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Good morning everybody. What you say? Its 2pm? Ah well, my bad. I just woke up. Actually, I woke up at 10 and decided that I really needed the day off so after snoozing a couple of times I just turned the fucker off. I'm not sorry either. Why was I so tired? Well, allow me to tell you about yesterday.
My friend Justin had introduced me to a singer named Howie Day. And Howie Day was playing yesterday in Austin, once at 5 at a record store, and then a small venue concert at 8. He wanted to attend both, so I said I was down, and we left for the land of t-sips around 1:30. Though it was raining pretty much the whole way, we got there without a hitch in time to grab some lunch, a spot of tea (hey, when in Rome), and head over to the record store. We hit some serious Austin traffic and didn't get to the place until ike 5:30 and walked in to hear the very end of his last song, which sucked. But Justin got his CD autographed and I got to meet him. I lied and said I really enjoyed the show, even though I hadn't seen any of it.
So we bummed around town for a little while longer, took a look at the campus, and then decided to get in line to buy tickets around 7:00. We got to the Cactus Cafe and there was already a huge line, composed mostly of people we recognized from the record store earlier. They were true to their word and didn't start selling tickets until they openned their doors. It got down to like 8 people before us and they announced that they were letting in anyone who had prepurchased their tickets online go first to make sure they all fit and we would just have to wait and see. We were very lucky because they took the next 10 paying customers ... making us the last two. Although, they eventually let in a few more to standing-room-only, we still felt lucky to be among the first let through. Standing the whole time sucked and I did have to take a few small sitting breaks, but it was totally worth it.
This man can do things that I had never imagined possible. He's a great singer, he's pretty good at guitar, but that isn't the half of it. I never really for sure figured out how he did it, something with pedals at his feet, but he was sampling himself live and managed to loop it. I don't know how many tracks he could get going at once, but at times there were at least 8. He would bang on his guitar in different spots and it would sound like a base drum and some bongos and he'd loop that. Then he'd rake on his strings and it would sound remotely like a snare drum. He would crank up the base on his acoustic/electric and start slapping out a baseline, all the while adding to what he'd already gotten going. Then he'd strum something, pick out a solo, and quite often be singing 3 and 4 part harmonies ... with himself! Live! Oh it was incredible. If I had one of those machines, whatever they are, I would be so incredibly popular. I've never seen or heard of anything like this, thus I was completely mesmerized and totally impressed. If you hear of Howie Day playing anywhere near you, GO! That is my advice.
On a side note, my AOL still seems to be working today even though its a day past when they said they were going to shut it off. Maybe that was a bluff to get me to start paying and their really not going to do anything about it. I dunno. I still need to get a new email address regardless so I don't have to deal with this shit again. Earthlink's help center sucks my left nut though and its hard to get any info out of them unless you call, and I'm not in the mood to call them. We'll keep you updated on that situation. Until then, I hope everyone had as lazy a day as I did. If you want to bump into me tonight, you best be at Shadow Canyon for Karaoke Night. Whoop!
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