Other bands: Smile Empty Soul
We had a final show scheduled two days or so after Pop's somewhere in Kansas or possibly Colorado, but we decided it would have raped our coffers financially, so we made the Sauget performance our last for the Smile Empty Soul radio X-fest Jagermeister tour.
We made some decent money, better than usual, but we spent a lot of it on hotel rooms and thus tempering our possible net gain. It was year 6 in Brazil's existence and the odd and almost pleading dynamic of sleeping on a stranger's floor had worn itself extremely thin. Privacy and the freedom to stink up a room for someone else to clean up was worth seventy or so dollars in this day and age.
Sauget during the warm months is desolate enough, but during in December it's nigh on apocalyptic. Most of it's real estate is owned by industry and that that isn't is typically a barren field of gravel or the parking lot of a rundown smoke shop.
(There are 250 full-time residents to accommodate the village's plethora of strip clubs and serve the incoming hoards of working drones populating its factories. It's Ayn Rand's dream monument to a pure free enterprise civilization catering to man's deepest desires to make money, eat meat and fuck.)
Scenic Sauget.
We made our last show count for something. I can't recall a more perfectly played show than what we did at Pop's that night. The crowd had never heard of us before, but by the end of our 35 minutes, they were eating out of my hand. Every swagger, every mic stand trick went off perfectly as if we and our gear were a single organism. Our charm bled into the headliner's set as we chanted them on, warming up the crowd.
It was cathartic and at the same time a relief, as my throat, mind and body were almost shot by this point. I had already called the metal shop where I worked part time to let them know I needed work when I got back home, and I knew I wasn't going to get much time to rest. Clock-in time was 6am.
We left that night to drive back home. I forgot to charge my phone and couldn't call Alison and when we finally arrived 4 hours later than when I estimated we would, she was a bundle of nerves in the quiet, angry way she could be a bundle of nerves.
I slept as much as I could. We got back on a Wednesday and I think I must have committed to working the following Thursday. We had nothing on the books. Nothing planned. For all I could tell, this could have been it for Philosophy touring.
A quick four-month eulogy to a great record unnoticed.
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