friday, april 3

jason had arrived from LA the previous evening, we wanted to get a fairly early start to our day. we were aiming to leave town at 11, which didn’t exactly happen, but we were not terribly late. we have a documentary crew following us around on this tour. they are from pittsburgh, and had come out to boston earlier this week in order to interview us and various other freezepop associates. so they showed up and captured the exciting loading-up of the van. lil’ simon jumped up into the van, thinking he was going for a ride, which was incredibly cute/sad, and i was none too happy kicking him out. oh man, if i could take simon on tour with me, it’d be so much happier. anyway, after saying goodbye to pup and pup-sitter abby, we got underway. it was raining a whole lot. we listened to a whole bunch of yellow magic orchestra.

we made it in to nyc at 4:30 and went to the ryko offices for a brief visit. it was good to see some folks again, and connect names with faces for some other folks. it was very brief though, since we had to run off to soundcheck.

we were playing at the studio at webster hall, which is a nice lil’ venue in the basement there. i was kind of worried that nobody was going to be at our gig though, as the presets were playing in the main room at the same time we were, and there’s definitely a bit of audience-crossover there. anyway, we met the promoter, hayden, who was quite nice, and our soundcheck itself went pretty well. our friend heather showed up, and then we all went to dinner at a tasty thai place around the corner, where we met up with our booking agent athan as well. then we went back to the club and things had already gotten underway. i got fancied-up a bit, and watched the opening bands and hung out with our nyc friends (and also some dutch friends) who had shown up, although this place was LOUD and it was really impossible to carry on any kind of conversation. then it was time for our set, and i was pleasantly surprised by the turnout, it was definitely better than our previous few nyc shows. sean had redone some of our backing tracks, and we added some old songs back into our repertoire, and were even doing some more new songs as well, so there was a lot of new stuff going on, and it went pretty well. i’d say as far as first shows of the tour go, it was about as good as you could ask for.

we hung around with our friends for a bit, and the club turned into a dance night after our set. it was still pretty unbearably loud though, and we had a haul ahead of us, so we tried to get out of there at a reasonable hour. that did not end up happening, apparently the promoter had a really difficult time settling up with the club, so we sat around forever waiting to get paid. after a while, we looked outside and realized that the entire street was closed off and full of fire trucks. MSTRKRFT were playing upstairs at the event after the presets, and from the looks of it, everybody in the world wanted to be there. the sidewalks were jam-packed with people, and let me tell you, it made for a highly unpleasant loading-out experience, trying to push our way thru the crowd with many large boxes and cases. there was no way to get the car remotely close to the venue, luckily jason had managed to find a parking spot a couple of blocks away, so we just hauled everything to the car in many trips. as much as i like nyc, playing there is just always such a royal pain in the ass. everything always manages to be like 3x as difficult as it should be.

we finally managed to get out of there, got some snacks, said goodbye to heather, and got on the road again. we had gotten a hotel in allentown, pa, since our drive the next day was to pittsburgh, which we didn’t want to do all in one stretch. luckily, jason was still on west coast time and managed to get us there in one piece. i totally fell asleep in the car. we arrived at 3:30 and the one last obstacle of the day was that our rooms were on the second floor, and there were no elevators. because 3:30 am is a great hour to carrying all our gear up flights of stairs. awesome.