Day 14: San Francisco, Day 2
Nau mai
Yesterday we played our second night at the Fillmore, San Francisco.
Tristan and I structured our morning around a run to the Presidio, the large park and former military post that sits at the southern tip of the Golden Gate Bridge. It felt like we hadn’t done a run with any elevation in weeks and this jog up into San Francisco’s northern reaches was a sure way to amend this problem. Luckily any pain that is experienced by the legs in this type of challenging hill climb is repaid to the user with the experience of wonderful views from the many lookout points along the trails.
Breakfast came from the deli at the Mayflower Market, a corner store that I would have been very happy to have as my local. I ordered a chicken salad sandwich on a Dutch Crunch roll with healthy layers of lettuce and tomato; all tightly bound in the white wax paper that facilitates the tidy and efficient consumption of a potentially messy food.
Night two at the Fillmore was a delight. The house sound engineer had the mix completely dialled in for the Phoebe Rings set and I’ve never heard them sound so good. One of the features we love about this venue is the little opera balcony right outside our greenroom that looks across the stage and also catches just the right amount of sound from the nearby PA speaker to create a perfect viewing and listening experience. The sonic charcuterie board that this band creates over a thirty-minute set, combined with an utterly charming selection of banter; I’d say there is little doubt that they will have earned themselves a dedicated following in the Bay Area.
This crowd were a dream to perform to. Not only did they laugh correctly at all our jokes, but they turned up with little handmade signs to encourage us. There was even someone who turned up with a tiny recorder and claimed to have learned the recorder part in No Joy to play along with us. Did they execute it correctly? Only they will ever know.
Sadly, we had to remove ourselves and our gear from the venue at the end of night two. It was Lavonda’s turn to experience the steep streets of this city as we bottomed out going across an intersection, the bus not achieving the momentum necessary to jump and clear these sharp changes in elevation the way Nicholas Cage’s character Dr Stanley Goodspeed does in the car chase scene from The Rock (1996).
