Dear Friends,
What an interesting and fun weekend!
After work on Friday, we went to get our rental van for the roadie to San Juan Capistrano, Lake Forest, and San Pedro. First lesson learned of the weekend: Don’t rent a minivan. Ever.
It’s a necessary and expensive evil, of course, when you’re a band and you don’t have a van of your own. Here in Arizona, though, when you try to rent a minivan, they think you are going to drive it down to Mexico and never return. We had a good rate at a company called Nu Rentals, but they wouldn’t rent a minivan to us. We had to scramble and find another one.
Right off the bat, we were an hour behind schedule. It could have been worse, too, because I had thought everything was going to be fine and just about sent Shane back to my house to wait for me. Luckily, he hadn’t gotten far when we had to scramble our plan.
We got on the road about 7:30PM and headed west. Because we were rushing, I don’t think we did the most efficient pack job and I had a hard time figuring out the radio situation. Off we went, though, barreling towards San Juan Capistrano to our wonderful friends, Mark & Mo & Felix & Matt. They were kind enough to put us up this weekend.
They were also kind enough to wait up for us. We got to their place just about 1AM. Spectacular time, really, for a trip to the coast. I had a beer and chilled a bit and enjoyed the fellowship greatly. I’ve written a lot about Mark/Markus and many of you know him well. He’s the best and it was so great to see him.
Mo and Matt and Felix are also the BEST, too. We really enjoyed our time with them. We crashed about 2:30ish and slept a good six hours or so before getting up to start our day. It was overcast and cool on the coast. It felt really good, even if there was a bit of humidity.
Our first show of the day was at Skatercon in Lake Forest at the Etnies Skatepark. What a great venue for Skatercon, which my friend, Adam, puts on. Saw a lot of good skateboarding and a few good bands, too. It did end up raining pretty hard for a while, but we avoided any major mishaps. Justin and Steve came out, too, as well as the usual Skatercon crew, so friendly faces were everywhere.
I’d love to say we played for a huge crowd, but it was probably about 50 people watching us. There were another few hundred, though, who could definitely hear what was happening in the live music area. My left wrist cramped up so badly during one song that I was seriously trying to figure out if I could just play with my knuckles. After getting through that, all was well. We got a lot of handshakes and fist bumps and we had a great time.
We hung out at Etnies for a few hours after we played before heading back to Mark & Mo’s. Made a few new friends, too, and hopefully we will cross paths again.
My buddy, Becky, from high school came over and we got to hangout for about a half hour or so. It was great to see her and catch up. We realized it had been about 20 years since we had gotten to hang out. Her husband is a Mainer, so we had a lot of stuff to talk about. I hope we don’t wait 20 years to hang out again.
After taking a mini-whores bath, we headed to San Pedro to play our second set of the day at the Sardine. It was a fun ride and we listened to Liam’s music on the way. The boy has some good taste.
The Sardine is a great little punk rock bar in Pedro owned by one of the guys from Toys That Kill. We played with some wild and weird bands it was great. More new friends were made, including a dude who played in two bands that I really love: The Cows and the Melvins.
We played well, again, and I felt a lot of joy.
To be continued…
See you tomorrow.
The flyer from last Saturday night.
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