Dallas Blog

Hal Samples

Telegraph Canyon, yucking it up.

Wednesday:

Playing in a band can feel like going to summer camp with your friends week after week. Our first trip to SXSW is no exception.

I'm sure someone did us a favor, or there was a clerical error that lead to us being here, but we didn't ask any questions.

Packed to the gills with enough video games, toy helicopters and junk food to ensure a good time no matter what, we set out for Austin on Wednesday morning. We arrived to find beautiful weather and tons of traffic. Fun always seems to start with no fun at all.

It could have been worse, though, and we knew it. We recently had our van totaled by a drunk driver, so we replaced it with a later model RV. The old van would overheat if you turned the AC on, so sitting in traffic in our surrogate living room was pretty much the shit.

We got set up and settled into the $10-a-night RV slot on Barton Springs Road and headed downtown to gather our wrist bands, tote bags, and free energy drinks full of enough sugar to make your sweaty ass feel like you need a whiskey drink to start turning this thing around. I spent most of Wednesday night show-hopping and running into old friends. A few unmemorable shows led to a quick cab ride back to the RV for some much needed rest.

[Last week, we asked a few bands to check in with us from time to time over the course of the week to tell us about their SXSW experiences. Now, with the fest over, those diatribes are starting to show. Here's The O's' take on SXSW...]

Steve Visneau

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Dear O's Journal,

It's 10:30 AM. For fuck's sake, John's running late again. I swear, he never is on time. He said we'd leave at 10:00. Geez. SXSW: Can we survive? It seems unlikely. If we can make it through without visible scars, a hospital bill, an injury sustained while saying, "Hey everybody! Watch this!," random bruises, dropping an entire pizza, sleeping, having people literally avoid me by walking a safe distance away by making a large circle, listen to "Stairway to Heaven" eight times (nearly in a row), get told to put my shirt back on (but what they really mean is put your dingle back into your boxers)... If we can make it through without those things happening, then maybe we will be OK...

Oh wait, what? We're going to promote; to work? Huh. Hmm. Stuff.

[Earlier this week, we asked a few bands to check in with us from time to time over the course of the week to tell us about their SXSW experiences. First up, Damaged Good$' Coool Dundee and Trak Bully, with DJ Prince William in tow, tell us how their week got started.]

Well hell...

Let us start off by saying that everyone has to get in the long-ass registration line like every other human artist on the planet!!!! Got here and was like, "Jeez, this must be the judgement day line!!!!!

We were like, "Times like this is when we need a name like Prince or somebody!" However, SXSW probably would have made his ass wait in that line as well.

People we didn't think we would see in the line that we saw: DJ Klever, U-N-I, DJ Craze, Blackjacks just to name a few.

Moving on, our first show was at a spot called Red 7. Maxtundra had just got done doing his gangsta set and everyone just left... and that place was packed...

But, thanks to our prayers to the SXSW gods, people came out of nowhere. Somewhat small at first but, not even half-way through our set, we had an army wild'n out with us!!!!!

Both of our necks still hurt from that party. And I've never seen Prince William sweat so hard...

A wiser Mount Righteous. (Adam Neese)

Mount Righteous actually got home last Wednesday from its tour. But through email complications, this final post has been unfortunately delayed. Either way, here it is: Mount Righteous' final tour blog post. Enjoy.

After spending most of the morning and afternoon at the house in Kansas City, (and being made a huge breakfast by an amazingly generous aunt), we got back on the road for Wichita. There was a little more room in the van than usual because Lee and Casey rode with two of our superfans who had driven up from Denton to see our Kansas City and Wichita shows.

Driving through rural Kansas, we were all thinking about how the night’s show would be the last of the tour.

Abilene, Lubbock, Santa Fe and Phoenix seemed distant memories even though they had been less than two weeks prior. Now, we were rolling through the Midwest, facing the abrupt interruption of all the good times we’d been having traveling together and playing music every night.

After half an hour of sitting in the van after our show at El Cid, most of the band was fast asleep, leaving Kendall and me to the driving and navigation as we left Los Angeles for Denver.

