Photos of This Piano Plays Itself‘s homecoming show at 97 Estoria (8/3/09) by Kevin Griggs
It’s been quite a while now since I spent three weeks on the road with Atlanta’s This Piano Plays Itself. The experience was phenomenal for me, so I wanted to revisit it one more time here on the blog. While I was on the road, I figured that inundating you readers with nothing but stories about the same band for three weeks would be overkill, but on the other hand, I think those stories are well worth telling, so the following post is an extraordinarily long exposition detailing my account of the epic road trip.
Week 1: Shove It Down Their Throats
Early Monday afternoon after the 4th of July, Justin came and picked me up and brought me over to the TPPI Bro Hostel Headquarters so we could all load our personal gear into the van. They are very lucky to have a friend in a successful band who has a 15 passenger van and trailer that they can borrow for their touring needs. It was a rather luxurious travel vessel for the six of us. Next we headed over to their practice space to load up their band gear. As they were bringing everything outside, I was struck by the sheer volume of equipment these guys utilize. I really can’t think of another band as unknown that uses as much stuff. They were a bit pessimistic at first as to how they would load all of it in the trailer, but one of the guys from Gringo Star happened to come by and say hi and the well traveled tour veteran reassured us that all of it would fit, and after some gear Tetris, it did just barely. After this trip I have a ton of respect for bands who arm themselves to the teeth with technology. Not only does it makes loading, unloading, and setting up difficult, but the more gear you have, the more essential items can break, and being at the mercy of suspect sound systems and sound guys are some significant hurdles to clear when not using a conventional stage setup. I can see why so many bands these days take the path of least resistance and go lo-fi.
CONTINUE READING On The Road: This Piano Plays Itself 2009 Tour Journal (3,846 words)
© Davy Minor for Ohmpark, 2009. |
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