Enjoy Beaumont

We had a fine time over in Beaumont on Friday night. The trip got off to a shaky start, as we arrived at the designated meeting point and then Andrew realized that he didn't have his bass. Damn it. I would have been absolutely frustrated and would have started with the screaming and yelling and crying and such and such, but I have been guilty of a) arriving in College Station and finding out I did not have my hi-hat stand AND b) arriving in Fort Collins, CO and realizing I left my cymbals in Lubbock, TX--a mere 600 miles away. SO, I was in no position to judge. Luckily, we only had to drive about 15 minutes to Andrew's house, and then we made the drive along beautiful 1-10 East. AHH, refinery country. For me, there is nothing like the smell and the hum of petroleum products being refined and churned and churned and refined.

The Vortex is a really cool place in Beaumont, and the sound in there is very nice. Two elements about the Vortex I really like are the dollar cans of Lone Star and the connection with Carlo's pizza--which is only bad ass.

Here are the sets we played on Friday night:

FRI AUG 20, The Vortex, Beaumont, Tx
Set I
Last Mile, Sweet Leaf, Last Concert, New Waverly, Time Tough, Dub>The Heights, Word Gets Around, Electric Netwerk Machine (of Rage?), Sophisticated Frothy>What's the Buzz (Reprise)>Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Set II
Timequake, Day Tripper, Osonova, If I had the World, Aslan, Scarlet Begonias>Scarfunk>Everybody Wanna Get Rich (Right Away), Varmint Poontang, Bumboklot, Buddy Boo, Memphis Soul Stew

We had planned that the first set would only be about an hour, but the set turned out to be about an hour and 40 minutes. The climax of set one was the Sophy through WTB through Voyage. After that jam--which lasted about 40 minutes--I was pretty much exhausted. Another thing that wore me out was the beer drinking. After we had played 2 songs, some nice person brought us a bucket of lone star beers. I got a little excited when I saw this (I always get extremely excited when someone brings me a bucket of beer), so I said, "OK. Here's what we need: what we need is a bucket of beer every 20 minutes until one of us passes out. Then, we need one bucket every 30 minutes." I did not realize that the good people of Beaumont would take me up on this. I got a good laugh when 10 minutes later there were 3 buckets on stage--this was much faster than the rate I had requested. That is lots of beer--especially when Jason and myself are the only hardcore beer drinkers in the band.

The second set was good too. We redeemed ourselves on the song Aslan, which we had kind of screwed up in Denton. It sounded much better on Friday night. I thought we really jammed well on Friday, and there was definitely some good listening going on on stage. The people in Beaumont were very nice, and we sold some cd's, so we were very happy. We should be headed out there again in either October or November. We left Beaumont at 2:15 am. Luckily, the drive is only about an hour and a half. Al volunteered to drive even thought he was scheduled to go to work in 3 1/2 hours at 6 am. He ate some Jolt gum--thing that would carry him through as the jolt products are advertised to do, but the gum wouldn't take, so Al got very tired and could not concentrate on his driving. Andrew sacked up and drove the rest of the way, even though he had school orientation at 8:30 am. I was incapacitated and unfit to drive because of the buckets of beer mentioned above.

Signed

DP (Original Gangsta)