Blog #7: Tour Diary 10.12.24 (Patreon)

Going into my show last night, I was exhausted. The night before, my humidifier had broken in the RV and so I'd had to sleep on a sopping wet bed in an uncomfortably warm hutch of sorts, and then had to try and catch up on the resulting missing sleep while being tossed around the back of a moving vehicle. My head hit the ceiling at one point.

I was so visibly exhausted that my TM and booking agent, Matt, recommended we book a hotel room for me that night. The plan so far had been that each night we park the RV in the parking lot of a hotel, and 1-2 crew members get to recharge in a room while the rest of us stay in the RV. Since the RV has a little pseudo-bedroom in the back, I figured it made sense for me to stay in it every night. I was not going to be able to handle that again. I'm glad I took him up on his recommendation, because I'm feeling fairly well-rested finally.

But the state I was in was one bordering on despair. I was low on energy, and working up a great deal of anxiety about the show. The venue was very industrial, the concrete basement style venue that normally hosts rock shows, which is a far cry from the City Winery and adjacent vibes I've been going for and that had seemed to work for me. In the back was a neon-lit bar, which in my experience can often draw audiences' attention away from the show and create a nook for people to chat in that can sometimes be distracting. Thinking this was a 21+ show in a college town (turns out it was an 18+ show) I was worried about drinkers being disruptive. My fans don't tend to be big drinkers, but that's hardly a rule, and it's not like I've never had a drunk guy throw off a performance before. So I had started creating these vignettes in my head where I would go onstage and immediately be drowned out by howling frat boys.

Learning it was 18+ instead didn't help my concerns about that. Youngsters can be tough even when they're not mixed in with the upperclassmen in a bar that is hidden in the basement of a different building (the layout was bizarre) that is an acoustically untenable concrete box. The box was indeed untenable, folks, especially when you're using a hot omnidirectional headset mic with stage monitors. Combine that with an obscenely loud HVAC system that the volume needs to compensate for, and you've got feedback city on your hands. The FOH (front of house: meaning audio that the audience hears) guy was a really nice dude, and he did the best he could be asked to do with what he'd been given, but soundcheck wasn't just an exercise in patience, it was a fucking olympian workout.

The meet and greet/Q&A didn't help me understand what kind of audience I was likely to do deal with, despite what I had told myself I had learned the nights prior. My exhaustion and accompanying grumpiness made for a weird and confused Q&A session where I wasn't sure I was making much sense or coming across as consciously cordially as I intend to. Afterward I tried sneaking past the line to see if I could get a better sense of the vibe, but didn't end up feeling at all educated by having done so. I just saw familiar fans, someone who I think may be writing a review on the show, and a moderator of the Will Wood subreddit. So I have since scrapped the idea of learning my audience from the meet and greet, because the GA line was a largely entire different scene. A lot more Tom Waits fans than Lemon Demon fans, but still largely younger.

The artist's restroom required me to take an elevator and walk around the building to get to, so I just used the public one that was ten feet from the green room. The folks at the venue then clocked my audience, so despite there already being a unisex bathroom they made the men's room unisex too so a starstruck female VIP walked in on me nearly mid-pee at a urinal and I don't like taking my wiener out in the same room as a woman unless politely asked to so using the bathroom became an anxious thing for me too. There was no way to do it without putting my keys between my knuckles and bracing myself for a cold Syracuse alleyway in the dark or risking that same wildly uncomfortable situation.

I went out front to hang out with my girlfriend after the phones were pouched, and encountered several fans who had been sold fake tickets, including one who had strapped a GoPro to his chest, so I had to help them get in without being weird and expressing my not believing him when he pouched in and told me he didn't have any other recording devices on him.

I then noticed that the bar had come up with some specialty cocktails for the evening, which was very cute, except they had named them "Memento Mori," "Mr. Sunshine," and fucking "Jamface." That's some RESEARCH, guys. That's not even a deep cut, y'all named a cocktail special after a soundcloud account a high schooler forgot to make private in 2011. So weird! It's also just funny to have named alcoholic drinks after me when I'm definitely better known for being a recovered drunk than for being in JAMFACE when I was a teenager. I kept joking to my girlfriend that tonight was the night for a relapse. I sent a photo of the menu to the guys from Jamface and they all got a kick out of it though. Jim (Horvath; guitarist from EIAL and director of "You Liked This") commented on the ingredients of the beverage (grape kool aid syrup, peach schnapps, vodka and sprite topped with a twizzler) with "They really accurately nailed the teenagers getting drunk in a basement vibe with that drink."

To try and cut through the tiredness, I tried drinking Red Bull, but I have very little tolerance for Taurine, so all it did was give me heart palpitations.

Anyway I am a human animal so naturally all of these factors together created a bit of a perfect storm for panic. I was absolutely certain that this would be the most difficult show of my life. I picked out an outfit that I felt like I could relax in and that would more closely match the vibe of the venue than my usual type of outfit for the Slouching Towards Branson - one that I felt like I could abandon the script and "shut up and play the hits" or even completely bomb in - and I stumbled on stage after trying to get hyped up and failing, and hearing the extremely excitable crowd scream every time they saw a crew member do anything. I was intimidated, overwhelmed, frustrated, and exhausted. Constant sleep-deprived plastered-on smiles... I am a professional, god damn it! Smile, though your heart is aching!

I ran onstage and had one of the best performances, if not the best performance, of my entire career. The audience was beyond lovely, I was able to ignore the feedback in the monitors, and the one moment where someone in the audience tried to start a dialog with me (I think they had mistaken the audience for a comment section and were arguing with some opinion I had expressed) I just kept talking. There was another moment where during a more emotional part of the show there was silence save for a couple people whispering at a volume I'm sure the entire room could hear, but I was able to stop it from interrupting my sense of timing and flow. The jokes hit hard - at one point the audience kept giggling for a while, which is sort of the holy grail of comedy, getting somebody to where the laugh is hard to contain. The more emotional moments hit hard too. I was able to really savor the silence and explore the space a bit. At the end of the show, I was called out for an encore, and Shayfer and I did a duet of his song "Ferryman" which was a blast.

I helped pack up some of my stuff, got locked outside with some fans briefly, and then my media manager and videographer Jake (Feldman; co-director for "White Noise" and "Sex, Drugs, Rock 'n' Roll) and I sat in the green room and ate chips for a very long time.

It feels almost like I've learned nothing from my first three shows now. Which is maybe what I've learned with this one - that there's a limit to the amount you can learn from each show. A lot of it just has to be a leap of faith. I am learning a bit about what works in the material, but every audience is so different that I can't take what I gather from looking at the audience and talking to a couple dozen of them and extrapolate it to what kind of performance I can expect. I also can only make so many assumptions about the venue. If the performance is there and the material is good, the show will most likely not bomb.

The only shows I'm truly nervous about at this point are the 400 cap standing room show in Kalamazoo, MI and the double in Columbia, SC. I guess I'm a little uncertain about some places down south, with how atheistic parts of my show come across and how much I roast Branson, Missouri, but even then all I can do is just do my best and hope it's enough.

You guys were amazing, Syracuse. Thank you for coming out, for the support, and for being such a fantastic audience. Tonight is Pittsburgh. A 21+ show at a winery. But I don't know if that means too much anyway. See you tonight!

Much love,

-ww