Tour Diary Part 1

Good morning from Medford Oregon! our bus is parked outside of a hotel after an overnight drive from San Francisco. I think I'll do these as "Parts" as opposed to days. Days seem to get confusing for me!

Last night was our first show of the tour but it actually kicked off the night before as we loaded up the bus at JPs and drove up from LA, narrowly avoiding the 5-5 closure due to yet another fire north of the city!

First nights on the bus are hard. I'm in the back which is a little like being in the back of a collar coaster. I don't think we were but it felt like we were making much of the journey on some dirt roads. Suffice to say, i didn't get much sleep and spent much of the day in a stress daze, trying to collate all i had to remember for this new set... The SF show would be a unique one, as Kyle Mooney had to bail at the last minute (he's still on for Portland, Seattle and Vancouver friends!) So Doug came up with us and I added my "no more bullshit" stand up guy as an opener to try and fill Kyle's absence.

The club, Bimbo's 365 is located right in the middle of North Beach, just about the nicest little stretch of the city in my opinion. Very walkable, lots of shops and Italian restaurants. Ellie and I walked over to City Lights Bookstore and I picked up a short book of essays from Zadie Smith called Intimation, then we had a fantastic lunch at Mario's Bohemian Cigar Store Cafe! High high marks for their meatball sandwich.

I cobbled together some truly terrible for you (but delicious pun-centric jokes) and then did a few longer chunks I had did last year, but not in San Franciso... It was fun to dip back into that guy, but I'm glad I'm not doing him every night. It was just too hard on my voice.

Doug slayed. And off the stager immediately warmed himself to the band. Who doesn't love Doug?

Remarkably the Very Good Band set went off without any major fuckups... We're playing a lot of the new record and often it takes me a few shows to lock into the lyrics again, but somehow I stuck the landing on nearly all of them. The sound was good but a little dead on stage and I had a bit of a hard time "getting into it" - and often felt like we were just playing for ourselves. Afterwards the house sound guy said "we hear that from a lot of bands"

The Bay Area is Ellie's backyard, so her family came out and I finally got to meet her folks, who i've said hello to many times on Facetime. They seemed to LOVE the show! Her brother got us all donuts from... Bob's Donuts. And folks... you know how I don't like hyperbole.... these were very much the best donuts I've ever had. WOW.

There were a lot of funny off the cuff moments that came with a brand new show as I play around with the audience and the band... I hope some of them stay in the show for good and I can't wait for you to see what we cooked up.

I had a restful(er) night last night and feel much better today. We park here for the day and much of the night before heading up to Portland... weird to have a day off after only one show, but probably a good thing, as just getting this one up took a lot of energy and we'll use today to dial in some stuff.

The night before, tossing in my bunk my thoughts were "oh no, what have I gotten myself into... but now this morning I'm thinking Happy to be back on the road and can't wait to see you all!

More soon! P&L T