Working for the Weekend: Part 1. London

This last week was a go go go non stopper. 5 shows in 5 days, which is standard for the regular working folk but our first stint non stop rock this tour. i made the comparison to corey the other day that this week kind of felt like a volleyball tournament i played in when i was in grade 10. we'd started this tournament off by beating the best team in the province, penticton ( a group of genetically engineered youth whose minimum height was that of my own), and then went on to lose every other game in the round robin that weekend.

In this comparison, the steroid pumped brute was the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern, and every other loss was a rapid fire of southern ontarian cities: London, Guelph, Sarnia and Josh's hometown of Windsor.

You'll have to excuse what may seem like my constant negativity. Looking back at Northern Ontario, there was a great amount of success and reward in the shows we played. The same can definitely be said about our last 4 of 5 shows. Touring for me is a series of massive ups and downs. The highs are super high and the lows are super low. It seems that i'm confronted in each show with either success or failure.

The Horseshoe in toronto was, of course, a massive success. Two sets of hands were not enough to handle the mad rush of people who approached our merch table. Having started off on a Tuesday, which is of course not really a night that people go out, with such good attendance, i got my hopes up, figuring this week would be amazing.

Getting my hopes up seems to be one of my biggest enemies, however. London was fine. The venue treated us astoundingly well. The pub's guests all loved us. It's just that despite all of their efforts to promote the show, including posters and handbills on every table and even our biography by the entrance, I wanted more people there. But that's me. Want want want, and never get enough.

London was the first night that we would share the stage with our good friends from Bedroom Biography (www.myspace.com/leightonbain). Bedroom’s frontman Leighton is a long time good friend of the band. At our first show Leighton would start a tour tradition of the onstage hug. Needing to leave suddenly near the end of our set, Leighton walked up to me in the middle of a guitar solo in our new track Is it Fate and gave me a hug. The guys all insisted on giving him a hard time, and Leighton and his sidekick Dave insisted on continuing the tradition at every subsequent show in Southern Ontario.

Now there's usually one ‘crazy’ who ends up making our night. they're usually into the sauce and sometimes a bit too touchy feely. in london it was steve. Steve was the anti heckler. if he would have been booing, trash talking, or making Pearl Jam requests he would have been a heckler, but Steve was more into the loud obnoxious compliments from across the bar. On Wednesday Steve worshiped the Painted Birds. Our crowning moment was when he told us that our CD would be the soundtrack to his family’s bonfire that weekend. I hope they roasted a pig on a stick and fired their family guns into the air. I’ve always wished that such activities would take place to our music.

We rested our heads at an old roommates house, and got ready for day 3 of the work week, guelph.

Dom