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]