(no subject)
By the looks of it, I haven't posted anything on here in a little bit. We just got back from another month of tour this evening. It was a ton of fun but I'm pretty wiped. Here are some cities I visited for the first time and my instant impressions of them:
Dallas - We hung out near a part of town called Deep Ellum, which was recalled as the hip, rough-around-the-edges part of town until the neighborhood apparently died over the last few years. Now it's a thinning row of storefronts and empty parking lots with pleading billboards written in Hispanic with English translations underneath. Not a town I'd particularly care to revisit.
Austin - The coolest town ever, like everyone told us it would be. Why would you NOT want to go to school there? Beautiful campus, a cool shopping district butting right up against campus, great restaurants with the State Capitol and a fully-functioning downtown city-area replete with arguably the best music scene in America a few blocks south...and I still feel like I'm missing something. Oh yeah - girls. Lots of 'em.
Birmingham - From the west, the city kind of jumps out at you from behind a mountain bend, all spread out and huge. From the breadth of it's downtown - which is spread so thin that it almost doesn't have a skyline - and the lights from outlying suburbs peeking over the mountain backdrop, it almost seems larger than life, like you're passing over from above. The streets were eerily silent for a Friday night. I was intrigued.
Shreveport - This most definitely wins the award for "Shadiest City We Visted on Tour" (supplanting Memphis from this past summer). The downtown area is surrounded by a barrage of hotel casinos just across the river in the next county. The southern outskirts, where we played, looked like your stereotypical bayou movie-town, filled with crumbling moss-covered shacks and squat house that looked more like miniature prisons stocked with croc wrestlers and Cajun knifemen. I picked up a local weekly paper that carried the tagline "If you don't want it printed - don't do it!" before recounting how the embattled local judge "still might can save her job" (actual headline). The rest of the magazine turned out to be collections of mugshots from arrests made in Shreveport and surrounding counties the previous week, with a ghastly amount of child molesters. The whole town felt sinister.
Memphis - We spent a night here in July on tour, but didn't see a lick of the city aside from the five blocks between the club and our friend's place. This time, it ended up being the last show of tour, so we stayed up celebrating at a friend's warehouse space until the sun came up (which was formerly the dojo where Elvis took his first karate lessons), and then took quick runs past Sun Studios and The Lorraine Motel, where MLK was shot. The former was simply unbelievable...standing in the same room with that much music history in the air was much like how I imagine it is for a Catholic to stand inside St. Peter's. We got to touch the vocal mic that every Sun artist used from '53 through the mid-60s (including every Elvis, Johnny Cash, Luther Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis recording for the label) and touch the keys on the piano that Jerry Lee used to lay down "Great Balls a' Fire." It was pretty damn mind-blowing...I was seriously in awe.
The latter was overshadowed by the mid-40ish black lady who had set up a protest site opposite the entrance to the hotel, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. She had a gigantic tarp covered her benches that at one point called Bono "Judas" for his support for the museum. We were intrigued by the idea of a black woman protesting the National Civil Rights Museum - even more after she yelled "Fall Out Boy!" at us as we walked across the parking lot. (She thought we were them.) Turns out she just thinks the money to fund the museum could be put to ends that Dr. King was working toward - like low-income housing or a hospital for the indigent - rather than keeping a "monument to hate" afloat. She recalled how many white folks walk about "proud about what their daddy did" while young black kids just "want to get even with white folks." I saw her point but when she said she hadn't missed a day at her station in SIXTEEN YEARS(!) I started to wonder when it was going to occur to her that her powers could probably best be used elsewhere. Something for dedication I suppose.
Dallas - We hung out near a part of town called Deep Ellum, which was recalled as the hip, rough-around-the-edges part of town until the neighborhood apparently died over the last few years. Now it's a thinning row of storefronts and empty parking lots with pleading billboards written in Hispanic with English translations underneath. Not a town I'd particularly care to revisit.
Austin - The coolest town ever, like everyone told us it would be. Why would you NOT want to go to school there? Beautiful campus, a cool shopping district butting right up against campus, great restaurants with the State Capitol and a fully-functioning downtown city-area replete with arguably the best music scene in America a few blocks south...and I still feel like I'm missing something. Oh yeah - girls. Lots of 'em.
Birmingham - From the west, the city kind of jumps out at you from behind a mountain bend, all spread out and huge. From the breadth of it's downtown - which is spread so thin that it almost doesn't have a skyline - and the lights from outlying suburbs peeking over the mountain backdrop, it almost seems larger than life, like you're passing over from above. The streets were eerily silent for a Friday night. I was intrigued.
Shreveport - This most definitely wins the award for "Shadiest City We Visted on Tour" (supplanting Memphis from this past summer). The downtown area is surrounded by a barrage of hotel casinos just across the river in the next county. The southern outskirts, where we played, looked like your stereotypical bayou movie-town, filled with crumbling moss-covered shacks and squat house that looked more like miniature prisons stocked with croc wrestlers and Cajun knifemen. I picked up a local weekly paper that carried the tagline "If you don't want it printed - don't do it!" before recounting how the embattled local judge "still might can save her job" (actual headline). The rest of the magazine turned out to be collections of mugshots from arrests made in Shreveport and surrounding counties the previous week, with a ghastly amount of child molesters. The whole town felt sinister.
Memphis - We spent a night here in July on tour, but didn't see a lick of the city aside from the five blocks between the club and our friend's place. This time, it ended up being the last show of tour, so we stayed up celebrating at a friend's warehouse space until the sun came up (which was formerly the dojo where Elvis took his first karate lessons), and then took quick runs past Sun Studios and The Lorraine Motel, where MLK was shot. The former was simply unbelievable...standing in the same room with that much music history in the air was much like how I imagine it is for a Catholic to stand inside St. Peter's. We got to touch the vocal mic that every Sun artist used from '53 through the mid-60s (including every Elvis, Johnny Cash, Luther Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis recording for the label) and touch the keys on the piano that Jerry Lee used to lay down "Great Balls a' Fire." It was pretty damn mind-blowing...I was seriously in awe.
The latter was overshadowed by the mid-40ish black lady who had set up a protest site opposite the entrance to the hotel, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. She had a gigantic tarp covered her benches that at one point called Bono "Judas" for his support for the museum. We were intrigued by the idea of a black woman protesting the National Civil Rights Museum - even more after she yelled "Fall Out Boy!" at us as we walked across the parking lot. (She thought we were them.) Turns out she just thinks the money to fund the museum could be put to ends that Dr. King was working toward - like low-income housing or a hospital for the indigent - rather than keeping a "monument to hate" afloat. She recalled how many white folks walk about "proud about what their daddy did" while young black kids just "want to get even with white folks." I saw her point but when she said she hadn't missed a day at her station in SIXTEEN YEARS(!) I started to wonder when it was going to occur to her that her powers could probably best be used elsewhere. Something for dedication I suppose.