20th
So as I continue this walk down old concert poster lane, I am going to slow down even more. When I found all these posters to share online, I was blazing through them. And per advice from my friend John Frusciante I realized I should not blow my load so quick. I am pretty sure he was talking about spreading them out and not killing myself posting them all quickly, and give myself possibly weeks of content. He also might have been talking about something else completely. But Ill go with the first option.
So we shall see how many I post a day. I have a bunch more. Some I can remember a fair amount about. Some I have hardly any recollection. The fun of the sieve that is my brain. When I can I’ll go a bit more in depth. Some will just be a line here or there. I CAN DO WHATEVER I WANT!!!!!!!! (im not convinced anyone reads these anyways so really it might just be for me to force myself to remember)
So this is a poster for our second show of the High On Fire tour, at the EL Ray theatre. Like I wrote in a previous post, we had flown in the night before into LA and had to do the whole pick up the van(with a Playstation in it that was occupied 75% of the time by one Joe Stickney) and our equipment/merch that we had shipped out to California (i am still amazed by the amount of steps that Jay Green and I had to figure out to make this tour happen and I am also amazed that we pulled it all off smashingly. I was very certain our equipment was going to be lost somewhere and I had said a final goodbye to my Ampeg SVT in New York. But I still get Happy Holiday emails from that shipping company so apparently it worked. HOORAY US!).
After driving to San Diego for our first show, we drove back to LA to crash at my friend Kevin Nibleys house, that he let us stay in even though he was pulling an all nighter at an editing job. At Kevin’s, our guitarist Josh tried to take a drink from Kevin’s sink and immediately threw up(the first of many throw ups on this tour so I am still not sure if I can blame it on the LA water or Josh’s partying abilities) and then go sleep in the van which we had to park on the street. AKA my worst nightmare on tour. But we had to get some rest because we were playing on some FUSE tv show called “The Daily Habit” where we had to play 2 songs in a half pipe at 8 am the next day. Not awkward at all. It went surprisingly well for the fact that as we drove to the FUSE studio in LA traffic, we had to slow down the van because Josh had puked AGAIN in a plastic baggie and wanted to throw it out(it stuck to the side of the highway embankment wall eliciting many cheers and a wonderful sense of band camaraderie).
Long story short by the time we got to the El Ray we were exhausted. So I have no idea how we played and I am guessing not fantastic. This was only the second show with this lineup and still some kinks to work out on top of the extreme tiredness.
It was one of the bigger places we have ever played, an old crazy theater that looked like it was designed to be a brothel for a thousand patrons. Red Velvet as far as the eye could see. And I got to see my buddy Ganesh who I hadn’t seen in forever. But I do remember it settling in that night that we were on tour with 3 great bands including High on Fire, and thinking to myself “this is the tour I always wanted Panthers to be on”. I mean it was our last tour but. AWESOME AT THE TIME!
