Day 3 – So it begins….

So I wake up in a hotel room 2 dudes short of our normal 6 pack.  I went to the room pretty drunk the night before - and for lack of a better term - I didn’t have all of my wits about me when we stopped for the night.  So I find out that Mike and Ed stayed in the truck.  Ed snores like a 57 Chevy without a muffler so I don’t think Mike got too much sleep.  That’s ok though because one of the cool things about being in a vehicle with 6 other dudes is that you start to learn a lot of weird little things about each other, and we all got ‘em.

So Mike finds a rock to start his morning.  He crane kicks flawlessly for like twenty minutes followed by some light sprints.  He’s on his game.  I find some Advil (I am not on my game).  What the fuck did we drink last night?  Anyway, no time for a game of “what happened between 11pm and 1am, and where is my other shoe?”.  We’ll try that over lunch.  We gotta get our shit together and get off to the bay.  We have about 4 hours till we have to load in at the Ultra Vice.  San Francisco here we come...

I think that San Francisco is one of the coolest places I’ve seen.  It smells like ocean.  Or maybe that’s the body spray I put on before we left…nope.  Ocean baby.  All Ocean.  Ed wheels us through town like he’s on a rail.  Genius maneuvers.  We have no idea where we’re going, but Ed is manning the SUV and Trailer like it’s a mini cooper on a football field.  There’s no car even half of our size in town and they all look at us with disbelief as they pass.  

We finally hit the Golden Gate Bridge and then off to China Town for some lunch.  China Town was crazy. They have whole skinned chickens just hanging in the window staring out with dead eyes.  We hit a Dim Sum buffet and tried some new things.  Awesome sesame balls, dumplings, rice wraps and a bunch of various mysteries only an old lady and God know about.  Drew comes out on the wrong side of victory, but everyone else seems ok a few hours later.  Manny stares in amusement from behind the eyes of not interested.

Showtime.  We make it to the Vice Ultra Lounge in plenty of time and load in.  We meet Guttermouth for the first time.  Nice guys.  Load on stage, Drew plugs in his bass head to the back of his speaker cab.  Connector goes right through the back.  Shit.  Didn’t see that one coming.  Did I mention Guttermouth are using the same gear?? We unscrew the face and grab the cord.  Cord unplugs the speaker.  Strike two.  We take out the speaker and reattach the cord.  Screw the speaker back in (p.s speaker has 8 long screws and we have one silly borrowed screwdriver to try and take these out) and the motherfucking speaker cord doesn’t reach back through the cabinet.  Twenty minutes of stringing together curses and unscrewing and rescrewing in the speaker and we’re back in business.  Drew’s cab held together by pink duct tape. 

Show goes good but we only get off 8 songs because we’re behind schedule.  Mike gets out “two days of sitting in an SUV with six other dudes-worth” of aggression and ends the set by running full speed and leaping off of the top speaker like an Olympic long jump landing inches away from the crowd.  Remember that scene in Back to The Future when Marty plays Johnny Be Good and the crowd looks bewildered afterwards?...it was kind of like that.  Strangely though, we had a lot of people come up afterwards totally psyched and buying merch.  Side note, Guttermouth had a similar response.  Mark actually offered someone double their money back if they left right there.  They decided to stay though.  Ah the life in punk rock…