Last Dance Down Under

Our set gets bumped back an hour and a half in the schedule to 4:30PM, so we don’t actually head out to the festival site until about 12:30PM. Fine with me—a little more like an actual tour schedule. I had completely intended to get up early and work out, but it didn’t happen. We get to the site and it’s another horse track, or something like that. It’s the smallest site they squeeze the festival into on the tour, which makes things look a little crowded—but at least it’s easy enough to make the short walk from the stage to the backstage area, even if it’s still a blazing 100+ degrees out. Like the Adelaide show we’re sort of inside and enclosure of sorts, only it’s not really any cooler this time. Ryan, Jon and I get everything set up on the floor behind the stage, but we still have an hour before we can get to one of the drum risers and get things prepped in the ‘on-deck circle’ back stage, so we head back to the air conditioned, portable dressing room. It’s just like the airport—you need to get there early enough in case anything goes wrong, but usually you just end up sitting around waiting. And even then, something will go wrong in the last second that you couldn’t possibly have planned for…which you’ll hear about in just a second.

For big festivals like this there’s usually a little village of mobile dressing room boxes. They kind of resemble the little foreman offices you’ll see on construction sites. Thankfully today the air conditioning is kicking nicely. Ryan and I use some leftover lunch tickets from a previous day to grab some food. Might as well take advantage of the free meals while we have them, right? Catering kind of sucks, but we eat. It was particularly fun trying to explain to the server why I didn’t want her to pick up my bread roll with the same tongs that were just sitting in the gravy-covered beef slices.

Everything goes smoothly until changeover, and then quickly things take a turn for the ridiculous. Reggie’s amp won’t make a sound, but it turns out to be something loose in the amp’s input jack, and thankfully this amp has parallel inputs so I can just jump the cable to the other side. Easy. Now Jon has problems getting signal from one of the keyboards, so that eats up some time. Finally we get everything more or less set with monitor levels and we’re ready to go just in time. Once on stage everything seems to be going alright. I didn’t get my guitar world wheeled right into place where I wanted it, so that’s a bit of a hassle but dealable. All sounds good, only a few monitor adjustments. During the 4th or 5th song we here Owen’s bass cut out for second, but it comes right back so we let it go. Then, near the end of ‘Hurricane Jane’ it just drops out completely. And I’m in action, scrambling to figure it out—unplug his pedals, check for loose input jacks by shaking connections, try plugging directly into the amp, try a new instrument cable—but nothing seems to work. I’m thinking maybe it’s the head so we quickly borrow a bass head from the next band but that still doesn’t work. All of a sudden we hear sound coming from somewhere…it’s the DI signal coming through the monitors! Then we take the DI out of the loop and we can get signal from the bass cab, but not both at the same time. So, it’s either the link cable of the jack on the DI box. We settle for all DI signal and crank the volume up in the monitors for Owen and get back to the show.

All in all the band only had to cut one song from the set, but it still felt like forever. Situations like this make me feel like an idiot—even if the problem is unforeseeable and totally not my fault, I feel responsible somehow. It’s like any small lack of skills or knowledge I might have is quickly and obviously revealed for all to see, and when 30 seconds feels like 10 minutes you can sense everyone’s eyes trained on you, watching and waiting as you totally screw everything up.

I thought about sticking around to catch a few more bands that night, but inspiration was waning. There really weren’t that many bands on this tour that I actually wanted to see. I caught Neil Young once, which was great, a few songs from Fantomas, and a set from Cut Copy. Aside from that I wasn’t really hurtin’ to see Dropkick (although I heard they are a really good live band) or really anyone else. Unfortunate or sad or jaded as it might seem, I just don’t get that psyched up to watch bands anymore—especially when it’s really hot and I’ve already worked a show that day. Maybe if it was someone I really wanted to see.... In the end Ryan and I had a few drinks, caught dinner and caught a shuttle back to the hotel which was actually fine with me because I got to watch most of the Australian Open men’s final on TV. The Open is held in Melbourne, so it’s been big news all week. Plus the semi’s the other night had been particularly good—it reminded me how much I used to enjoy watching tennis. Nadal and Federer duked it out and then we headed downstairs to the after party.

We were staring down a 4AM lobby call for the airport and 30+ hrs. of travel home, so there was nothing left to do but stay at the after party until 3:30, run upstairs for drunk shower time and pack and get the hell out of there. This is what you do when given a situation like this, and this is exactly what we did. Had our free drinks, caused our ruckus, said our goodbye’s to friends and laughed and grumbled our way to the airport.

All tours should be like this—sadly they are not. G’day mate, I’m off!