adrienne's Tour Diary

The packed BART train I took in the late afternoon on my way home didn't have its air conditioning on. A tall man in a long-sleeved black shirt and slacks, wearing his long grey hair in a thin ponytail, moved through what little space there was between the sweaty, uncomfortable people and pushed the button for the driver intercom at the front of the car. He complained of the heat, said he'd felt the air come on and then shut off. He wanted to know why the system worked for only a brief interval.
The menu at the Cafe du Nord has changed since I was last there. I got the sirloin kebabs in place of the ahi, no longer an option. We sound checked "Accelerator" and then, when Chris G. wasn't looking, Eric and I decorated Chris's birthday cake and lit the candles around the strawberries. Chris blew out all the candles at once and we got our sugar fix before the show began. Last March 11th we were in Phoenix and a ska band named Spaz Kitty sang happy birthday to Chris, but Dan and I missed it because we were across the street at a 7-Eleven eating microwaved burritos in the parking lot.
Sometime around 7 pm I realized that I'd left Chris's keyboard/bells stand propping open the door to our studio in West Oakland. Luckily, Seksu Roba let us borrow theirs. This is the second keyboard stand we've lost in West Oakland, just outside the studio. Our set started out fine, but in the middle of the third song Chris's bass pedal broke. He stood to continue playing the drums without it, find the beat elsewhere. Jim, the trusty sound engineer, fixed the pedal with some plastic ties, but then, during the next song, Chris's crash cymbal stand broke in two and the bass pedal fell apart again. He threw the cymbal over towards Chris G. and me. We finished "In the Dark," but without a bass pedal and cymbal the set was over. None of the other groups had drum hardware. We apologize for the brevity. Chris is going shopping for new gear on Tuesday. The system only worked for a brief interval.