Austin started early....very early. After finishing our Dallas set with no one being too keen on sleeping in the van, we decided to make the 4 hour journey to Austin. Boomer promptly passed out in the back seat, Jay was in and out of consciousness, while Aaron drove like a mad man sucking down his 6th Monster, and I tried my hardest to stay awake in the passenger seat and keep him awake.
We showed up at Liz Love and Maggie Sullivan's house who had set everything up for us quite nicely. I layed down on the giant air mattress thinking I was finally going to get a comfortable night's sleep, only to be joined by (you guessed it) my usual sleeping partner (big points) on this tour - Adam Boomer. We got some good sleep and woke up early the next day to explore downtown Austin. WOW. Sixth street is a touring musicians dream, every other store is a music venue, and what isn't a venue is a music shop or souvenir shop specializing in music memorabilia. We ate a nice Tex Mex lunch, went to a nice drum shop to fix Jay's pedal, and went to scope out the outside of the venue (Headhunters).
After our morning downtown we decided heading to the UT's campus to scope shorties would make us feel better about the lack of groupie action so far on tour. We got a quick workout in (4 pull ups a piece, some of us with cigarette in mouth) on the outside track/gym and went running around the campus. I WISH I COULD GO BACK TO COLLEGE!!! I know it has been said before on this blog but every time we visit a school I get more and more nostalgic for dorm rooms, bad food, and lots and lots of (parties) studying. We explored the admissions office and almost got tackled by a security guard as we tried to leisurely stroll into the office of the University President.
After campus we headed back to Liz's to hang out with her and Maggie for a minute and catch a quick nap/shower. We got to the venue early and started setting up on the outdoor patio in a rainstorm, luckily the patio was roofed in and it was kind of nice to set up with the sound of the pitter patter above. We got yelled at by a clearly very tense sound guy who helped us set up them quickly took off. We were in competition with an open mic happening inside but throughout the night we pulled a lot of the fans outside. Our new friend Jason kept yelling things at the stage like "ya, bring that funk, get it" which made us feel nice and Boomer's new bestie Dinesh spent the night taking really cool pictures of the show which you can see here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/48370430@N03/sets/72157623682856963/
Liz came up with her sax and jammed with us on a few tunes, reinforcing my belief that many of the best musicians around have their humble beginnings in Nebraska. Now, being sober driver I didn't get to partake in this but some enthusiastic crowd members bought A LOT of shots for the band towards the end of the night, leading to just jovial musicians post show. After we got the van all packed up we spent some time talking to the club owner Looney who had dug the show. Looney was a big scary looking dude, the type of guy Boomer and I probably wouldn't usually mention our religious beliefs to, but he turned out to be incredibly nice and had lots of good tips for us (including don't go swim in the lake those girls just invited you to, unless you want to come out of it with hepatitis). So after Boomer did some bullet dodging to get us out of plans the band had drunkenly made, we headed back to Liz and Maggies for a wonderful party. At this point I was able to start drinking so my recollection gets a little hazy after this point but I do remember having lots of fun. The next morning we got up early and headed out for the small small small town of San Angelo, so stay tuned...
Steven
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