Day 22: New Haven, CT
Welcome
Yesterday we played in New Haven, Connecticut.
It was a gentle lobby call of 10:30am that began our third day of this support tour. As we left Philadelphia on Interstate 95, I began assembling a breakfast in our Ford Transit 350 van using ingredients I had collected the previous day. In the hotel lobby I had sliced a few pieces from our 2kg boule using a plastic knife, and then used the buffet toaster to crisp them up. I also had a bunch of tomatoes left over from the rider, and about a dozen small sachets of butter taken from the catering at The Met. Liz lent me her small bag of Maldon salt flakes, and I constructed a backseat tartine of salted, sliced tomatoes on buttered sourdough bread.
After crossing back over the Delaware River, we were out of Pennsylvania and back on the New Jersey Turnpike which carries I95 as it heads northeast, passing Staten Island and then traveling alongside the Hudson River. We left the state of New Jersey, the George Washington Bridge carrying us across the Hudson, through the tip of Manhattan Island, and across The Bronx. The interstate followed a coastal route for the rest of the drive, heading up the Long Island Sound and past the many bays and inlets that make up the southern edge of Connecticut.
Driving past the Hackensack Meadowlands, a system of wetlands in northeastern New Jersey.
Two and a half kilometres west of New Haven is a 15,000 seat venue that up until a few years ago was known as the Connecticut Tennis Centre Stadium, the third largest tennis venue in the country. A recent retrofit has seen the facility reborn as Westville Music Bowl, and we arrived to find the court concealed beneath a bouncy layer of artificial grass, with a large stage at one end that backs onto the east grandstand. The National were just beginning their soundcheck, and their crew had been working since 7.30am to get this venue into a state of readiness. Three semi-trailers-worth of lighting, video, and audio equipment were in place, and they had even been kind enough to stack our amps and drums neatly in a corner of the backstage.
There was a large patch of grass right next to the stadium and while we waited for our turn on the stage, we gave our cricket bat some much needed love, playing the first game of the tour, and enjoying the huge space and the chance to hit as far as physically possible. We were tired from chasing the ball and it was probably a good thing that we were kicked off at 4pm when the field turned into the venue’s car park.
Throughout our soundcheck the guitars struggled to maintain their tuning with the late afternoon sun bearing down on the stage. The National’s instrument techs had deployed reflective foil blankets over the drums and the other sensitive pieces of equipment to minimize the temperature change. Gabe was very happy to be in an outdoor venue after two nights in the reverberant opera house, and we all enjoyed the chance to play outside on this beautiful, sunny afternoon.
Jon completes a quick repair before soundcheck.
The catering area is deep in the bowels of this music bowl, and we headed there for an early dinner. Large paintings graced the walls of this dining room and these various depictions of electric guitars only got us more in the mood for a night of rocking.
At 7pm we headed out on stage for a nice early set. The sun had dropped below the stands, thankfully, and we were left with a pleasantly cool evening as we began our thirty minutes of power (only the hits). This former tennis court was now covered with people and there were a few Beths t-shirts out there in the crowd, as well as a couple of hilarious homemade signs. Our set was over before we knew it, the half hour passing like a flash, and as we headed out back to pack up our gear, the evening continued on its trajectory with the crew preparing the stage for the headliners.
Our next show was a headline show, in Pittsburgh, so we had a night-drive in the schedule to chip away some of the 450 mile journey and make our 3pm load-in a bit more realistic. The real challenge, though, was fitting everything into the back of our van, something we hadn’t tried yet as our backline and merch had been traveling in the back of a semi-truck. Tristan and Gabe played Tetris for a long time, expertly stacking cases and merch boxes until they reached the roof and all the way back to the rear doors.
The illuminated cable stays of the Governor Mario M. Cuomo bridge, a five kilometre structure that crosses the Hudson River at it’s second-widest point.
We drove for three hours to get to our hotel in Stroudsburg, just inside the eastern border of Pennsylvania. It was 1.30am by the time we made it into our rooms and sleep came easily at the end of this long day.
Here is a brand new video offering from Tristan Deck