We had a slow start to the day and inched our way East to Philadelphia. We popped into the Noddinghead Brewery, which was a site most enjoyed by Patrick and Travis on a previous visit to Philly. We got some food there and chilled out for a little while before wandering a bit and stopping into a few stores. I had to buy a car charger for my phone and they upsold me and convinced me to get the car charger with the wall prongs built in. We hit the Buffalo Exchange, a thrift store that I had visited in many of its California locations recently. Some boots were purchased. No one was injured.
Eventually, we rolled on down to The Fire, pretty early, but we figured we’d relax a bit. They had a ping pong table. We managed to get two balls and the games began. Matt stepped on one ball by mistake breaking it. I was up against Travis, playing ping pong for the first time in about 15 years. I was terrible. The score was something like 7 to 1 (not in my favor) when I went for a slam and ended up hitting the ball onto the stage where it rolled into a back corner room on the side of the stage, hit the wall, and rolled under the stage, probably never to be seen again. Ping pong was over. We went upstairs to the green room, which was actually a green apartment. We played a little Connect Four, which I also haven’t played in many years, but have better maintained my skills at. The space had an old bed, a weird world-map carpet, and a gold record from RUN DMC (see photos for some poses with it).
The venue wasn’t bad and we were excited to be playing with three local bands. We expected a decent turnout ourselves for the small room and figured with three other bands, we were golden in terms of filling the space. Well, it turns out that the sum of attendees that the three bands brought was one – the 2nd band’s drummer’s father. As if this wasn’t bad enough, despite our attendance for all of the sets, the first band didn’t stay at all for our set and the 2nd band left halfway through. It’s just bad band etiquette, which we have experienced at almost every one of our non-SXSW shows this tour. Someone needs to start teaching bands this stuff. The venues need to refuse to rebook bands that draw zero and especially those that don’t stick around after drawing zero. Bad, bad form.
We brought a decent group of people and had fun playing anyway. Former Bostonite Jackie (and her crew) were kind enough to give us a place to stay, so we headed on over and more or less collapsed from the accumulating exhaustion.
NYC tomorrow is the last day!