6 May 2007
House of Blues, San Diego
It's confusing, because we normally start the tour on the West Coast and head east, so now we are in California it feels like the beginning. In which case, what have we been doing for the last three weeks?
It's incredibly hot. I know, it's boring and you don't care what the weather's like, but that was the main feature of the day. It's all I talked about all day, how fucking hot it was.
We played this very House of Blues in February when we were opening for Pete Yorn. House of Blues is a chain of restaurants and venues that spreads across the US. I believe it has something to do with Dan Ackroyd, hence the 'Blues'.
They are a little peculiar. Small and mid-size music clubs tend to be owned and run by private individuals, often with mad eyes and ostentatious hats, clinging to their business with rat-like tenacity, who, despite the fact they can make more money at the weekend doing a club night with DJ Poo and a Tribute to the Music of George Micheal and Wham and Also Spandau Ballet and Also Abba, nonetheless book small, new, local and national touring bands, seemingly as a public service. As such they are the gummy grease on the wheels of the music industry. Without them talented musicians wouldn't discover that their first band is shit and they should try something else.
House of Blues has cunningly spotted a gap in the market for venues that can put on bands that a few hundred people want to see, and concluded that if it can convince the audience to come and enjoy their legendary jambalaya beforehand, they might actually make money out of it.
So they operate like all the other major US chains; all the locations are fitted out the same, even down to the puzzling hand-painted portraits of rock luminaries, such as the Blue Ray Charles (Ray Charles, but blue), they all feature highly competent staff and new equipment which actually works. It's a smooth operation. They even have decent showers.
The only problem is the lack of soul. No one has the heart put their band sticker on the dressing room wall; still less write 'are gay' underneath it. The irony is that House of Blues would probably love it if you did. It would prove their authenticity. They'll end up getting their corporate artist to design an ersatz dressing room wall covered in crude drawings of dicks.
They probably don't put on local bands, either.
On the other hand, Adam is happy because all the DI boxes work and they don't have to call in Beef, who's the only one who knows how to get the power amps to stay on. And the monitors aren't made out of cereal boxes with a paper plate in. And the desk isn't built vertically into the wall of a rabbit hutch out the back. And so on.
And sadly, the gig is delivered professionally, in stereo, to the highest standards of technical competence, but suffers somehow from the lack of metaphorical dicks drawn on it.
