We're home at last. The French Quarter West Coast tour 2008 has ended, and while our adventures were many, I still relish in the comfort of my own mattress and clean laundry.
The final leg of the tour started in Seattle as we gradually headed south for home. We arrived in the coffee capital on a rainy afternoon, if you can believe it. It was quite a relief knowing there was a coffee joint with ample Wi-Fi connectivity on every corner.
The residents of the house we played at were college students, not artists or punks, who snuck a few hours with their medical textbooks before the show kicked off. The audience in their basement, also consisting of students taking a breather from studying, was one of the most rapt and enthusiastic we'd seen. It's a real testament to both the quality and accessibility of Stephen's music that such diverse people throughout the tour were giving him props after our sets.
This was proven tenfold by our next show in Rexburg, Idaho. The show took place in the lounge of a girls-only dorm at Brigham Young University. Now, Stephen and I went to high school with a lot of LDS members and had no serious qualms about playing for a Mormon crowd. We simply had a few concerns about how the show would turn out: Will there only be girls present? Will they ask us to edit Stephen's lyrics? Will those two bored-looking chaperones give us the boot for smoking outside?
Essentially, the only things different about the Mormon crowd were that they were vehement in helping us load in our gear and giggled whenever Stephen swore. Both boys and girls were present and generous. The chaperones looked bored as ever during our set. And it was sub-fucking-zero outside, with deadly ice on every surface, proving nicotine consumption impossible.
We made a quick enemy with snow on this tour. Going down to Salt Lake City was like traversing the ice planet Hoth. As the owner of our tour vessel, I had to throw down 30 much-needed dollars for tire chains. Snow totally almost killed us all — meaning Stephen spun out the car at about 15 mph on an empty freeway. We could not sled, ski, skeleton or toboggan. We could only sit, sit in helpless reverence to the mercy of the white devil. Fuck snow. It's stupid.
We made it to Salt Lake City alive, barely. We calmed our nerves with crooked naps and a Christian Bale-era Batman flick.
Later that night, we were to play an in-store gig at Slowtrain Records. The show was as clean and slow-moving as the mountain air outside. A couple dozen cool kids leaned against the CD racks and watched us jam in the country/blues section. It was a nice finale.
We took off in the morning and got back to Tempe right at midnight. After 4000 miles, hundreds of smokes and gallons of Mountain Dew, our final budget had reached a grand total of $4. Don't be fooled; most do-it-yourself tours are financial disasters. Breaking even is a roaring success. We took those four greenbacks straight to the liquor store.
As I got ready to finally drive home, a delirious Stephen looked up at me from his homecoming 40 ounces and said, "What did we just do?"
Reach the reporter at: chase.kamp@asu.edu.
