South by South Gomer tour DAY FIVE: Leaky Saxophones and Cheap Beer

Day Five:

We awoke with a bleary eye and a song in our hearts! Then we sat down for a fine continental breakfast in the lobby of the hotel. I'm not sure which continent small boxes of Raisin Bran, Costco danishes and orange juice shot out of a machine comes from, but it was free so we loaded up.

We said our goodbyes to Holly and sent her back to the Bay Area fully engorded with the power of Gomer, then we faced our next challenge. An emergency instrument repair. At some point during our Jean Cocteau set Mark's sax started leaking...(I realize that sounds like a euphemism, and maybe it was, I honestly didn't check his shorts). Regardless, he had to do some crazy ninja-like circular breathing or something to stay in tune during our second set.

We had a three set night looming in Lubbock, not to mention a five and half hour drive, so we needed to fix this thing pronto. We called around and exhausted all our options in Santa Fe, since the one guy who could do it took the day off. With no other opptions we hit the road and crossed our fingers.

We called around Lubbock from the van and got in touch with a cat named Clarence who was a horn tech at a shop called Jent's Express. He said he was only there till 6pm so we drove as fast as a giant Econoline could go...Needless to say, we were a little late. However Clarence stuck around and not only did he fix the leak, he hammered on that thing for over an hour and even changed out the pads and everything. According to Marko it sounded better than new and best of all, he did it for free! it was unreal, he wouldn't take any money, just said "this is what I do, glad I could help". Mark left him a $50 tip anyway, this was our first taste of the hospitality of the citizens of Texas.

Next we found our motel and conducted our usual shit, shower and shave (and cocktail) routine, then headed to BarPM just across from Texas Tech.

We were greeted by the bartender Antoine who just happened to be from Vallejo of all places, it was cool. After we set up and ate some serious burgers on the house, we hit the stage around 10pm for our first of three sets. It was one of those slow simmer shows, the first set had a fair sized crowd but they were there to drink and not actively listening. However it heated up by the second set and there was a big late night crowd that spilled in and really dug our stuff. We played quite well and went into the third set with confidence and panache. Sadly it might have been over-confidence. We broke a couple strings and had our only bonafide train wreck of the tour with a truly nightmarish rendition of Dead Cat on the Road. If that cat had any life left, we beat it out of it that night. Poor kitty.

Still, thanks to $2 Lone Stars and well bourbon we made a comeback and blew the doors off the joint with a pretty smokin' Hills of Appalachia and Wayfaring Stranger. All was forgiven!

A quick note on Lone Star beer, as far as cheap beer goes it actually doesn't taste terrible so long as you drink it as fast as possible, and at $2 a bottle we drank all of them, or tried at least.

We shut the place down and did fairly good on schwag sales, including a sale of an artisan snuff tin (our best selling item) to a fellow who professed to Aaron that he "Chews Copenhagen and don't spit". His eye's bugged out and watered up after a healthy sniff and he said "this is the stuff my grandma used to do". We like to keep it old timey...

Back at the hotel there was some zany shenanigans involving whipped cream paraphernalia and a shoe...I won't mention names, but it's the closest we got to trashing a hotel room like rockstars.

Tune in (hopefully) tomorrow to find out who shot JR as we swagger into Dallas!