So… the last day of the tour. We had two shows and an interview planned; I knew this would be a long day. After we awoke from our relatively decent slumber from the previous evening had to get a move on pretty quickly.
One thing that I haven’t mentioned yet, was the lack of laundry facilities that we’ve run into. I (personally) made a slight strategic mistake by not taking advantage of some of the laundry availability earlier in the trip (the hotel in Jackson TN, as well as our accommodations in both Houston and Dallas) assuming that we would be able to do laundry in Austin. Well, as it turns out, our hotel didn’t have any place to buy detergent and I really didn’t feel like it was worth it to wash my clothes in water. So, I cleaned a few pairs of underwear in the sink in the room and at least I knew my undergarments would be clean. However, the rest of my clothes were not so fortunate… I’m a pretty clean guy, so my clothes didn’t really smell, but it was more knowing that I’ve already worn this t-shirt for 14 hours earlier in the week that kind of made me pause..
Anyway, everyone (except for Mike, who did wash his clothes in just water) is wearing clothes that are dirty to some degree, but we only have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so we’ll survive.
So Pat insisted that he had to eat before we start wandering around (we weren’t playing until 8pm, but wanted to be in the city to perhaps see a show or two (amazing.. seeing music at SXSW! What a concept) and do our usual handing out of flyers and CDs and what not. We walked around the suburban heaven that our Hotel was located in and went to this deli where they had free soft serve ice cream, total score! We also learned a bunch about cheese, its lactose and gluten properties, and what cheese rock starts from the Hingham area would eat; all courtesy of Pat.
At this point, we’re getting ready to head in, and once we arrive, we head over to the tent where a few shows we had planned to see where going on. We were able to see Billy Bragg (who I like, but had never seen) and a project involving M Ward and Zooey Deschanel called She and Him – both were quite good, although the sound person did a terrible job. We were also able to catch a few tunes from the band Le Loup, who we had played with back in December at the Middle East, and I thought they were great, just as they had been in December. [If I have time, I’ll try and write a review of the record – along with a review of the live show since they are two completely different animals].
All the time we’re out; I have neglected to note that it is in the Mid-90’s and I had to slather my self with sunscreen, less I wish to have a terrible sunburn. After these acts, I couldn’t take the sun, so we walked around for a bit and ended up splitting for a little while so we could explore on our own. I walked around the convention site, and noticed that we could’ve gotten into a decent amount of the offerings of the SXSW convention at the Austin convention center, but by the time I was there, people were packing up their wares and all the free small t-shirts they were giving away were LONG gone. Although it had cooled off quite a bit I still grabbed a free popsicle (which was delicious) and headed to the club for load in (which I was dreading).
Kelly Davidson and her friend Heidi came to the show as well as another photographer and took what I hope were some awesome shots. After, we had to high-tail it over to the next venue, since we were scheduled to play in a few hours. It took us a little while to find the next venue, our directions weren’t great and we were cursing ourselves for not renting/buying a GPS… Once we arrived at Wests, it seemed almost like a house party; and was a burgeoning art gallery/performance space. We caught a bit of the band on before us (The Beangrowers) who were awesome. We played our set and chatted with Rachel and Nick who ran things afterwards. Now for the last event of the evening, a brief interview with Aidan from the blog Strangeglue. We had a great interview as the Driskill Hotel and stopped at an iHop on the way back to the hotel. It was 4:30am and were ready for the 36 hour drive back to Boston…