Day 14: Cambridge, MA
Welcome
Yesterday we played at my namesake venue in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The bus slowly weaved its way through curvy and narrow streets as we drew closer to the venue. These historic roads were laid out in the 17th century - perfect for a horse and cart, but a struggle to navigate in our giant sparkling stallion, towing a 6 metre trailer.
There was no bus parking at The Sinclair so we pulled up outside just long enough to unload our equipment and then Rob drove off to a nearby hotel.
I headed out for breakfast after we had set everything up. There was a gourmet shoppe just around the corner called Cardullo’s which had an impressive sandwich menu. A gruff Italian man was making the sandwiches and he seemed annoyed when I didn’t speak my order clearly enough and he had to tear up the docket and start again. I brought back two sandwiches and Jon and I had half each. One was a Gallina Rustica with roast chickn, artichokes, and black olives aboard a ciabatta bread. The other was a Cubano with roasted pork, Fleur de Lis ham, Swiss cheese, pickle chips, and yellow mustard aboard a baguette.
5pm was the noise time so we got up to do our soundcheck. The Sinclair is a purpose-built music venue that holds close to 600 people. There are great sight lines to the stage from anywhere in the room and it sounds fantastic. After an hour we had everything dialed in and Gabe was extremely happy.
We had dinner with Marshall, our booking agent, and during the walk to the restaurant I got a look at how pretty Cambridge is at night. In Autumn all the leaves fall from the trees and hundreds of tiny amber lights are attached in their place.
As we were ploughing through our first song in our set I saw Donny Benét looking down at me from the balcony. This is not the first of his cardboard cutouts we have encountered but it was certainly the most auspiciously placed.
I felt blessed to have this bass-playing god watching over me as I performed. I might have even played a perfect show I think. The Cambridge crowd must have also felt this energy because they were very competent. At one point they even counted a song in for us.
My favourite moment was in You Are A Beam Of Light when someone held up their phone displaying what looked like a .png image of a zippo.
What was it like playing at my namesake venue?, you might ask. It was very good. As you might imagine, lots of things had my name on them. Items, and bits of building. But I didn’t get any special privileges, and that was fine.
Back at the bus it was time to finish watching Top Gun Maverick. We started from the beginning though, so Jake could catch up. I was sitting on top of the subwoofer and every time Tom Cruise pressed the throttle all the way to the stops it made a very deep thumping noise and I felt like I was there with him, in the moment.