After our wonderful visit to the Sam Houston statue, we headed on down to Dallas. We arrived at the door before it opened and we sat in the van in the parking lot with about 10 other vans full of bands. The show at The Door in Dallas was a collection of bands headed down to SXSW. They were all out-of-town bands, probably none were well known in Dallas and the room is pretty huge, so we had pretty low expectations for this show. The venue had three stages with about 4 bands playing on each stage. The show was set up with 2 stages in a single room such that as soon as one band ended, the next band began playing. In fact, the band after us was sound checking during our last song, which was a little weird.
The booker/manager guy was super nice and had basically been kind enough to set up this show so that all of these bands had a place to play on the way to SXSW even though he knew he wouldn’t make much (if any) money doing the show. He bought the bands pizza and gave some drink discounts. The sound guy also played in a band (Jonathan Tyler and the Northern Lights) and he was a really nice guy too. The show was strange because it was more or less, bands playing to bands. All of the bands had probably been on tour for a while and that makes it hard to listen to music. After we played, we stuck around as long as we could, but we had to get over to our place of sleep for the night before it got too late.
We had a really nice time hanging out with Erica and Jason and got to check out some more areas of Dallas and grab some food. It ended up being a really relaxing and recharging evening, which was nice to have before we headed to Austin.
As an aside, every rest stop in Texas had a bathroom full of religious tracts…this photo shows tract location in two different bathrooms at different rest stops:
