Kilroy et al: Tour Diaries Day 3 / 4

Posted in SPLOG to Photo by Smile Politely Editors on Thursday, May 28, 2009 at 9:25 am

Ed note: We often publish C-U band’s tour diaries when they head out on the road to represent us in the great wide open. The content here is just as it appeared when they send it to us. So, grammatical errors and offensive language may abound, but that’s part of the fun.

Day 3: Saturday, May 16

We went to a farmer’s market in Des Moines just outside of the parking garage that we slept very poorly in. We found a coffeehouse to get our caffeine fix but there was a weird magician character and a salad-dodging, old television comedian that was not our cup of tea. We decided to leave Des Moines pretty early and arrived in Ames around 11:00. Right away we found the place we were playing and a nice little café called Café Beaudelaire. The accomodating waitresses provided us with our caffeine fix while we wrote this diary and were pretty attractive to boot.

Then we hit the streets to busk a little bit. Otto had a show back at Bentley’s Pub in Champaign with Santa, so he missed out on Ames. We had bongo drums and two guitars and made some fun jams. We took a green self-guided tour of the Iowa State campus, which was pretty beautiful and filled with trees and greenness in general. We busked a little more outside of a pond on the campus with Brian playing the singing saw, which drew a few looks from people passing by.

At 7:00 we loaded-in at the Ames Progressive. On the first look we knew it was an intimate, environment for a show. Four bands played, we played last being the non-local band. The other bands, Paddle Captain, We Are Ourselves, and Rodeo Drive were all very good. Our set went really well, despite being without Otto on bass, keyboards, backing vocals, and occassional cat. We ended with an unplugged version of the song ‘Engine’ by Neutral Milk Hotel, since the room seemed conducive to an unplugged song or two. The audience was very respectful and paid attention to the music, a nice change after playing to walls in Des Moines. The bands that played before us stuck around to hear our set as well, a much appreciated gesture.

That night we stayed with Nate from the Ames Progressive and his girlfriend Kate, who we are quite thankful towards. Zach and Sean from We Are Ourselves also hung out for awhile and we all drank while listening to old Bob Dylan and Beatles vinyl albums. Needless to say, we slept much better in Ames than in Des Moines. In the morning, we had some coffee with Nate and Kate and then went out to breakfast before leaving for Omaha.

Midget Report: Negative

Day 4: Sunday, May 17, 2009

We got into Omaha around 4:00 and found a coffeshop near the PS Collective that was closing but kindly let us hang out outside and use their internet. We also met up with a few of Edward’s friends and had a few drinks. One of his friend’s friends offered to buy us a few pitchers, which we deeply struggled to turn down coming from such an attractive female youth. Brian noted that perhaps we should accept these kinds of offers more often.

The PS Collective turned out to be an interesting place because there were no sound people running it, so bands just sort of helped each other out. We ran into a few technical difficulties on two songs, but overall it went pretty well and was fun. We played with Fortnight and Dimlight, both local Omaha bands who seemed to share a propensity for the late night hours and the music that accompanies it.

After the show, we went to an old town section of Omaha with multiple bars loosely based on a ficticious theme of frog and, less specifically, amphibian ways of life. Despite these troubling themes, Omaha was a lot friendlier than the salad-dodging capitol city of Des Moines. We had our most comfortable sleep at our friend Greg’s air conditioned basement.

Midget Report: Hopeful, but could have been a member of the youth cohort