, so we were really able to enjoy the playing. Here’s how the setlist panned out:

Let It Be (Anton solo) –>
Park
Hazel
Sister, Brother
IIOKYN
View From Way Up Here
Obey –>
Life During Wartime
Don
Turn My Egg

All in all a great last night of the tour. There was some confusion when we arrived at the venue, as they had accidentally double-booked the room with another event, so we had to scramble to get set up quickly and then play… but we – and the audience – made the best of it. These are the funny things we have to deal with at our level, and they usually end up working out.

Mario and I (Russ) walked over to a Perkins restaurant next to our hotel late last night and enjoyed some French toast and chocolate pie. Beers and Anton responsibly skipped that and went straight to bed. We used Priceline.com to get the hotel about an hour before we got to town and scored a great rate ($120) for two big suites. Mario recommended Priceline from past experience with other tours; we’ve always booked our hotels in advance, but figured we’d try it out on his suggestion, and it worked out great.

We’ve had amazingly nice driving weather the entire tour, but we’re paying for it today! It’s raining ridiculously hard, there’s a good amount of traffic, and visibility is pretty bad/foggy. Anton is driving, which is great, as he’s owned the van for 10+ years and knows how it handles… it looks like we’re under this band of bad weather the entire way to Denver, including snow on the final stretch (3-4 hours) in Colorado. Yay – a little bit of excitement peppered into the trip here on the last day.

We’ve got a bunch of photos here that we’re going to have to go back and add throughout the posts, just have to get them organized and resized, etc. Check back to see the Road Journal with more photos from the trip.

Howdy from the hotel in Ohio. We didn’t quite make it to Cleveland, but we did cover some miles west of Erie after the gig. It was a fun show, definitely made some new fans, and we were really glad to get out of the van and jam for a bit. The place hooked us up with a free dinner, too, so that was good times.

Here’s how the setlist panned out:

Story Of…
Let It Be (Anton solo) –>
Park
Hazel
View From Way Up Here
Marula Binge
Don
September
Diggin’ In The Dirt
Turn My Egg
Late In The Evening (P. Simon cover, by request)
Life During Wartime

More driving tomorrow, to Des Moines… catch up with you from the road!

So much for the night off. We’ve decided to play a show tonight in Erie, Pennsylvania. It was a long day of driving, and we all agreed that it would be nice to stretch our legs and have some activity, so we hopped on Google and started looking for venues in western PA. We found one – The Vermont Tavern (or “Nelson’s” or “Erie Ale House” – looks like it has changed names a bunch of times, not sure what the most recent iteration is). Looks like a cool space, with a big stage and lights, etc. Should be fun… we’ll be there in about 20 minutes to load in. More later…

Hello from the van. We’re in western Massachusetts on I-90, on our way to Cleveland. This is our one day off from playing the entire 10-day tour… a travel day. Had a great morning at the bed and breakfast. Woke up and took a walk with Mario around the perimeter of the farm, checking out the horses and enjoying the fresh air. We had fresh eggs (from the chickens behind the inn) and bagels for breakfast, got our stuff packed up, and hit the road. This point in a tour is always bittersweet, as we make the turn west for home. It’s awesome to think of being back home and off the road for a little bit, but we also know that within a few days of being home, we’ll be tapping our toes with energy, missing the activity of tour. Great driving weather again today – we’ve had fantastic weather the entire tour so far – and we’ve got about 10 hours to Cleveland. More later from there…

What an AWESOME night at The Chat… the place was packed with great people ready to celebrate the capture of the bombing suspect, and surprised to find live music at their favorite drinking hole… here’s the setlist Fred made:

We’re now settling in for the night at the bed and breakfast. Tomorrow morning we’ll relax here for a bit before heading West for a day off from playing (travel day). Hope to get to Cleveland for the night, half way to Des Moines. More later…

Welp – we decided we really wanted to play a show after 10 hours of driving from Virginia, so we started going through Google and asking friends who live in the Boston area, to try and find an alternate venue tonight. We called a whole bunch of places, most of whom had stuff booked already, but we just confirmed that we can load in all of our sound gear and play at a dive bar in Wayland, about a half hour outside of the hotel. It’s called The Dudley Chateau (“The Chat”) and it’s supposed to be a pretty cool little place, and there will be a bunch of people coming out who had planned on seeing us at Johnny D’s, so we’ll see how it goes… and it sounds like the cops have caught the Marathon bomber guy in Watertown, which will be a big relief for everyone here. More later…

Well, our show tonight in Boston is officially cancelled – just got the word from the promoter. The police have the whole city shut down and they evidently have no idea where the 2nd Marathon bomber is, but he’s somewhere around the city, and the venue we were to play tonight is right smack in the middle of it all. Pretty crazy to follow all of this from the van. We have friends texting us, telling us, “since you guys are driving, keep an eye out for a Honda Civic with this license plate #…” etc.

