Tour Beginnings: Kelowna

October 16th we headed to our jam space in gas town to load the van and head to our first gig in kelowna. we don't have the funds yet to buy our own van so we have been borrowing from our friend matt mc'd of the local act shukov, or renting for shows when we have to. for our last tour it was quite the task finding a van that could fit every one and everything that was still economically feasible. we ended up renting a mini van and using my sisters car. for this tour we definitely had to cut down on gas prices, we also needed all four of us inside one van bonding and getting used to each others' smell and/or idiosyncrasies .

my good friend Zach from lotus child had given me a tip that we could rent a certain "grand caravan" that could fit all of our gear in it, as he and his boys had done a similar tour in the same vehicle. feeling over confident about his suggestion I rented said 'grand caravan' and tried our luck. needless to say after about 20 minutes of shifting things around and looking at about 25 cubic feet of equipment and about 15 cubic feet of space, we started pitching things we didn't need.
pedal board, gone, 2nd lap top, chucked, josh and shawn could share. Back up bass, left behind. Shawn's suggested that we share his duffel bag for our clothes as that would cut 3 bags down into 1. along with half of my shirts, i decided to toss my school books as well.
It took us about half an hour to design a configuration that would fit all of our essential gear and merchandise. it wasn't comfortable but it worked. we had mountains of stuff in between the left and right hand side of the vehicle which on a rough corner would shift and fall on the person who was sleeping. but again, just more fun to be had.

we arrived in kelowna with time to spare. we were playing a good venue downtown, close to the water called doc willoughby's. i came to the realization at this first venue that as a touring musician you are paid in about 4 different currencies. one is of course the door money, which from my experience they always seem the most reluctant to give you. the other three are accomodation, which any touring artist normally needs unless they have friends in the area, and lastly food and beer. beer is great, though i kind of hate how they've established it as a method of payment. for one, and i know this sounds a bit whiny, i hate how it perpetuates the stereotype that we're all here to play a show get drunk and party etc. if anything, the painted birds are horrible at this. ok that was an outright lie, but there will never be any mud shark stories about us, and i'm not too interested in snorting cocaine off of strippers as every one assumes.
after about four shows i don't want any beer, i'd rather not even be in a bar, and we'd rather just take some money instead, but, alas they won't give us that.

kelowna managed to do a 360 from our last experiences there this summer. kelowna was packed last time, so much so that i had friends who were waiting to get in who missed the whole show because the bar was at capacity. you'd think this would be great, but i felt the show was lost in confusion. i think we successfully connected with 2 or 3 people, one of which was some guy who told us he wanted to put our music on his "ski-do" video, and wanted a free CD because of it. a good ploy i felt. a packed house is close to always great, but on this occasion we were battling with a crowd who was way louder than we were. mcnorton, however, did tell me after the show that he thought it was our best show ever, so maybe i had just missed something.

kelowna this time was a practically empty room. (what could we expect for a tuesday night in the fall?) by the time we started the crowd had filled out to about 30 or 40 people, and they were all ears. from start to finish we played our set to a virtually silent audience. they greeted the end of our set with cheers for an encore, and a last call bell, that really confused me as it was still before midnight. the bar tender, however, assured me he was just trying to make more noise.

we loaded out and went to our hotel across the street. perhaps one of my favourite shows of the tour, mainly because i was so surprised at how good it went. the next morning we were off to kamloops, where more adventure awaited us...