Day 4: Asheville, NC
Nau mai
Yesterday we travelled from Los Angeles to Asheville.
The body clocks were still trying to recover yesterday, and we didn’t get out of the hotel until midday. It was October 30th and we had an important task to achieve in order that we properly participate in the cultural celebration that would coincide with the next night’s show.
We took a taxi to Spirit Halloween, a pop up store that was filled with every conceivable outfit that one might need to impersonate a TV or Movie character from the past fifty years. There were home decorations too, and wigs, and of course many varieties of fake blood. It took us a good hour but we decided on our costumes, and paid the horrific prices that were as much a part of this celebration as the pumpkins.
After returning to the venue, we dropped our shopping and headed out for very late breakfast at a nearby Mediterranean restaurant called Baba Nahm. I had something called a Baba Bowl – chopped shirazi, sumac onions, chopped lettuce, pickled slaw, and cumin carrot salad, and added falafel, pita bread, and grilled local vegetables.
It was an industrious afternoon at the Orange Peel. Liz had several new additions that would bring her pedal board up to full strength and she was hard at work with wiring diagrams connecting and calibrating the various components needed to create a wide array of tones.
The Recorder-me-s were on the work bench and Tristan had a fresh stock of replacement parts to fix the various failures that had cropped up towards the end of the European tour.
For the drummers: It was a new cymbal day! Tristan’s endorsement grants him this special large logo on the cymbal.
I was working on my own project, upgrading the old pickup on my Ibanez Blazer with a brand-new Lollar Precision Bass Split Coil. It was nerve-wracking work, trying to defuse the old wiring and solder in the new electronics, all without adult supervision, but I’m happy to say that it worked the first time I tried it.
This was our second time playing the Orange Peel and this time the room felt like it was close to its 1000-person limit. Asheville provided a great audience who were enthusiastic to celebrate and unafraid to bellow and heckle. There was a particular bellower, a man with a gravelly voice pitched somewhere in the high tenor register who produced a beautifully positive heckle in the silence the end of one number: “that was pretty good!”. After the next number he nailed it in the silence again “that was even better!”. This was the fun and supportive type of crowd that we loved to play to.
There was a piece of extremely niche piece of bootleg merch that really put a bow on our night, a reference to one of Tristan’s album making-of documentary videos in which Liz attempts to list five power tool brands.
