THE HEARTLAND

So after a couple days of international travel we began a weekend trek through the heartland. We began in Wichita, KS. We packed about 1250 into the Cotillion on a Thursday night. It was a very cool room, it reminded me very much of The Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, IA where we've played a couple times. It's been there for over 50 years and just has history built into the rafters. This was a good shot our keyboard player, Chris Kline, took from the stage...


We went from Wichita to Columbia, MO for a show at the Blue Note that we'd sold out in advance. Columbia is such a cool little college town. They've got great thrift stores up and down the strip and we had some phenomenal food while we were there. We had Italian for lunch from a place called Bambinos and then ordered from the Jamican Jerk Hut for dinner. We had a buffet of jerk chicken, curried shrimp and brown stew chicken. All of it was great. Despite being a production nightmare, the show went really well. The folks ate it up. We've got an opening act named Adam Hood out with us playing solo acoustic and riding with us and he did a great job in Columbia, the crowd really dug him. After the show we all went to a little bar called Mojo's, which Alex told the entire crowd we would. It was good getting to hang with everyone for a few minutes in a non-work environment. I headed back to the bus pretty quickly and got a great nights sleep.

On Saturday we rolled into Des Moines, IA to the Val Air Ballroom. It's probably a club we'll never play again. The owner was this guido looking Tony Soprano assmuncher and the club had about as much ability to rig as my bathroom. We ended up with 1000 people which wasn't bad considering we got no radio support for the show.

Tomorrow (Sunday) we drop Adam at the OKC airport and roll into ML's neck of the woods. We're going for a day off at her and Blake's places and plan a lazy day of eating BBA and fishing and sitting around. I'm up for it after the busy couple weeks we've had.