Personally. Jamestown was my highlight of the tour so far. The people, the town the shows. We played three shows there in three days, a town nobody we told that we were going there had even heard of.
Because we had slept in the car and driven through the night we arrived in Jamestown around 9am…with around 2 hours sleep. Nothing worse. We go to the café/venue we are playing at tonight and thankfully there is a room directly above the café that is being outfitted for a bookstore, so we stretch out on the floor and get a few more hours in.
Feeling a little better we take a look at the venue and see that its part of the coolest thing ever. There are three really beautiful little shops, all interconnected with hallways and stairways, one is a record store, one is the venue/café and one is the bookstore which is being worked on at the moment. The part of the beast we are playing in is called The Labyrinth and it’s a choice café serving (the guys inform me) the best coffee in the US so far, and served by the really awesome owner of the store. The room we are playing in is like a 50/60 capacity tiny little room with a massive window right along the back so anyone walking past can see the entire show. (I love that whole thing…so was looking forward to it)
The show was awesome! A decent crowd filled the room and the show went off! Because there were no support bands OTA played their longest set of the tour..clocking in around 90 minutes…they played all 17 songs they knew and people still didn’t want them to stop. It was a really amazing night, it was an AA show so there were some young-uns, but also some oldies who popped their heads in having a boogie. Sold CDs to pretty much everyone there! The bloke who runs the venue loved it so much he asked us to hang around for a few days and play 2 days later when he had a free evening. We had nothing better to do, and had heard there was a “I Love Lucy” festival happening in town over the weekend…so we stuck around.
John who ran the sweet record store above the café set us up to stay at his parents place who had a really nice house on a pretty decent sized part of land on the outskirts of town.
Our second day of hanging out in Jamestown we were told about Chautauqua, an amazing place around 20 mins drive from Jamestown that you have got to see. Here is a brief desription here: http://www.nd.edu/~rbarger/www7/chautauqua.html , the wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chautauqua or their website: http://www.ciweb.org/ . Its basically a summer camp for adults, so haha, you can see why I am very intrigued by it.
We wandered around the site for an hour or 2. Its 2 miles long by 2 miles wide and fenced all around. During peak season it costs $20 just to visit, but we visited off season so got in for free. Apparently in summer there are more people per square mile in Chautauqua then in Manhattan, you could tell it was going to get crazy.
We were trying to get a really 80s looking photo of the band, and I spotted this scene.
Pretty dang 80s.
John’s folks cooked us up a mean Italian feed and Johns mum cracked out a Candy Floss maker for dessert. I ended up having way too much and feeling kinda sketchy. After dinner Johns dad announced that he was going Musk Rat hunting. He grabbed his rifle and then headed out into the back yard. We were bemused to learn that Muskrats have been pillaging their water supply and they only come out at dusk and dawn. John invited us to go shooting muskrats with him. We didn’t. Apparently some dude got murdered in the shed next to their house some years back, Nik wouldn’t stop bringing it up.
Ash with the candy Floss
Out shooting pesky Musk Rats
We had been talking about going to a drive-in movie for weeks and finally had the chance tonight! There was a double session of Iron Man and Indian Jones for only $7, so we picked up some $5 pizzas. Another ridiculous thing about America…you can get a full size large peporoni pizza from “Li’l Caesars” for only $5, not only that…there is not waiting time…you simply walk in order and collect, they have them all pre-made.
You gotta get to a drive-in early to secure your spot, you arrive around 7pm for the sessions starting at 9pm. We got the mint spot and set up the chairs we had borrowed from Johns folks.
Livin’ the dream
We realised once we had arrived how we were drive through novices. The people next to us had bought along ghetto blasters, pillows, picnic rugs, picnic food, sleeping bags, mattresses!
Drive-ins are awesome! Once you tunr your radio in the frequency you’re given, you just sit back and enjoy the whole experience. You can snooze, drink alcohol, smoke, eat whatever you want, crank the sound as loud as you want…and you won’t annoy the others around you. It’s pretty much the ideal way to watch movies, why it never took off outside of the US I’ll never understand. It’s really hard to go back to a regular cinema now.
