Playing at the Viper Room in LA Friday night
Tour is going really well. Here is a cool shot from the Viper Room in LA. Currently, we are in the southwest and will make our way up to Denver tomorrow night. Then its across to Salt Lake, up to Idaho, and into Washington.
For daily updates about the odds and ends of life on the road, check out The Whale’s Tale.
I am going on tour with my band Or, the Whale starting weds night in LA. We will be driving around for 10 days and heading to the southwest, northwest, and just about everywhere in between in the western US.
Please come out and see us if you can – its going to be a lot of fun!
I am picking up another gig with Blammos tomorrow night at the Elbo Room on Valencia St. We are on first at 9. I’ll be playing the little bass, because I am too lazy to carry a normal sized bass 8 blocks to the gig (hopefully thats not a deal breaker for anybody).
The next show I am playing in SF is at 111 Minna next friday night. We played this benefit last year, and it was a lot of fun.
I was informed tonight that we are playing 2 sets. Is that too much?* No! It simply means that we are playing album cuts and old songs that we never have enough time to play anymore. This is a good thing – trust me.
*I think we need to consider something here: Can there be too much? I mean, back in college my band used to play 3 seemingly never-ending sets of bizarre, quasi-psychedelic, overdone jam rock and people totally stayed for the whole show and were upset that we were finishing at 2am as the bar was closing. I am not proud to admit this, but I will do so in service to this great cause. What we are proposing is simply a little less than twice what we would regularly do, broken into two delightful servings.
The idea that music can only be digested in 45 minute or less slices is, frankly, still entirely new to me. Has the global attention span diminished that much in ten years? But you know what? It doesn’t matter, because we still are slicing it into less than 45 minute pieces! If you can’t simply pretend that we are a different band between sets, you can get a drink or attempt to erase your memory of the first set using various techniques or substances which I am not going to list here. In fact, I think some of these substances and techniques were required to tolerate those 3 set monstrosities back in the day…
Or, you can consider the Zen approach, which is if one can not step into the same river twice (or even once, for that matter) then one can not see the same band twice. Its inevitable that after the break we will change, at least in some small way. At the very least, my damp yet still cooling off sweaty shirt will have to come off revealing the unfortunate and hopelessly dorky t-shirt underneath. Maybe we’ll even mix it up a little – you know, like switch instruments or haircuts.
Regardless of the explanation presented, I stand by my conviction that no, this is in fact not too much, and that it is a good thing.
