8/1/14

Day one of a mini Hickoid tour in the Pacific Northwest. 

We all met at the Austin airport at a ridiculous hour to make our 6AM flight. The Austin airport has a strange policy of checking every guitar case that goes under the plane for explosives residue. I get it at some level, you don't want a bomb on an airplane (duh) but EVERY guitar out of AUSTIN???!!! That's a whole lot of swabbing. Anyway my bass case is a weird vault kinda thing and it's a real pain in the ass to put back together so I always have to go to the back room to help them out. And that means I've got to get there earlier than usual. Let's just say that at 4:30AM I am pretty useless...

We finish the first flight and have a three hour layover in Vegas. Then another two hour flight to Seattle. We grabbed the rental and make the drive to Portland. It could have been easy but it took around two and a half hours to go 40 miles...

Traffic clears eventually and we make it to the hotel and later to the club, Tonic Lounge. Nice place! We were the last of three bands on the bill. First up the Lovesores. Some pretty sweet rockin punk and the lead player was amazing! Then our old buddy from Austin JT (whom I hadn't seen since the last time we hickoided it up in the PNY) latest band Adios Amigos, an (almost) all instrumental four piece with a bass 6 holding down the low end (and a real badass on lead, it's a theme) Some sweet shit. 

We finished things up with a pretty good set. We were all feeling a little punchy by that time (we'd been up for more than 20 hours at that point) we were mostly semi-reacting for the majority of it. But the crowd liked it and that's what really counts. 

Currently we are in the rental heading to Seattle for tonight's show at Slim's. We are all fairly well rested and our stomachs are full from a great breakfast at the restaurant (Montage Cafe) where JT works. He even comped us the meal!!! It's a fine way to live.