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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Day 4 (or... what the hell are we doing in Redding?)
w/ a football game and a cover band
We're the smartest band in the world! We brought tents! If we ever need a place to stay, we'll just camp!
It was a great theory... but as it turns out, when a highway roadsign says "camping," it actually means "RV parking, no tents." And when you're heading out of Redding after playing a sports bar, you just want to turn in for the night. After two long excursions off the highway, down winding, back-woods roads at 2:00AM, only to find another park that closed at 11:00 and no overnight camping, we all just slept in the van at a rest stop. The van was a cozy bed when it was just me. It was less comfortable with five of us.
The story is this: we'd gotten as far south of Eugene as Redding, CA, when we stopped to find some wifi connections and see if we had any new tour info (mostly working out our cancelled Friday gig, and our lineup at Plea For Peace). After some time at a Starbucks (ubik. does not endorse Starbucks: we just needed some internet), we thought "There has got to be a place to play in this town. We don't need a rest! Let us descend upon Redding and rock!" This seemed like an even better idea when a place we found had a "jam night" on Mondays (which were, according to some, pretty popular) where the guy in charge not only said we could set up and play a ubik.set, he'd give us an hour if we wanted it.
We loaded in to this place: a big, open sports bar, where the music starts at 9:00, we go on at 10:00, more jamming after we're done (and, hey-- South of Heaven is on the playlist. I think I remember how to play South of Heaven!) The stage wasn't bad, but we've never fit with sports bars... didn't fit in Seattle, really don't fit in northern California. For example: the music didn't start until a really, really important footballgame ended. The first coverband (though not bad players... but, you know: rock cover band) drove out the crowd. ubik. played to a smattering of drunks (there may have been some meth in the mix), but mostly an empty bar, where we did a half hour, packed up, and got the fuck out of there.
...and after that fateful Monday night, ubik. never returned to Redding again.
So much for South of Heaven.
Notes from the road:
Apparently, southern Oregon is all uphill. We did have a lot of fun thinking up responses to the checkpoint where they ask you if you're smuggling fruits and vegetables into California. My favorite was "iS marijuana a fruit or vegetable? Then: no."
We followed that up by taking a rest stop in Weed... a town where everything is named for maximum giggle factor.
I find myself eating, drinking, and showering less out here. That's just the breaks (as evidenced by the two PBR in my backpack since Epic Space)
Eugene was surreal. We walked past so many cartoon characters, it went from funny to disconcerting pretty quickly. The grizzled hippies in the bus watching Hendrix at Woodstock, the mook that leaned out of his car at a stop light to sing us the Peanut Butter and Jelly song, the Yelling Guy... everything was a bit exaggerated. The journey between the venue and food (in Downtown Eugene) was pretty strange.
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