It’s 10AM— I have thirty minutes before we leave for Colorado, and I still have to put together merchandise orders (10 minutes), go to the post office and mail them (25 minutes), get Tyler’s car back to his house (thanks Duncan, how would I get around town last-minute without that Honda of yours?…5 minutes), and worst of all, I haven’t even started packing (hmm…). 

 

I’m sure this sounds hilarious, but this is pretty much my typical day-of-departure predicament: lots to do…NO TIME! I feel like I’m on some kind of ridiculous game show, except instead of having to assemble a brass monkey out of giant styrofoam pieces in three minutes or less so I can unlock the Legends of the Hidden Temple, I have to suppress my voracious appetite for good deals, and quickly scan the aisles of Plum Market for on-sale items that I actually need on the road. My mind wanders for a second as I look over the hundreds of bottles of olive oil (1Liter of Colavita Cold Pressed Extra Virgin for $8.99? Damn, that’s good…but the clock is ticking). I snap my self out of the price tag trance and checkout with three high-protein granola protein bars ($.99 each), and a box of throat coat tea ($4.19—a little steep, but an essential item for the touring vocalist). 

 

Walking out of the market, I run into my good friend Brendan McCall. There are few people in this world who can truly snap me out of a complete mental stress maze, and this guy is one of them. We talk for a minute, and I am instantly brought to a relaxed head space. I realize there’s no way I’m going to make it to my house by 10:30, and I accept my fate: I’m going to make the whole band wait for me. “I just changed-out last week’s menu,” he tells me, “do you want to take some meals on the road?”

 

[mental pause---something like in the movie "Snatch" when Brad Pitt gets knocked airborne from an uppercut to the jaw, and just hangs in the air, suspended in time]

 

Do I want to take some meals on the road? My response is some garbled mixture of the following: “Brother, for real? OH, BRENDAN!!!! I mean…Man, are you serious? Dude…”

 

In addition to being a great guy, Brendan is also an INCREDIBLE chef. He and fellow chef Jay Haamen (also INCREDIBLE—and he can fix cars) own and operate a killer food business called A Knife’s Work. Their focus is on prepared food-to-go, using fresh, local produce and meats (organic whenever possible). They change their take-home menu every week, and all the food is packaged in compostable containers. In my opinion, these guys make THE BEST FOOD IN ANN ARBOR, hands down. Their food is for sale at Everyday Wines in the Kerrytown Market and Shops, where the staff will help you select the perfect wine to pair with any of the six meals they offer weekly. Check ‘em out!!!

 

As I said before, I was late for our departure. You can imagine, however, the forgiving spirit that joyously took hold of the entire band when I arrived with my bounty of food from A Knife’s Work. Our typical on-the-road menu of peanuts and granola transformed into White Bean, Thyme, and Roasted Vegetable Soup, Caramelized Squash and Candied Pecan Spinach Salad, Yellow Lentils with Sherried Fresh Bacon, and Moorish Spiced Lamb Chops over a Red Onion Kumquat Salad. Not a bad score for a bunch of starving artists, eh?

Thank you Brendan and Jay—-Best tour departure ever! 

 

-The [rewind] button

 

 

Day 7: NYC

Arrive at 3am from our philly drive . . . who wants to split the couch?
Theo: “There’s a bed downstairs, a loveseat in that room up front, umm, i think someone might have to sleep on the floor. ”

(Convenient that i have a pattern of having my best sleep on 3 couch cushions placed on the floor)
–  “hey i’ll take the floor.”

How the hell did it get so warm all of a sudden?  I woke up yesterday looking out the window at falling snow and blustering cold, and today I’m waking up to gentle rainfall and 50 degree weather.  And I am DOWN.
And hell yeah, i love bagels.  I think we all love bagels — thank you THEO!!
Internet is down, office time unlikely, how am i gonna rock today’s blog?  Well, no time to dwell, bob and i gotta go downtown to meet our lovely publicists at fanatic promotion.
There’s an amazing quality that NYC has that i recently noticed: in one underground, dirty, and crowded subway, you can be surrounded by beggars, buskers, teenagers,  grandmothers, and business men on their way to sign a multi-million dollar business merge — all at once.  There’s an unusual sense of equality down there.
Out of the subway, into the rainy streets of manhattan we go.  Lets run, its is coming down pretty hard.
Book it to the fanatic office: contained by yet another obscure doorway merely displaying an address.  I have a tendency to romanticize success – surely the people who spend all day making artists like the Chemical Brothers, Sigur Ros, and Sufjan Stevens famous must do so in a stainless steel office aboard a NASA test mars capital building.  The office was beautiful, but the lack of brain-detecting 3D CGI machines  reminds me that it’s not about the gear, you just gotta have a group of extremely knowledgeable and passionate people coming together to share a common goal.  Hell yeah!

