Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
More of the same.
A dark bar with an unadventurous beer selection. Another meal of grease and processed meats. Only this time I had the entertainment of a fight between two semi-drunk women sitting across the horseshoe.
Their cacophony rose and fell in five to ten minute intervals, almost petering out entirely before another verbal jab was thrown and the volume rose once again. It was an eerie and lonely fight, played out in front of a laughing bartender, myself and a fat, silent ale-sucker at the far end. It was still early, not quite dark yet.
It never came to blows, which disappointed me. The myth of tour-as-neverending-vacation is easily disproved by that with which we inevitably use as stimuli. The crude and the bass. Misfortune and schadenfreude. If those girls started swinging and clawing, I would have kept eating my fries and steakburger and sipping my High Life like nothing happened. The numb blanket of boredom and world-weariness was thick.
Whatever advantage being flu-drunk was to my stage show was gone by the night of The Rock. The stage was narrow and wide, so I stayed in one place, hugging the mic stand and eating the SM57 that smelled like electronic components, rust and the gingivitis of a hundred other dirty singers before me.
The small crowd gave us all the interest of a mute street urchin with a concertina, tossing us a few token claps between songs like they were tuppence. It was mostly slightly overweight metal fans both male and female. Most of them sat at tables smoking and eating fried things.
I didn't really care. I had more important things to worry about, such as my 103-degree temperature. My performance was phoned in, each song a bullet point on an ordered checklist. My goal was to finish. It was fine.
No one's life was going to be changed tonight.
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