Day 20: Philadelphia, PA

Welcome

Yesterday we played at The Met in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Kayleen was back! She was waiting with a black Ford Transit van when we assembled downstairs at 10.30am, ready for the drive down I95. Just as we finished loading our equipment Tristan returned from a nearby deli, his arms full of bagels and coffee. While Kayleen drove us towards the highway I ate a breakfast on the road, a Scotch Lox with cream cheese, tomato, capers, red onion, and lemon.

“New Jersey Turnpike, riding on a wet night” - the famous opening lyrics to Bruce Springsteen’s State Trooper, vividly painting a scene with a handful of words and a few strums of an acoustic guitar. Our ride on the New Jersey Turnpike may have been on a dry morning, but it didn’t change the feeling we felt while driving along this iconic toll road, a piece of infrastructure that has inspired many of the great artists of our time. I couldn’t feature the real song on the blog for copyright reasons, but I could embed this House remix by Juanjo Tur, and the lyric happens about 38 seconds into the track.

We entered the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by driving across the Benjamin Franklin Bridge and then we were in Philadelphia, heading to our first venue of this two-week support tour with a band from Cincinnati, Ohio, called The National. After circling the block a few times while trying to find the loading entrance we tracked down the correct gate and drove into a small gravel lot containing three Golden Sparkle Faces. These huge buses could bring a lot of firepower to the production of this tour, and we couldn’t wait to see that in action throughout the afternoon and evening.

Just around the corner from the lot was the stage door and we made our inside and found the production office which was filled with coffee cups, pelican cases, laptops, and portable printers, all the essential tools for keeping a touring band on the road for several weeks at a time. We were shown to our green rooms, of which there were three, a perk of being in a building that dates to 1908, back when nooks and alcoves were popular, and they would throw additional dressing rooms into a place without a second thought. Matt and Scott, the singer, and bass player from The National came up to introduce themselves and they were followed by a tour photographer who recorded the several minutes of us exchanging pleasantries.

Our amps and drums were waiting for us behind the stage, and we unwrapped this pallet of gear, taking care to catch the guitar amps which for some reason had been precariously stacked upside down and on the very edge, only held in by an enormous amount of plastic wrap. Tristan was very happy to be reunited with his favourite drum set, and Jonathan was lucky enough to have a brand-new amp waiting, the result of a short but intense social media lobbying campaign against Vox Amplification.

Once The National had finished their soundcheck it was our turn to set up and the helpful crew gave us a hand moving everything out onto the stage. We have a wide but shallow strip to inhabit in front of their mighty keyboard array, drum set, and piano riser that remain in place, so instead of our usual ‘drums at the back’ layout we were stretched out in a long line with Tristan at the end, and Bird standing auspiciously behind him. Getting everything working took a while, as is usually the case on the first show of a tour, but to give them credit, this crew of pros got the patch perfect on the first try, and we banged out a ten minute soundcheck just before it was time for the doors to open.

It was nice to be on a tour with catering, and all we had to do was walk up a few flights of stairs to have dinner. The dining room was a mezzanine that extended out into the theatre’s fly loft, several dining tables laid out with a birds-eye view of the stage below. We ate and then headed straight back downstairs to get ready as we would be opening the show at a very early 7.30pm.

The Metropolitan Opera House is a 115-year-old concert venue, built by theatre impresario Oscar Hammerstein I, the grandfather of the great American composer/playwright Oscar Hammerstein II. While this room wasn’t designed for amplified music it is still a beautiful space to perform inside, and maintains all the original trimmings like opera boxes, intricate plaster detailing, and a grand chandelier. It had been quite a while since we played a support set, and it was refreshing to head out to a half-full room and try and play your best 45 minutes to win them over. In such a large space it was tough to hear and feel the mood of the crowd but our set was fun and we recieved a good applause at the end.

The crew helped us to rush everything off stage and then executed a smooth changeover to help the main act kick off right on schedule. There were seven of them out on stage, five band members plus two auxiliary members playing brass and keyboards. The sound was dense and powerful and for nearly two hours they kept the crowd engaged with a set that never lost momentum.