3/20
We woke up earlier than we would have liked, ensuring that we only allow ourselves less than 5 hours of sleep a night for our big day. I say big because we had three shows and I had to run around all day and do interviews for Boston Band Crush. We zoomed down to Friends for the Official SXSW Berklee Party. After loading in, I started coordinating the interviews, which you can see on BostonBandCrush.org – they’ll be going up over the next few days. We played second at the party and had a really nice, attentive crowd. It’s always touch and go when you’re on at 1:30…will people all be too wound up still to get into anything or will they actually appreciate music in the early afternoon. Well, they seemed to dig it. It was great playing a venue with an open window behind us. Every time I turned around to face Travis, I saw a sea of faces outside staring in at us. It was my first time having an audience in front and behind. We played a short, but fairly solid set (I think) and we even got a lot of people to do the “30 Lives” dance, even though they seemed a little 1:30-scared the first couple of times through.
My favorite part of playing this particular show was that there were several photographers there, so I could always see where the good action was on stage, though I couldn’t always turn around to get a look at it. When Matt played trumpet, they all gravitated toward him. When Patrick started tearing his strings off and when he broke his strap, there they were. I hope they got some good photo moments. I think we manage to create those opportunities for photographers if they are on top of things.
I spent all afternoon chasing down bands. Some arrived early, some arrived late. My phone rang and rang; text messages arrived every 10 seconds. It was fun. The bands did a nice job entertaining me with quality antics, so that made my job fun.
At 6, we had to haul on over to Sonny’s Vintage for an in-store show. It was an excellent vintage clothing and music gear store. Unfortunately, we ended up playing for two or three people. They were nice to us, so we had an okay time with it, despite exhaustion. I really wasn’t sure if I would survive these last two sets. We worked pretty hard on stage for our short Berklee set and after several days of bad sleep, I was suffering quite badly.
We flew back up North after the show to our next gig, the 3rd of the day at Pete’s Bar. The owner and sound guy there were super nice to us. We played as people kind of fluxed in and out, but by the end, we had gathered a good modest group of fans. The owner passed around a tip jar, so we even made a little money, which is a rarity for anything happening during SXSW, so that was pretty great.
After we finished our 3rd gig and loaded out, we were pretty wiped, but felt good that we had survived our obligations for the day.
We walked down 6th past the din to get some food. I stopped for a pita wrap at the Pita Pit and chilled out for a minute. Eventually, we met up with Janelle and Heather from Green Light Go Publicity and Jen and Ben from Static of the Gods. In addition to knowing SoTG from playing shows with them, Ben also runs 6-Foot-4 booking and booked some of the shows on our tour.
The rest of the band split off to meet up with our housing hosts Dave and Andre and I spent some time hanging with the GLGers and the SoTGers on the couches in the bar at the Driskill Hotel. It’s always a pleasure to see all of these folks and chat with them about music and music business and life. After they headed out to leave the SoTGers at the airport, I met up with Dave, Andre, and The Motion Sick at Friends. We stayed there until they shut down at 2 and then headed a few blocks up to look at Same Sky Studios – – which is run by Dave and Andre. They are awesome and interesting brilliant and outside-the-box thinking guys and their studio, which was just completed in the last few weeks was awesome. It was in a big tall commercial building – The Bosch Hogg building if my memory serves, which is only one letter from Boss Hogg. That might not be the exact name, but something close. Anyway, really excellent.
At 4:30 AM, we headed back to their apartment to crash.
Take a look at the Same Sky tour on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/davidmessier/videos/1103838682984/