Archive Sunday #36

From San Francisco, we made the short trip up north to Petaluma. We loaded everything to this nonprofit community building/venue called the Phoenix Theater. It was a really cool space that I think originally started out as an opera house, but now focused on providing an art space and resources for young adults. Both sides of the concrete floor were lined with quarter pipes and rails, so it could serve as an indoor skate-park during the day. Luckily the Naked Giants brought a skateboard along in their van to help move heavy amps, so they got the chance to give it a spin while we were setting up. I remember John had to isolate a couple of malfunctioning speakers in the massive PA during soundcheck, but once we unplugged those it was sounding great.

Next we drove up to Andrew's hometown of Eugene, Oregon to play a neat little venue called the Wow Hall. We usually try to hit up one of his old hangouts like Burrito Boy or Tracktown Pizza for lunch when we're there, but I have no idea which one we tried this time. When we got there, the production team was still upset from working the Yelawolf show the night before. I think the singer got super drunk and destroyed one of their monitors, so they took the time to try to fix it. I'm pretty sure this was the venue where we worked out "This must be the place" with the Naked Giants during soundcheck. John was using the song at the time to ring out the PA and sometimes the Naked Giants would do a rendition for their soundcheck too. Naturally Will said hey we should cover this tonight. So we worked on a version with all of us playing together and threw it in at the end of the set along with another Talking Heads song "Psycho Killer."  I guess it was kinda the last day of this tour as we were going our separate ways from there, so it was a good way to cap things off. The crowd seemed to love it, so we agreed to try it out again.

A few days later we made our way down to Portland, Oregon to do a short run of nearby shows with the Portland band the Domestics. We had played here before as an opening slot, but it was nice to come back with some extra conveniences like a full sound-check and more space to move around on stage. We had the chance to meet up with a couple of Andrew's old friends that were in town, and I remember chatting a bit while running the merch table once doors had opened. The show was super fun, and I was totally swamped selling merch later that night.

Our last show of the year was at home in Seattle at the Neptune Theater. We wanted to do something special, so we hit up the Naked Giants to see if they were available even though they weren't booked to play the show. Luckily they were still in town, and they were totally down to come down and play the Talking Heads cover with us. It was a great fit with Henry on aux percussion and Grant and Gianni on layered guitars to add to the wall of sound. It sounded even better than the first time, and luckily the venue recorded the audio from the show. It was such a treat hearing the live version of the song on KEXP a few weeks later!