Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald
The House of Blues in Las Vegas is buried deep in the bowels of the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel, which is the gold-leaf high-rise of Southeast Asian persuasion in the "Nevada gaming area" of downtown.
To say I was surprised to learn this fact is a bit of an understatement, given that most franchise venues of that ilk tended to be housed in a glitzy strip mall superstructure. This one, however, was housed in a glitzy mega-casino, one that I'd seen used as a backdrop in film and one-hour TV dramas involving characters who made more money in a week than I'd made in my lifetime and wore suits that had more style than fifty of my closets.
Big money.
We loaded in early, getting a nice long soundcheck and plenty of time to get our gamefaces on in the lavish, signature House of Blues backstage dressing rooms painted like Mediterranean bungalows, with tile mosaics and upholstered furniture. Because we weren't direct support, we still had the smaller of the two available rooms, but even then, it was still as if we'd lucked upon an ever-elusive free hotel room. Clean, spacious showers and a well-stocked larder and buffet table is usually enough to make a man such as myself forget about being homesick for at least an hour or three.
Spent most of my time walking around the loading docks, listening to our roadie Dan and Aaron Weiss pick around on an acoustic guitar. I'd saunter into the dressing room from time to time to see if the LAN cable was free, then I'd go back out and try to call Alison. mewithoutYou learned they'd scored a European tour and called a band meeting to figure out what kind of breakfast cereal they wanted on their rider.
We played well and could move around, unencumbered by a small stage as at 75% of venues we played. The Las Vegas crowd did what all Las Vegas crowds did when we played, which was to stand still, except for one girl who vocally demonstrated her disapproval in two succinct words as we walked offstage. I had given up on trying to figure out what it would take to get over in that town. I figured we were competing with the likes of Penn and Teller and we'd do just as well to simply enjoy our free tuna steak and cous cous, play our show and get on with our lives.
We learned that, as artists performing in the venue, we could reserve a room upstairs for a deeply discounted rate, which we did, breaking free from our Vegas Strip de riguer of the neon Motel Six and greasy spoon across the highway.
Bryan and I parked our van in a trailer-vehicle lot far, far away and cut through the Bellagio and its associated millionaire European tourists, and those wanting to appear to be millionaire European tourists, on the way back to the hotel. I always like to get a whiff of The Money each time I visited, even though I knew I'd probably never have access to the high-roller tables in the back rooms, much less the shops in the courtyard. But it all looked so nice. It never hurt to have a look, unless one were maybe Buddhist and having problems with that whole "death of desire" thing.
We had a room on the 33rd floor, high enough to look out over the desert through floor-to-ceiling windows. I chose to hang back in the room and enjoy my solitude, for as long as I could enjoy it, while the rest of the crew went downstairs to raise hell. It was the day after Nic's birthday, and he was drunk and on rollerskates.
I put on a bath and propped my laptop up on the sink and listened to Galaktlan, which seemed to be the thing to listen to in a luxury bath in a luxury hotel while trying to burn off the fog of war and tour in my head. It was dark, and somewhere in Estonia, a bedroom laptop artist's ears were itching.
After my bath, I fell asleep, then woke up to learn 1) Nic had been chased by hotel security on his rollerskates, 2) a girl we knew had passed out in the bathroom and had to be wheeled out in a wheelchair, and 3) that our tour manager drank all the five-dollar bottles of water left by room service after a drunken bender. Which I suppose meant it was a better night than our usual Vegas trysts of walking around with no money, collecting escort cards and comp drinks.
I probably made Dan feel a little too bad about the water thing than I should have. Money was still always, always a concern.
