The rain finally caught up with us in the morning. Again, our attempts to get an early start were thwarted and we woke up 20 minutes before checkout. The drive to Philly is one of the longer ones of the trip, a little over five hours. Five hours of looking at Pennsylvania mountains. When it comes to food, this last part of the tour has been a complete disaster. I cracked again and succumbed to Roy Rogers. It was as gross as it was satisfying (very), but at least it's one notch higher than McDonald's due to the Fixin's Bar.

Once we got into Philly we had the strange compulsion to turn off the music and listen to NPR. Figured we should keep up with the news and such. We didn't miss a hell of a lot; economy's still shit, Bush still doesn't know his ass from his elbow, and wackos are still getting airtime. There was an interview with Bill Maher later in the evening about his new movie Religilous, which coincides nicely with the Christopher Hitchens book I'm reading God Is Not Great. Some people might balk at the thought of reading it, but I'm a history buff and that book is chock full of it. If you think the book may offend you, I'd recommend you challenge yourself.

Anyway...

We're staying with our friend Jaime (who interviewed us for WDBK... but you'd know that if you saw our tour movie). She had pizza and everything waiting for us (take THAT Roy Rogers!). Had an interesting conversation with her mom and stepdad about the unfortunate decline of MTV. Yes, they do play music videos; no, I don't want to have to stay up till 5:00am to watch 20 minutes of videos— and shitty ones, at that.

Once again, the club was subject to the reverse Murphy's Law theory. Dr. Watson's has three levels, with the top two dedicated to bands. We didn't get a soundcheck and the line check was pretty quick. The soundguy totally knew what he was doing, though. None of us could really hear ourselves onstage, save for Ross' drums and bass; normally, that sort of thing makes for a bad show, but for some reason it felt really good. There was a pretty good crowd out there that was really digging us. I really like Philly.

We spent the rest of the evening having a good time at the club with Jaime and her friend Brian. We got out of there around 1am and headed back to Jersey to crash. A few of us were pretty hungry, so we decided on Taco Hell (ah, the food choices get worse and worse). When we pulled up to the window after Jaime's car, the dude handed us the food and just said "She paid for you ass. Something about love." We were laughing about that one for a few hours. Days. We bullshit for a couple of hours back at Casa de Jaime before crashing. I was hoping to play some Wii, but I was too tired.

Yea, we had fun.

Next: A day in the studio at WTSR.

Cheers,
Henry

Labels: tourdiary