4/29/09 Work Play, Birmingham, AL

We arrived in Birmingham in the early morning, and I finally got into my hotel room around 9:30am, hoping to continue my slumber. Fate had other things in mind, though, as about once per hour, there was a knock at my door, followed by the opening of the door as much as the chain lock would allow. On the 3rd or 4th time this happened, instead of ignoring it, I dragged myself out of bed, opened the door a crack and yelled "Can I help you!?" In my foggy state of mind, I learned that it was the manager of the hotel, and he needed to get into my room to access a wireless router to fix the internet for the entire hotel. First of all, who was the genius that made the decision to put an essential piece of technology equipment inside a guest room? Second of all, how many times of attempting to open a chain-locked door to a dark room does it take for a person to deduce that the room is occupied by someone sleeping? I offered the hotel manager a piece of my mind, with a side of expletives, topped off with a door slam.

I spent the afternoon in my hotel room catching up on computer stuff, and then later met up with my friend Val for dinner before the show. The show was a co-bill with Soulive, so we arrived in time to see most of their set. In addition to the usual Soulive trio that I was used to, they also had 2 horns and Nigel Hall on vocals (who I had played with at Bear Creek Fest last fall...that dude rips!!). Another unexpected surprise was finding that Soulive's road manager was Tony Hume, the artist relations guy from Bear Creek and one of the nicest cats I've met in a long time. We had a nice little reunion!

The Crazy Engine show was probably the roughest of the tour in terms of both sound and crowd. We had zero soundcheck, so we basically got up there flying blind. I'm sure Brian did his usual great job with the house mix, but we had no monitor engineer and thus no easy means of dialing in good stage sound, so it was hard to play comfortably with the distractions of the sound. The crowd was good for the most part, but a few drunk Southern yahoos were acting up a bit and causing trouble. My favorite part of the set was seeing little Charlie get in the face of a dude twice his size who had just sloshed beer all over the stage about a foot from Steve's guitars. Go Charlie!

Post-show, we headed back to the hotel, and now we're on the way to NOLA...woohoo!!