Day 2: Del Mar, CA
Welcome
Yesterday we joined our favourite band Alvvays in the seaside town of Del Mar for the first show of our West Coast US tour.
I arose late on a fine Wednesday morning to find that the bus was already alive with activity, the front lounge full of conversations, phones glowing, and laptops clacking. Out the window I saw the rearing body of a mustang straining, a taut lasso wrapped around its midriff. The window on the other side of the cabin looked out across the sandy floor of the Del Mar Arena, the trusses and supports of the huge roof providing this dusty showground with an all-weather rodeo capability.
The Del Mar Arena.
The workday began at midday, the sun bearing down on us fiercely as we lowered the back of the trailer and began wheel our equipment inside. We found ourselves in a modern theatre, a tall room, dark and chilly, and a stage crowded with cases and equipment in various states of setting up.
There was a catering room where I helped myself to a breakfast of tacos, one with fish, one with roasted cumin squash, both topped with salsa, coriander, red onion, and guacamole. On the side I had corn chips and guacamole, and a Greek Salad, and then to drink a black coffee which was warm and weak, and served in a tall glass with a handle.
I love free time. We had free time yesterday afternoon while we waited for Alvvays to soundcheck, so Tristan and I went for a lovely run. The skies were crystal clear, and we sweated under the thirty-degree heat as we jogged along a riverside trail that murmured gently through an area of wetlands and then broadened and began towards the ocean. We arrived at Dog Beach and found a beautiful white sand shore with a lifeguard tower and a good population of handsome and stylish animals seeking relief from the heat. Overlooking the area was a scruffy bluff and we climbed the trail up to the top of this sheer cliff to get the lay of the land, looking out along the Del Mar shoreline and then back inland towards the horse racing track which lay behind our venue. We descended back down to the beach and hopped straight into the ocean, enjoying an incredibly refreshing swim that left us with wet running shorts and sandy feet for the return journey.
We passed a bridge on the way back, a wooden trestle bridge built in 1916 that carries rail traffic across the San Dieguito Lagoon. There was a gang of bmx-riding kids hanging out on the bridge’s maintenance platform, climbing around the safety barrier to get to the best fishing spot. It was just like a 90s movie except that the kids had e-bikes.
It was 5:30pm when we began to set up on the stage, arranging ourselves and our instruments into a line-abreast formation, the superior sonic arrangement for playing support shows when you are limited by stage size, but an inferior arrangement for those audience members who wish to be close to both Jonathan Pearce and Tristan Deck at the same time.
Setting the stage.
We ate after soundcheck, a light dinner, soups and salads and the like, and then retired to the greenroom for our pre-show rituals. If you had entered the green room in that critical hour before showtime, S-1, you would have seen things like solemn vocal warm ups, solemn guitar warm ups, the solemn brewing of tea, the inhalation of steam from a kettle, and solemn high fives being exchanged to boost morale.
Morale was indeed high for the band members of The Beths and remained high for the duration of the show, for the theatre that calls itself The Sound was a fine music performance facility and was filled to the brim with a cheerful audience that responded to our songs with not a small amount of enthusiasm. There was a cardboard sign hoisted by one of the crowd members neatly painted with the names of several songs, requests that we observed and stubbornly ignored while we stuck to our perfectly planned and balanced setlist.
Our final task of the evening was to enjoy the music of one of our favourite bands, a five-piece indie pop group from Toronto that is called Alvvays but pronounced with a silent double v and invisible w, leaving it to closely resemble the word always when spoken aloud. They sounded even better than we remembered. We watched from the back of the room and from the side of the stage, filling ourselves with this wonderful music before fleeing the room and escaping to the safety of Blue Paradise, our sanctuary on the road.
