An American Tour

Saturday 20th March back at Chad’s. We left Chad’s house yesterday evening around half 6 to head downtown to our showcase gig at Mohawk, about a minute later we started crossing the main road when a car screeched and skidded to a halt narrowly swerving to avoid one standard fare drummer happily wandering across the road admiring the tarmac. The bus journey was enough time for Dan, Emma and Jas to recover from the incident, Andy seemed totally oblivious to the whole thing.. We got to Mohawk and met with the photographer Dominick we’d met in New York last week; he was really nice again and took some photos of us with a stuffed bear striking a grizzly pose, quite in keeping with the bands style. After setting up our gear and one male guitarist from standard fare getting two pretty gnarly electric shocks from two different microphones, we were ready to play. The place filled up quite nicely and we played 9 songs which went down better than we could have hoped, with some ear piercing whistling from the crowd. On the whole we were pretty happy with how we played and the response; it was a nice finish to the ‘shows’ on the tour. We left the venue to head back to Chad’s to drop of our gear before catching some of the other bands, after a few minutes we managed to hail a cab. It was one hell of a cab ride. ‘Shaggy’ our ‘chauffer’ was a true Texas redneck with a hooting laugh (hhHHHaaaauuurr!!) and many stories to tell; some rather factual, others including men, trees, & drunken desire. Although it felt like the longest cab ride of our lives, he did wait whilst we got changed and we did kind of enjoy it. Back in town we grabbed some tasty grub from ‘Kebabalicious’ and headed back to Mohawk to catch the end of the Summer Cats set, the Australian indie poppers we met in Boston, by all accounts they were sounding pretty good too. We’d heard Evan Dando, singer of The Lemonheads, was playing an acoustic set that night so we trekked a several blocks to find that he’d played the night before, so we marched a few more blocks to the place Sum 41 were playing to find a queue longer than their set, soooo we stomped across town to the Alphabeat gig. We got there and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club were still playing, the place was pretty busy and we were impressed with the way the female drummer was putting so much power into the drum beats. After their set we decided rather than wait for Alphabeat to set up and play we would head back to Mohawk to see The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. Outside the temperature was getting a bit cold and the venue was a bit away so we caught a bicycle powered taxi and he gave us a special deal $20 for the four of us. We then raced all the other bicycle taxis with solo travellers and were way faster! The guy must have cycled us around 10 blocks, some uphill, which seemed pretty far at the time. We went past a packed secret Muse gig with lots of flashing lights and crazy guitar stuff. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart definitely lived up to the hype we’d heard and they went down really well in the small packed venue. The lead singer thanked Standard Fare at the end of his set and told us afterwards he attended our first US gig in the Cake Shop, NYC, last week. Unfortunately it then took us a good hour and a half to catch a taxi as there was a desperate hysteria around flagging down taxis. Overnight there was a very dramatic storm and Andy felt the floor shake. Emma continued her habit of waking up the whole household with her loud sleep-swearing and panic and was the only one who slept sound all night! The temperature has turned very cold today but we ventured out and warmed up at a genuine TEX-MEX restaurant called Chuy’s (pronounced Chewey’s) with lime marguerita’s with extra shots of tequila and some very cheesy chicken burritos. We then drove downtown to wander round the guitar trade show and poster show. Andy bought one poster and we helped him get a couple that had been flyposted to the pillars. We did a little shopping and headed home. That evening we had dinner in a cafe adjoined to a supermarket which had a lot of ethical/organic type stuff and after ordering the food at a counter we were handed pagers which buzzed and flashed when the food was ready! Dan and Andy have gone to see Rival Schools tonight and I (Emma) have stayed in to watch some films.