ceciliatan

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

“This is the biggest music venue in the United States,” Louis told me while I was waiting around for soundcheck.

“Bigger than a football stadium?” I was sitting on the edge of the stage and he was walking around to keep his knee from stiffening up. The place was a shed: a covered stage with an area of amphitheater seating and a huge general admission lawn beyond that.

“Stadiums aren’t music venues,” he said. “Capacity here is like thirty-seven, thirty-eight.”

“And we’re doing two nights in a row here?”

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

The Costa Mesa show was fun. The venue was smaller than a lot of the ones we’d been playing and it felt to me like the intensity went up as a result. People were very very into it.

Or maybe I was more energetic since I’d gotten a good night’s sleep. Whatever the reason, we burned with really high energy right out of the gate and the crowd pushed us to keep it up. I had a solo in the middle of the set that I usually played at the very front edge of the stage. This time totally spur of the moment I took a beer from a fan in the front row, drank it, and then used the neck of the bottle as a slide.

Mirrored from the latest entry in Daron's Guitar Chronicles.

(If you haven’t had a chance to go upvote DGC vol 4, now being serialized on Wattpad, go on over there and click that star icon, please? -ctan)
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Nomad moved to a bigger rehearsal space the week before hitting the road. The new place was a former airplane hangar/movie soundstage on the edge of Van Nuys and the first person I saw when we walked up was Louis. He was sitting on an overturned milk crate outside the door, wearing opaque black sunglasses and smoking a cigarette. His overgrown hair was grayer than I remembered.

He flicked the cigarette onto the blacktop the second he saw me and stood up to give me a back-poundy manhug. “Shit. You’ve grown.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Shit,” he said again, shaking his head. “How you been?”

“Good,” I said automatically. It’s not like I was going to bring him up to speed on the past two years in two minutes.

“Good,” he said back. “Welcome to my office.”