Sydney, AU. (EMI MUSIC AUSTRALIA) - Chicago. The home of the blues, the Blues Brothers, Oprah and Jerry Springer. When we turned up to soundcheck at the Cubby Bear (located right across the road from Wrigley Field, home of the
Chicago Cubs), it turned out there was an NFL game on. We sat around and took part in the local pastime: drinking beer, watching sport and swearing. The show turned out to be another not-very-full-looking room that turned into a full-blown party when we started playing.
Later on, Harry, in an effort to combine drinking with work, managed to spill an entire glass of bourbon into one of our merchandise boxes. It was such an expertly-delivered spill that it managed not to land entirely on one t-shirt, but in fact across the shoulders of ALL of them. He didn't seem too worried: "In my experience, bourbon doesn't make clothes smell at all."
We decided the only way to see Chicago was from the top of a freakin' tall building, in particular the artist formerly known as the world's tallest freakin' building: Sears Tower. You can't help but be impressed by the stats: 1730 feet tall, 110 stories, 2232 steps, 43000 miles of telephone cable. "Now THAT's what I call a long distance call!" We all got horrendously sick of that joke. Later on, we saw a tour group being shown around the city on Segways. I may sound like a Luddite five years from now, but those things look silly and won't take off. The off-road ones the cops ride around on are pretty badass, but even I could outrun one of those.
The next day we drove to Ann Arbor for our show at the Blind Pig, which is a venue with a mighty impressive history. There was a band from Seattle touring through there back in 1990, and they were having a pretty horrible tour and decided they weren't going to continue. The reception at their show at the Blind Pig was so impressive that it changed their minds, and they continued on to become one of the most influential bands ever. They were called Nirvana. The stickiness of the carpet and the amount of graffiti in the band room have clearly multiplied by a staggering amount since then. Here's one of my favourites:
'Dave Matthews peed on me.'
We assume this is a reference to the Dave Matthews Band river dump story. They were travelling in a tour bus not unlike the one we are in now. These buses have a tank that stores everything that gets flushed down the toilet. The driver usually chooses an appropriate place to dump this along the way, but unfortunately Dave Matthews' driver chose the wrong spot. There was a boat full of people on the river directly under the bridge when he let it fly. A sticky situation for everyone involved, but forever cemented in the annals of rock touring and legal history.
When we pulled up out the front of the House of Blues there was a mega queue out the front when the doors opened, which looked promising, but it turned out they were all there for Steve Winwood. Their bus was just as big, but slightly less clean than ours. We were in the (smaller) Cambridge Room up the front, playing a fairly early gig, finishing up in time for the iPod night that started at 10:30. For those unfamiliar, that's when everyone brings their mp3 players along and pours their digitally-encoded heart out one track at a time. Really loud.
When we stepped out of the bus in D.C, we realised we were surrounded by a quite alarming number of tour buses. The collective noun for such a situation is a "shitload" of tour buses. There were five buses, two semis, a mini van and a Hummer. The four punk bands that did the early all ages show were all out of there by 9pm, and the doors were to open for our show at 10pm. Surprisingly, it all ran extremely smoothly and we went on stage right on time for The Cat Empire's 400th gig. Will has been keeping count all these years, and we're pretty sure the 9:30 Club was number 400. We've missed out on all the other multiples of 100, only realising a few months later when Will updated his gig list. The next day in Washington we somehow got aboard Air Force One. Well, one of them anyway. When in Rome...
Adam Duritz proved himself something of a prophet once again, for it was Raining in Baltimore. Once known as the 8x10 Club, the Funk Box has changed its name, again, to the 8x10 Club. Stone Gato, purveyors of violinised, Guatemalafied funky rock, opened the evening. That's right, gato means cat in Italian or Spanish or something, so it's another cat band. We've had an overwhelming number of royalty-related bands share the stage with the Empire (Custom Kings, King Curly, Crown City Rockers) but as far as I can remember this is the first other cat band. It was a zoological extravaganza when we played at WoZone in Adelaide on the same night as The Bird and 2Dogs. And I'll never forget that time we threw a Cat amongst The Pigeons live on stage. They got their revenge, but it took a lot to convince them to let the Cat out of the bag.
