Day 36: Chapel Hill
Welcome
Yesterday we played a show in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
We left Atlanta at 8am so we could aggressively attack this 600km drive to North Carolina. I85 took us northeast right up the centre up one of my favourite Appalachian subregions, the Piedmont Plateau. The choices for breakfast were McDonalds, Subway, or Longhorn Steakhouse, and since the Subway was completely unattended, I ended up at McDonalds, opting for the one of the staples on their morning menu, a sausage and egg McGriddle meal with a hashbrown and a coffee.
The manmade reservoir Lake Hartwell sprawls across a large part of Georgia’s eastern border and this is where we crossed into South Carolina, continuing through the northern part of this state before entering Charlotte, North Carolina, the second largest city in the Piedmont Atlantic megaregion.
This was the saddest part of our journey as we headed to Douglas International airport to drop off Kaylene who would be returning to her hometown of Akron, Ohio, shortly to head off on another long tour. We said our goodbyes outside the domestic terminal and then had to keep moving as we had another three hours to drive.
Chapel Hill is a college town, home to the University of North Carolina, and part of the Research Triangle, which is a great regional term used to describe the area adjacent to the cities of Raleigh and Durham which contains three major research universities as well as the largest research park in the country. We were only thirty minutes from Gabe’s childhood home and his parents Izy and Richard came to meet us at soundcheck, bringing with them a large container full of baked goods, as they are prone to doing.
The venue we were playing was a mid-sized club called Cat’s Cradle and it has been quite a legendary spot on the club tour circuit since the 90s. Gabe used to attend shows there regularly while he was growing up and apparently it was a formative experience - “It taught me enough about live music to make me fall in love with it forever”. We were housed in one of these classic green rooms that proudly bears the scars of thousands of nights of thorough, post-gig celebrations. Carefully curated cat art adorned the walls, and the couches and armchairs swallowed you when you sat down.
Everyone working at Cat’s Cradle was incredibly friendly and generous. I was still saddled with a broken bass amplifier and prepared to make do with my DI pedal, however Jeremy the venue’s sound engineer popped out to his car and returned with a Fender Bassman which he happily lent me for the night.
Disq were back to play support for our remaining headline shows. They had been driving around on their own headline tour while we chased The National around the Midwest, and we were happy to see them return as their music is fantastic and they are exciting to watch. It was a warm room when they opened the show up with six hundred odd bodies through the door and their combined body heat challenging the air conditioning to a fight to the death.
Jon with one of his presents, a pair of hand drawn signs to mount back home in the studio.
After a fine set from this Madison rock band, it was time for us to head up and do our thing. Some readers may be aware that it was Jonathan’s birthday yesterday. Up until this point his birthday had consisted of a seven-hour drive, a load-in, a soundcheck, and a brief dinner break. Now he got to play the electric guitar in front of hundreds of people who were hungry to hear the screaming sound of a Gibson Gold Top Les Paul being cranked through a handwired Vox AC15 amplifier with its Celestion G12M Greenback Speaker. The room felt intimate and also full of energy and we enjoyed our ninety minutes out on stage, finally getting the chance to stretch out and play a full-length set.
This was not a day that allowed much in the way of a proper birthday celebration but we did enjoy a cake and a glass of bubbly wine in the greenroom post show. As he blew out the candles on his birthday cake Jon made a wish for only one thing, and this wish came true less than an hour later. Right before we had to jump in the van and leave we played some cricket in the carpark, quite a challenge because the ball was barely visible, but it was the perfect way to wind down at the end of this long tour birthday.
I’ll leave you in art corner where this week we showcase a portrait of wooden logs hung in the lobby of Holiday Inn Express and Suites, South Hill, Virginia.