On the way home we passed a deer chilling on the side of the road…I had about 2 minutes to get a shot while it stood staring blankly…this was all I could muster, another shot to join my out-of-focus-at-night photos of deer
Man. I’m sure I used to be a good photographer, wha happen’d?
Mojo’s, the regular live music venue in town had heard we were around and added us to their show on the next night. We now had two shows on the same night at two different venues – always a good time.
Our second show at Labyrinth wasn’t quite, for lack of a better word, “magical”, as the first one. Even though there were more people, and on average a younger audience, the amazing vibe that was there the previous show wasn’t there again. It was still a good gig and sold a whole bunch of CDs and people really liked it…but we couldn’t put our finger on why it didn’t quite meet with the previous show… It made the guys quite sceptical about doing another show straight after at a different venue…but after heaps of pressure from some people who really wanted to see them play again, we decided to give it a shot. - Roll on the maddest (of some mad shows) show of the tour.
Knackered from playing a 90 minute set at Labyrinth and then having to pack down and cart the gear down to Mojo’s to set up straight away the guys decided to just play a 20 minute intense loud crazy set and just to have fun. Mojo’s was the strangest layout of any venue so far. When we walked in and saw the band playing before us - - from Philadelphia, we thought the venue was PACKED. But through some weird design flaw the room is shaped with a weird bend so that there is only like 1.5-2 metres between the band and the start of the bar, which juts out like halfway across the room…so everybody stands back behind the bar….so you get a full room, but with NOBODY dancing infront of the band. Nik and Ash decide to make use of this space and spend most of the show playing on the dance floor
This show was ridiculous. A dude who was at the show videoed the start of the set and got some hilarious footage. The PA was the crappest of the tour and I was struggling to make it sound any good at all, check out the video footage… Niks amps fell down and I had to run in and set them up, then Ash’s lead popped out and then Nik’s lead popped out and this incredibly drunk woman who wouldn’t stop molesting me was right up the front clapping completely out of time the entire song. I was cracking up at the entire situation.
I can’t work out why the dude chose to post the first song of the set where everything went wrong when the rest of the set ruled…but, haha, its funny to look back on
The molesterer
This woman, old enough to be my mum wouldn’t stop grabbing my ass and running her hand up my back, she was so drunk even though I kept on telling her to bugger off she wouldn’t, haha, it’s strange to feel violated, but after about 15 minutes a bloke calling himself “Buddy C” distracted her for me…not after she’d fallen over a few times.
The molesterer gets her cummapance
The people at Mojo’s went crazy for the band and were screaming after every song. It was a crazy show. After about 3 songs Buddy C stopped Ash mid song and shook his hand, leans into him and says the filthiest thing I’ve heard on a tour so far, explaining what happens to the ladies when Buddy C gets on the bass. (trust me, you don’t want me to repeat it….just look at the bewildered expression on Ash’s face)
Buddy C
All in all ridiculously fun, sloppy and messy set, but a hilarious way to finish our three day holiday in Jamestown. About 5 minutes after the band finish, this total redneck looking dude strolls past the band and just as he enters the toilet he flicks a glance at the band and says “you guys suck dick”.
Awesome.
We happened to coincidentally time our visit to Jamestown with the twice annual “I love Luci” festival. Lucille Ball was born only a stones throw from Jamestown and the town itself has become a Graceland for Lucille Fans from around the world, with Museums, gallerys and souvenir shops littered around the town it’s almost suffocating in it’s crapness.
We decided to check out the festival itself on Saturday morning before we left town…and it was the crappest thing I have ever been to in my life. It took around 4 minutes to walk the length of the street festival…there was no parade, not even really any Luci themed stalls, just a bunch of crappy food stalls and two or three “rides”, the only thing worth seeing was a spaghetti eating competition (after the famous epidose…though this didn’t start until 3pm and we couldn’t be bothered hanging around) and this mad statue, which has nothing to actually do with the festival…but I stumbled upon it. Horses balancing Fish on their heads. Odd.
eh?