Update #9. Today is a long 10 hour drive day. We've played our eastern most show and are now on the long trek back west, barreling across Minnesota tonight heading for a hotel in Sioux Falls, SD. We played in Chicago on Saturday. It was a return engagement at Goose Island, where we performed on our summer 2012 tour. Not one of my fav gigs on the tour, sadly, as we all really love Chicago. It's kind of a neat bar, but the sound was really, really distractingly bad for us. They herd bands in and out pretty quick with 4 bands playing 40 minute slots. Bad sound, not much time to get into our mojo, some technical equipment malfunctions and we were really feeling the tiredness at that point. My voice was kinda shot at times. Shit happens. We played through pretty uneventfully, sold our merch, said good night to the handful of friends and family, packed up and headed down to Valparaiso, Indiana, vowing to upgrade venues for the next Chicago gig, whenever that may be.
We stayed at our good friend Amy's farm in Valparaiso. This is my hometown and I've known Amy since junior high. It's hard to describe how beautiful it is there and how peaceful, quiet and relaxing this was for us. We slept, ate really well and most importantly, did our laundry. (You can only use so much fabreeze.) We played a house concert in Valparaiso to about 50 people. This was, for me, the funnest gig of the tour so far. There were lots of old friends there, some of whom I've known since I was in grade school. The hosts of the party, Cathy and Mike are professional-grade party givers and total true believers in rock and roll. They've converted their basement into a really cool small performance space, complete with a stage, lighting and PA system. How cool is that? We played two sets in the afternoon and early evening. We eased in during the first set. I played Mike's beautiful Gibson acoustic guitar. We played a few tunes we haven't played much on tour: Temporary Diamond, Secret Life of Guns, Water Fit For Babies. People were with us from the very first note. Alcohol was flowing. The energy, volume and vibe of the music was starting to pick up. It was Mexican Independence Day, and seeing as Felsen is 25% Mexican and 75% Californian, we had much to celebrate. The second set was really incredible. More people arrived and more alcohol consumed. We focused on a bunch of tunes from the new album: Rock and Roll's Not Dead, All You Gotta Do is Smile, I Don't Know How to Talk Anymore, Gimme Shelter for the Devil, Tokyo Electric Power. The crowd was pressed right up on top of us. There were a bunch of teenage kids there really getting into the Felsen spirit for the first time and that felt really great knowing that our music wasn't totally irrelevant to them. There was even a 75 y.o grandma who also got bit by the Felsen bug. I made a toast to the Valparaiso slum lord who, on Christmas Eve, evicted my father, mother and their 6 kids. Nice guy! I felt I vindicated my family. Revenge of the Nerds: Art wins, humanity prevails. The stage was surrounded by Mike and Cathy's record collection. At one point while Dylan was bending both time and space during one of his, epic, spiritually transformative guitar solos, I noticed all the records and realized we'd been invited into their music sanctuary. I saw a copy of The Concert For Bangladesh and that brought back a flood of memories of living in an apartment at 1419 Laporte Ave in Valparaiso when i was 20 and hearing that album for the first time: Ravi Shankar, Dylan, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Ringo and George. We ended the concert as we've been doing often on this tour, with an acoustic version of Take Me Back. We went out into the audience and asked the crowd to huddle up around us. You could have heard a pin drop. All that energy in the whole room focused just on that one thing for 4 minutes was really, powerful, spiritual and deep.
We played Waterfall yesterday. Singing the lyric "I Come from the country, went to city, seeking refuge" felt especially confessional yesterday, singing it to all these people I grew up with in a little Indiana country town where my father was the town doctor.
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