As those who've spent any amount of time on the road can attest, touring can be either exhilarating or exhausting. Like anything else, there's high points and low points. Most of the time, though, it falls somewhere in the middle. Days are spent in constant motion it seems on long, mundane drives with a lot of staring out the window, trying to make small, confined space and sleeping in intervals whenever you can manage to sneak in some shut-eye. For a band hitting the road for the first time, it can be downright harrowing and deflating, from playing to meager crowds to dealing with mechanical problems on your vehicle. Nothing's perhaps worse than the latter, which can set off another batch of troubles entirely. Ask Speakeasy Tiger who dealt with just such a scenario on one of its first cross country jaunts.
Day before yesterday, evidently, the outfit was driving from a show in Manhattan,
Kansas to another in Omaha, Nebraska when the battery gave out in the
parking lot of the hotel just as the act was pulling. After charging the
battery briefly, the outfit made it to the gig only for the members to discover that they
were on their own for sound and also tasked with handling the door.
Furthering the aggravation after the gig, the van died again and the
members purportedly had to push it to a service station, where it would be fixed in the morning. They then caught a
cab back to the place where they were staying. And then as if to add insult
to, ahem, injury, Kyle Simmons somehow managed to slam bassist Lauren
Gale's finger in a door. Ouch! Lucky that was the last show on this tour. Hopefully Gale will recover in time for
the band's lunch time set tomorrow afternoon in Skyline Park. Easy, tiger.