“Hi hey hello! hey whats that? whats that? what’s that mean? what’s he doing?”

Ok, gotta go soundcheck now — rain_run_subway_rain_run pt 2.
The venue is the mercury lounge — they gotta big rep and we’ve all been excited about this gig for a while.
Little confusing to set up, the backstage is in the basement on the opposite side of the building, there’s no real good place to set up our merch display, and damn it’s such a pain dealing with the bus in manhattan.  We also have to get everything off the stage and put away within 15 minutes of the last beat, which, for a 7-piece electronic rock entourage, is a serious serious undertaking. Despite it all, the show went great, the crowd was awesome, the staff super helpful, and we got to see a lot of friends.  AND, we were awarded a $120 parking ticket from the city, despite the bus being on and a driver in the drivers seat.  Yee haw!
Next up: scatter MDD’s members to the four corners of the city for a couple hours,  reconvene at a bar called the Library, have a couple drinks,  more catching up with close friends, and catch the 1:20am subway back to long island.  Which means you gotta RUN!  It’s incredible how in shape dave schall is for someone who smokes and doesn’t regularly exercise.  Someone’s gotta start rocking some science on that human, there’s something profitable there.
Get back to the pad, hit a little 3am office time (ie, get the last blog up with a very spotty internet connection), and hit that hay at 4:30am.

A good tour — thank you east coast!

Quote of the tour comes from Bob, during our last pre-show huddle:

“I just want to tell you guys, several times this tour i’ve literally gotten goosebumps from all the love being musically transmitted from everyone on stage.”

see in you in february My Dear East Coast.

Love, [record]

 

Day 6: Philly

 

There’s something that makes cell phone alarms more annoying than alarm clocks.  We gotta leave boston at 10am to make it to philly on time, which means i gotta wake up at 8:30, take a shower, pack, and help make sure everyone’s on the plan at 9am.  

I’m gonna miss this drip coffee.  Christian goes to the bus a half hour early to rock some more grease, gets back at 10am, get the bus loaded and out by 10:30am.  

Only a half-hour late!  That’s a record!!  

Except we’ve only driven 10 minutes and everyone has to pee (how many empty water bottles are on the bus right now?  uhh, two — ok we gotta pull over).  One thing that’s interesting about touring is that since you’re usually playing the same markets (east coast=NYC, Boston, DC, Philly, etc), you start to find yourself at the same gas stations and rest stops by chance (or is it . . .).  I think we hit 2 that we had stopped at before.  It’s a cool way to distinctly remember a pretty un-interesting moment (oh yeah, i got a coffee here, that sink doesn’t work, there were sunglasses sold outside, and those smoothies are too expensive!).  Why should we only recall the interesting moments?  

Pull into philly, looks like we’re a 1/2 mile away!!  Alright, we made it!  Ten minutes later, and 15 feet further, uuhhh we’re still about a 1/2 mile away!  Another 10 minutes, another 15 feet.  Rinse and repeat.  My god this is taking forever.  Wait wait ok here’s the left turn that’s gonna get us there — shit that’s the lane that puts you into the massive hotel parking lot and spits you out where you started!  Rinse and repeat.  Lets not take that turn again.  Ahh, here we are this is the left turn lane, and hey there’s the club! Where do we load?  In back?  We’re on a bridge but ok . . . ok there’s no where to turn.  Dammit, we missed the club.  Where can we turn around?  Oh up here — oh hey, remember being on this exact corner 45 minutes ago?  Being on this short bus feels so appropriate now.

The venue is the World Cafe Live.  Clearly very swanky as soon as you get in the doors.  

 

 

 

 

They made a flyer specific for us, which is a great sign for a venue (versus “hey, did you get the flyers we sent a couple weeks ago?”  “uhhh, i dunno maybe are they not up?”  “Guess.”).  And the stage is carpeted — this is my signal to play the show barefoot.  

 

 

We’ve never played in philly, don’t know many people, and 10 minutes before the hit the only people ready to listen are the cafe staff.  Huddle: lets just do what we do and hit as hard as we can anyways.  

Then what looks like 50 people come into the club all at once, including some great friends who graduated from U of M.  This is a good good thing.  

 

 

 

 

 

The show ended up being super fun, the audience was awesome to play for, the club staff loved the show (we even sold a handful of cd’s to the staff — which they told us was a first).  Looks like we might be coming back to open for a national act in february . . . lets hope!!  

Take a good long time to load out after the show (after selling merch, finishing off our drink tickets, taking a tour of the facility, catching up with friends, waking joey up from his post-show nap . .  ), christian fills up the bus with some grease from the kitchen, we all load the gear, and leave philly at 1am to sleep on the floor at theo’s family’s place in NY.  

At the end of the day, this whole music as life thing is really f*cking fun.

 

Love, the [record] button