Sad news, dear readers: We have entered the final week of the tour! I agree! It’s just flown by! Today is Monday, and we’re heading to Kalamazoo, MI, a filler gig if there ever was one. Jeff is excited as we pass through Gary, Indiana, as he loves the look of all the industrial plants and refineries. The ugliness of all the twisted, hissing metal really speaks to him and Gary (the city, not the guitarist) is the midwest epicenter of this kind of thing.
Soon, though, we pass into the more bucolic State of Michigan and we hug the shoreline of their Great Lake for a while. It’s a short drive to K’zoo and we notice in the atlas that the gig is close to Battle Creek, the home of GHS, our personal brand of guitar strings. We have Rod call the factory and tell them that we are a band full of GHS customers, out touring in support of our popular major-label album and that we’ll be in the neighborhood and would love a tour if they have the time. They happily invite us to visit and we figure, while we are there, we might as well angle for an endorsement.
We get the nickel tour and then ask the guide who do we speak to about GHS endorsing the band? He introduces us to an artist relations guy and we give him our spiel. He asks for a CD and tells us that he’ll be in touch. We never did hear back from them but he did give us each a cool GHS Boomers T-shirt that we all wanted to wear that night at the gig. Jeff had skipped the tour, opting for a nap in the RV since they didn’t have anything that he could use. We promise him we’ll tour the Pro-Mark factory if we stumble across it.
We’ve never been to Kalamazoo before, although we all enjoyed the Glenn Miller song, but our friends in Christmas had told us about a very cool guy they’d met at their gig there last winter, a Mr. Joseph Puleo. Michael had encouraged him to go to our show and we put him on the guest list. Joe was indeed a prince of a fellow, and it wasn’t long before he had moved to Providence and started working with bands on tour. He eventually caught on with Yo La Tengo as their tour manager and, chances are, if you’ve ever bought merch from them at a show, Joe was the one who shortchanged you.
I can’t remember the name of the club there or anything about the show, but please feel free to share if you were there. Tomorrow: Ann Arbor, cuz you definitely don’t want to play in Detroit where all the people are.
I couldn’t resist: Check out Cesar Romero and Jackie Gleason in this clip. Oh, and the Nicholas Brothers!
Calculating Route... 