saturday we played in cleveland ohio at the Hi Fi. this is one of my favorite places to play. it’s not too big, not too small. not too dirty but not too sterile. this club is just right in every way. plus, the cleveland fans are so nice as is the hi fi staff, especially nikki who made the show possible. thanks nikki!

the drive up was uneventful (read: boring). i drove; everyone slept. although we did get a chance to tell brian (a pittsburgh area native) what a buckeye is. i’ve found that many non-ohioans think buckeyes are animals. this seems ridiculous if you or one of your friends went to OSU (go bucks), but it’s true–this myth exists. if you’re one of these people i hate to break it to you but buckeyes are not animals; they are poisonous tree nuts. the word buck-eye comes from its looking like the eye of a male deer or buck. so maaaaaybe you could say that the eye of an animal is an animal. if you also consider your toenail an animal. if that is the case you may wanna get it checked out.

after load-in i ate dinner with some friends at the winking lizard. there was a lizard there, an iguana but he wasn’t winking and you couldn’t eat him. instead i had a grilled cheese and a root beer float. grilled cheese with bacon. what is that? i guess they put bacon on grilled cheese in cleveland. maybe they do that everywhere? was a new one to me.

back at the club we mingled with people, watched the other bands and played with a miniature pirate ship in the dressing room. i was so happy people came out to the show! i would love to start playing cleveland more regularly.

brian ives bass, dan mcquinn drums, t miller cello guitar keys

the big logistical problem with doing shows right now is that house sound guys who are used to running standard rock or punk bands do not like the added stress of a cello, keyboard, acoustic, et cetera. this means a lot of our sets have been cut a little shorter cuz it takes us longer to set up and check all that. but the hi fi sound guy did a great job (and even ran lights simultaniously!). i always get a little anxious about it, and we take a second to flirt with the idea of just doing a straight ahead drums bass guitar show. but once everything is working and the set is going smoothly, the extra stuff is totally worth it as it makes our shows a little more dynamic and interesting musically than they would be otherwise.
this was probably one of our smoothest sets in a long time. finally i think we may be at a place where we’re confident with brian and the new songs and and things just flow. the cool thing about doing a short set is that you always have a more immediate picture of where you are–beginning middle or end. in a longer set sometimes things start to get too lax and there is less urgency in the performance.

the reaction to the new songs was great. i am relieved about this. people seem super receptive and even excited about the slight change in musical direction. thanks so much for sticking with me here..

after the show we decided to save money on hotel rooms and drive home 4 hours. this was the wrong decision. i guess you can’t have adventures without misfortune. maybe i should change the title of this blog to the adventures of a starving artist. that is more uplifting right?

I-71 at about 3am a half hour into the trip i was lying down in a set in the back trying to fall asleep when a loud “thud” jolted the van violently. i sat up and swore we had hit a car. as dan pulled the van over to the side of the deserted interstate he explained that “it was a deer. there was nothing i could do. i had to make a choice and couldn’t swerve or i would have killed us all.” we got out and walked around to the front, prepared for the worst. this is from the next day:

not so bad i guess. obviously there’s a mark. the parking light bulb is dangling out of the hole like an horror movie eyeball from its socket. but there was no blood, and no damage to the engine or anything important (it seems). there was however a disturbing spatter trail of spit or vomit in a streak on the side. i know that’s gross but that’s reality.

let’s have a moment of silence for the deer. i’m serious.
…

i don’t know how much of this our insurance will cover if any, so we would have been better off spending that money on hotel rooms afterall. these unexpected things are why it’s so hard just to break even.

i read that this is the likeliest time to have this kind of incident because of mating season and hunting. and every year the numbers are higher and higher. i probably saw at least five or ten deer corpses on the shoulder on the way up. this is obviously a serious problem that’s killing animals and some humans alike (and less importantly damaging the vehicles of midwest rockers). the highway looks like a war zone, blood stains and entrails littered all about the asphalt. and it is expensive to fix damaged vehicles and property. what is the solution? apparently hunting, while bringing down overall levels of deer can also drive them toward the roads. also maybe littering increases the problem. i honestly used to think if something was biodegradable it was okay to litter. i now know that throwing an apple core or banana peel out your window can attract hungry animals to the side of the road. my brother in law works for the city of trenton ohio and sometimes helps clean up road kill (apple cores too).

so what do we do? reintroduction of natural predators? of course our ecosystem is out of whack. of course our highways and subdivisions have disturbed the habitat of all woodland creatures. but when people are dying and getting injured this isn’t something that’s easy to shrug off as tree-hugger talk or just a symptom of necessary modern life or transportation. perhaps it’s as easy as building better fences to keep animals off the road. i don’t know. certainly there must be some link between being poor stewarts of the environment and innocent people being shish kabobed by antlers.

speaking of environmentalism, if you’re over 18 and care about the world or yourself or yourself in the world please vote on tuesday! this is a big election. in case you care about my beliefs–and if you don’t please skip the paragraph–i know how defensive some people are about their politics–i will be voting progressive ideals, education, pro-working class, labor unions, anti-corporatism, anti-nation building, more diplomacy, anti-unilateralism, environmentalism, et cetera et cetera. if you haven’t figure it out that’s the democratic party (at its best). although of course i encourage you to think rationally and critically about the state of the union and our place in the world. and if you come out on the “other side” well, i respectfully disagree but i love you anyway. cuz that’s how we crazy liberal rockers roll: all you need is love love love.

well i have a couple days to vote, work on some websites, and continue contemplating deer overpopulation.
THEN a three day run of acoustic shows!

wednesday coopers on main, cincinnati, oh
thursday clique lounge, covington, ky
friday the blue line, lexington, ky

i am really excited. if by the third night i really suck you should demand your money back. maybe i’ll see you around?
be careful out there and rock the vote!

peace

joe

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 5th, 2006 at 5:36 pm and is filed under Tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.