So the week in Texas passed more quickly than I expected it to. I think a large part of that was because SBS (to give it its proper acronym) was such a blur of activity that time flew there.
At the Dallas show we encountered our first torrential downpour just after we loaded-in. The sky before the storm was green, it's something I've never seen before. It was a biblical amount of rain, which is fitting for this tour. On this tour since January we've / they've endured fires (x 2), stabbed wheels, thefts, a collision with a runaway villain, and now floods ( in Houston the rain was so heavy the slide-out lounge flooded - a full-on water everywhere flood, not just a drip here and there). I think we're working our way through the ten plagues of Egypt which means, by my reckoning, we've got at least Lice, Rivers of Blood and Unhealable Boils to look forward to.
Erm, actually, I might have two of those covered already.
Under the weight of the approaching storm Josh and Marc played a little wiffle ball in an abandoned lot, laughing in the face of an angry god with their underarm serves and wild, effete swings. They reminded me of a young Hall & Oates playing on the streets of Philly, honing their harmonising chops, before they were swept up up in the yacht rock phenomenom. Just two kids, believing in a dream, hanging out with poor black children and stealing their music, cutting off its balls, and selling it to white people. Hall and Oates that is, not Josh and Marc; Josh and Marc were just bored.
Or maybe I read the Hall & Oates bio' incorrectly?
The venue where we played in Dallas is about to be converted into a Starbucks. It's the first time I think I can say without reservation that it is definitely an improvement. People get very sentimental about all these nasty old club venues, I suspect because they don't know any better. I guess I'm not the sentimental type as I think it would be better to burn them all down and to replace them with a parking lot or a Pottery Barn. Not that I like Pottery Barn per se, but you get my point. Why a venue that caters to live music has to smell of piss and beer and have no facilities (even for a live gig, a flat, safe, workable stage would be nice sometimes, as would a PA system that wasn't wank or a local tech who didn't know everything because he was once a stagehand at a Cradle of Filth gig and still has the sticky pass to prove it) is beyond me. Or rather, it's not (no one invests in the venues and the audience accepts them), but why anyone gets attached to these kinds of toilets I cannot imagine. Maybe these are the Unhealable Boils we're supposed to suffer on this tour (the other ones, not the ones I alluded to above....)? But Yay!- a Deep Ellum Starbucks! Finally something to look forward to in Dallas, besides having a picnic where a president was assassinated through the face in front of his wife.
When I woke up in Houston our bus was parked at the back of the venue. The venue was a converted box / warehouse on the edge of Chinatown. It was an Unhealable Boil. There was no one on the streets except beggars. Across the street was the modeling agency, pictured below. I didn't realise that there was such a demand for a 24/7 modeling agency in Houston. Are people there always putting on surprise catwalk shows round the clock and need models? I am confused and not a little cheered. Who doesn't like a fashion show? Lots of pretty girls walking up and down like giraffes with broken pelvises in clothes.... To think that one could pop up at any moment excited me, even though it didn't happen. Go models of Houston! Go with your crazy surprise Fashion Shows!
The people we met in Houston were very nice though. Except the taxi drivers, who were all wankers or weird. I've traveled in taxis all over the world and these were the worst I've ever encountered. Still, what do I care? They're driving taxis in Houston and I'm....oh yeah. I'm on a bus in Tennessee. That'll show them, won't it?
* Except for South By Southwest, of course.
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