Ween on Austin Texas, SCI, Gibby Haynes, etc.

[Blane]

I love reading the Ween tour diary, which is brutally honest and somewhat disturbing at times. I think they're pretty illustrative of what a rock star deals with on a nightly basis while on tour. I thought this one was particularly great. Good SCI reference for all the cheeseheads out there:

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austin

lots of anticipation for this gig---actually it was 2 gigs. i felt like it was gonna take a magic trick to live up to our expectations. lots of music around austin on this weekend, it's sort of an honor to be playing there on such a heavy weekend of music. we had a night off in town and my friend kwanzaa and i had a nice dinner across the street from stubb's and listened to the mediocre white sounds of string cheese incident wafting through the air like a nasty fart . our show at stubb's was pretty solid and we finally pulled out a bunch of the newer tunes and intentionally avoided playing l.m.l.y.p. if nothing else. we finished on a really high note with one of our better renditions of fat lenny and then went out for a night of texas debauchery that ended in my hotel room with a bunch of friends around 9 am. the next day we played the ACL festival opening for REM at dusk. I don't think we went over that well with the massive crowd (maybe like 30,000 people) but i thought we brought it pretty hard. the second i finished playing and took off my guitar i spotted gibby haynes, (one of my heroes) and we ended up hanging out til 3 or 4 am at a bunch of bars. the funniest part of the night was the fact that you couldn't park a car at the festival so we flagged down a van on the service road behind the stage which turned out to be filled with spanish speaking mexican dudes delivering food to REM from some local restaurant. gibby's girlfriend speaks fluent spanish and we ended up getting a ride back into the city from these mexicans, but we had to sit in the back of an econoline van on crates of seafood on ice. the van smelled like a rancid pussy and the whole ride was spent listening to gibby's girl arguing in spanish with the driver over where he would take us for 20 bucks and being shoulder to shoulder with gibby haynes and 5 mexicans. it was something i'll never forget. he's starting a new band and they're gonna open for ween on our upcoming american tourdates in the new year.

los angeles

this venue was just so nice---reminded me a lot of the beacon theater in nyc. well this was my "birthday" show and we played maybe the most mellow setlist of the tour (intentionally). I really enjoyed this gig thoroughly, it was the most tunes from quebec that we pulled out in a single show---we closed with fluffy. after the gig my friend shelby threw a party for me down the street from the club, and i think the entire crowd tried to squeeze into this little bar. she had someone construct a pinata in my likeness and she also hired a mariachi band that played for me out in the street. i drank every color of shot imaginable and vomitted them all back up in one glorious moment in the bathroom. overall tho, there were too many people in this place and i bailed after a couple of hours and did drugs with claypool on our bus all night instead.