With the aid of some sleep-preventing pharmaceuticals, we took turns driving all through the night until we reached south-central Utah, where we handed the keys to Adam and Mason for the daytime shift.

Driving over some high elevation passes, we ran into heavy sleet in Utah and wet snow on the east end of the Eisenhower tunnel in Colorado. As we descended into Denver, the temperature warmed a bit, but it remained rainy and overcast.

When morning came in L.A., we began to get out of bed to find the house littered with the remnants of the night’s party. Stepping over bodies, beer cans and strewn instruments, a few members of the band gathered their stuff and headed up to Malibu where Lee has family. They planned on spending the day by the beach and taking it easy before our final show in California that night, but the rest of us decided to stay behind and spend some time with our friend Mike Shapiro.

We walked down to Sunset Boulevard and found a vegan restaurant where we got some lunch. Continuing down the road toward Hollywood, we came upon the painted wall where Eliot Smith’s album cover for Figure 8 was shot, and took a moment to snap a couple of photos before walking to Los Feliz where we saw a movie.

Anticipating the 17-hour drive to Denver that we were in for that night and the next day, we were happy to relax a little and conserve our energy. We’d played every night of the tour, and several days with two shows, and had been traveling at a pretty rapid pace. Just over the halfway point of the tour, the fatigue of being in a traveling band began to catch up to us, and it was really nice to have a day where we could have some quiet time and catch up on some rest.

The city of South Pasadena has passed an ordinance that prohibits smoking cigarettes in any public place--including sidewalks, street corners and parking lots.

Mount Righteous, aghast, became aware of this reality as we pulled into the town late Thursday night. This was after we left Long Beach and went to a bar in Echo Park for a while where we met up with a friend of a friend who was letting us stay at his place in South Pas.

After regrouping in Los Angeles in the morning, the band and our good friend Mike Shapiro of Lemon Sun got in the van and headed south to Irvine, California, where we were scheduled to play in the middle of the UC Irvine campus.

As is typical of the roads in Southern California, it took us an hour and a half to travel the 35 miles to Irvine. But once we arrived, we hauled our gear into the university center and set up on an outdoor stage across from a student center and food court. UC schools are still in session--this is their finals week--and the campus was busy with activity. We began to play to a crowd that had accumulated to see what was going on. It didn’t take long for others to be drawn in as they passed by.

The UC students were great to us, many of them dancing and clapping along. It felt like they were probably seizing the opportunity to have some fun and take a break from finals. And how convenient that we were right there to provide some relief in between classes.

The band somehow achieved our goal of leaving Tucson by 10 a.m., and we headed back through Phoenix and west on I-10 for Los Angeles.

The drive took us through the extreme desolation of the Arizona and California desert, finally relenting as we began to approach L.A. Though, as it happens, the approach to L.A. lasts for about 100 miles and we felt like we were almost there for an hour and a half.

Luckily, the traffic was far less severe than it could have been and we got held up only a few minutes in downtown before making it to the venue in the Silverlake area.

Note: Technical difficulties meant we never got Mount Righteous' Dispatch yesterday. We'll make that up now, posting the last two days of Mount Righteous updates in one post.

The morning after our show in Santa Fe was spent at a music shop browsing through trombones. With the hopes that the police or one of our friends in Lubbock would eventually turn up our stolen horn, Allison bought a nice Yamaha trigger trombone that we immediately put in the trailer. Then we headed west for Phoenix.

Anticipating a drive of seven hours or more, we struggled to keep good time and stay on the road. As we passed through New Mexico and eastern Arizona, it was hard to sit and watch the gorgeous landscape pass by from behind a window.

At our show in Santa Fe, a couple of symptoms of having brand new members manifested during our performance: The effect was minimal, but we felt we could use a short time together to quickly run through the set. But, by the time we pulled into the outskirts of Phoenix, there was very little time left before we had to be at the venue.

We didn’t want to blow the surprise of our show and practice in front of our audience, so we took an exit and set up in a dusty vacant lot. Aside from a few honks from the occasional passing motorist, we had an undisturbed and productive rehearsal under the setting Arizona sun with mountains all around us. Squinting our eyes against the dust, we ran a few songs and loaded up again.