Midwest Tour, vol. 3

Volume 3 brings us near my hometown of Monroe, MI to Toledo, OH on Friday April 18. No offense to Toledoans, but every time I come to this area of the city it looks more and more depressed. Upon crossing the Maumee River we were greeted by a man getting arrested and tased on the side of the road. Gone are the youthful days of bliss, seeing Sloan a million times at the Main Event which is now a shut down sports bar covered in graffiti. Ah, Toledo. What a great city.

Load in was at 8pm and doors were supposed to be at 9pm. This works in theory, so long as they actually let us in at 8pm. We got into the venue about 8:20 and did a damn fine and efficient job of setting up in time to get the show started by 9:30. Great turn out of friends from Monroe and BG and the show went really well in my opinion. All three bands played well and I think everyone had a great time. It's always fun for me to play to this crowd and I thank all of you for showing up and supporting me and us. It was a blast. Hectic....but a blast.

On Saturday morning we set out for Julie's hometown of Cincinnati where we actually played in Kentucky at a place called Molly Malone's. Molly Malone's is an Irish pub housed in a really cool old building right across the river from Cincy. The room that we played in was on the 3rd and highest floor and used to be a house of ill repute. Turns out the room is also haunted by a patron of the brothel who was found out by his wife. As the story goes, this gentleman used to frequent the establishment and one day his wife walked in with a gun and shot him dead whilst he was with a female companion. Now, I'm not usually one for stories like this, but an incident happened to Ted and I that made me actually consider the validity of this story. I'll leave out the details, but we certainly felt the presence of another being and some strange shit happened behind the bar when no one was in the room except for the band and everyone except Ted and I was on the other side of the room. So, we made nice with "Joe" and invited him to enjoy the festivities of the night without incident.

As for the show itself, it was great. Julie pre-sold about 150 tickets and around 200 people showed up. The place was rockin and it was a lot of fun. Good room, good stage, good sound, good atmosphere....in a lot of ways Saturday was great.

.........and then came Sunday.