Really bummed that the show is cancelled – we had sold out of our presale tickets and expected a really great crowd tonight, but obviously in light of everything going on, it’s not a huge deal – we just want this guy caught before he hurts anyone else.

We’re going to head to the bed and breakfast we’re staying at tonight and relax for the night, then we drive tomorrow and Sunday to get to our show in Des Moines on Sunday night.

Bummed to miss all of you in Boston. We’ll be refunding the presale tickets ASAP over the next couple of days. We’re donating $500 to the Richard Family Fund, the family of the 8 year old boy killed on Monday in the bombing.

More later…

Double entendre in the subject of this post… we are, indeed, bound for Boston… but the city of Boston is also bound.  We’re seeing on the news that virtually the entire city is on “lockdown,” with all businesses closed, all public transportation halted, and all residents told to stay in their homes with doors locked, etc. Evidently there was a massive firefight overnight between the Boston PD and the Marathon bombing suspects, in Watertown (oddly enough, where Fred works as a bartender when not touring with us), and one suspect was killed while the other is currently on the loose somewhere in the city. Holy cr@p.

We sent an email to the local promoter for our show tonight, asking if he’s planning on cancelling the show or keeping it on, or whatever. We’re about 4.5 hours out at this point and haven’t heard a word. We’re going to keep heading toward the city and we’ll have to see what happens. Our show is in Somerville, which is right in the middle of the manhunt. I think we’re all assuming at this point that the show will be cancelled, but we have to keep driving in that direction until we hear otherwise. We’re streaming Boston news channels on the iPads in the van here to keep track of everything, and we’re hoping for the sake of the citizens of Boston that they catch this b@stard soon before anyone else gets hurt.

Back to Virginia for a moment…

We had a fantastic couple of shows at The Box, sorry we didn’t post an update earlier, but we had late nights and early mornings and tons of time hanging with Jason and seeing the sights; not as much time updating the Backstage website. The first night at The Box on Wednesday was fun, with a good crowd coming out to check out the show, lots of new peeps hearing us for the first time, etc. We loaded in around 8:30pm and then went over and caught half of the Founding Fathers’ set at The Southern, before coming back to The Box to play. There were some C’Ville fans in the crowd singing along and requesting our original tunes, which is always a trip for us. We love it.  It was awesome to see Jason and to have him there for the show, to check out how the band sounds with Mario (he approved). Falco and Pandolfi and Michael showed up about halfway through the set and rocked out in the crowd through the end of the night, and then asked if we’d be down for having them (Falco and Pandolfi) sit in for our 2nd night. We were stoked and made plans for it. Yesterday we relaxed out at a friend’s farm where we spent the night, and we also got to see Jason again for a little while. Cruised into downtown C’Ville for dinner at Eppie’s on the downtown mall and relaxed in the beautiful weather (70’s, light breeze, sunny, perfect!). We then headed to the venue and set up the Merch table, placed Backstage cards on all of the tables, tuned up, and got ready to jam. Anton and I (Russ) stopped by The Artist Farm office (management company for The Stringdusters) and hung out with Michael and ‘Dusters fiddle player Jeremy for a little while, then strolled over to The Box. There were a lot of people there earlier than the first night, and we heard buzz amongst the crowd along the lines of, “…I heard this band is sick…”, etc. Good to hear. We played the set and had Falco and Pandolfi join us for “Sister, Brother,” “Marula Binge,” “Nightlite Jesus,” and “Turn My Egg,” which was very fun. They head on tour with their band to North Carolina today for a weekend of shows in the Southeast, and we knew we had the long drive to Boston, so we all called it somewhat early last night and all agreed that we’ll see eachother in the fall.

Here are some photos from Virginia:

More from Boston after we find out what’s going on tonight…