Day 24: Cleveland, OH
Welcome
Yesterday we played a headline show in Cleveland, Ohio.
I began my day with a run, leaving from our hotel in downtown Pittsburgh and running down the Allegheny River to where it meets the Monongahela River and the two combine to form the Ohio River, the major tributary of the Mississippi. It was a beautiful morning to be out on the water and there was just enough breeze to move the small sailboat which was out enjoying this major water junction. I continued running along the Ohio, wishing that I was out in my own watercraft, but still enjoying this popular riverfront trail that was busy with the Saturday morning traffic of runners and cyclists.
After freshening up I headed out with Tristan, following up on a breakfast recommendation and ending on the other side of the river at Kelly O’s Diner. We were in The Strip, a lively neighbourhood packed with shops and restaurants set amongst old warehouses, and it seemed that most of Pittsburgh had the same idea that we did, to kickstart their weekend with a late-morning meal. After queuing for a few minutes, we were seated at a nice outdoor table and I ordered myself a corned beef hash and two eggs, over easy, with a side of Italian toast and fresh fruit.
The kitchen was busy and it took a while for our food to come out, so we wolfed down our meals when they arrived, and rushed back to the hotel. We were still twenty minutes late for lobby call, a discrepancy for which I am forced to award Tristan and myself 50 penalty boints each.
It was an easy two-hour drive to get to Cleveland and we took Interstate 76, the hilly terrain of western Pennsylvania easing into flat farmland as we crossed into Ohio and the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau. Unlike its south-eastern neighbour the Unglaciated Allegheny Plateau, which has rugged, heavily eroded terrain, the glaciated plateau was raked and rasped by these massive ice formations tens of millennia ago, leaving a gentler landscape that transitions into the fertile, glacial till plains of northern Ohio.
We pulled into the carpark of the Beachland Ballroom just before 3pm and carried our equipment inside, beginning a setup on this stage that held fond memories from a winter night in 2019. Everything was going well until Gabe tried to turn on the mixing console, a unit he described as “the bleary-eyed blue bastard of the Midas Pro 2, short scale version”. Almost any time that we have been beset with technical difficulties in our last year of touring it has been due to a Midas Pro 2, and that doesn’t even begin to deal with the rest of Gabe’s touring career.
Setting the stage at the Beachland Ballroom.
Gabe recounted his experiences from yesterday evening and rather than do a poor job of retelling them in my words I have transcribed and edited his words, so you get the gist of the challenges he was facing.
Excitement was metaphoric. The machine turned on and I put my file into its mouth, and it swallowed and regurgitated the file properly. The console was not reading the stage box, where the patch was completed, deeming the entire setup more useless than margarine. We did a power cycle. The stage box turned on, but the console got stuck on the boot screen and froze. After an hour of calling every Midas-savvy tech in the Cleveland tech area including Midas technical support, no one knew how to fix the problem.
I discussed the little Midas M32 (a small and cheaper console) with the house techs, who pulled it out and got it working. By this time there was less than 15 minutes left to soundcheck. Something was going weird with the PA amplifiers, and the speakers were clipping and distorting with little to no input signal. With no time to diagnose this issue I reorganised my gain staging to make it as little of a problem as possible for the evening’s entertainment. With this improper gain structure mixing becomes difficult and imprecise.
We had ten minutes to play once we were finally able to make a sound, so we checked all the mics, played through a couple of songs, and left the stage so Disq could begin their soundcheck.
The last time we played at the Beachland Ballroom I had a fond memory of walking down to the frozen Lake Eerie, a vast and awesome snow-beaten expanse, the likes of which I had never seen before. It was my intention to visit the lake and see it on a warm, summer evening, so I set off after dinner. I must have taken a different route to last time because it took me a good 45 minutes to find access that wasn’t restricted by the many private roads that lead to the shore. Finally, I found a public road that led to a nice viewing platform from which I was able to witness the beginnings of an impressive sunset.
Our show went well despite the set of technical problems that Gabe had worked so hard to overcome. It was a Saturday evening, and our audience were in good form; loud when they needed to be but also polite.
We chatted to quite a few folks afterwards, and then caught up with our old friend Rachel Lawrence who kindly hosted us at her family home back in that 2019 winter tour. Once the van was packed and we were ready to leave there was only one task remaining and that was to eat all the ice-cream Kaylene had bought for us.
There’s nothing we love more than a bootleg Beths shirt.
Eating ice-cream at the bar.