I am so tired. So very tired. People say that the road is a young man’s game. I am considered a young man if an average man’s life expectancy is two thousand years.
I am sitting on the couch of the bus, driving to the hotel (thankfully only about a half hour away) after a Blue Sky Riders show in Newport Beach, CA. I am currently collapsing in a big tub of tired.
Thursday night, Georgia and I played a show with Carole King in NYC. It was a birthday party thrown by a very loving husband in honor of his wife. He rented out a museum on the upper east side (of course he did) and invited oodles of their friends to hear Carole King sing “So Far Away” and “You’ve Got A Friend.” (of course he did)
This museum used to be a guy’s HOME! It was an incredible place to play. They searched our bags each time we left the building to make sure we weren’t sneaking out a small Monet or Rodin’s lesser known work, “Tiny, Easily Concealed Thinker.” The show was lovely but it went a little long so our normal post-show tradition of consuming a wheel of cheesecake at Carnegie Deli had to go. As professional singers, we do not eat cheese on days when we have to sing, so whenever a show is over we all have huge pieces of cheesecake so we don’t ever feel like the profession we have chosen deprives us of the important things in life. Like dairy. And heart disease.
This morning Georgia and I left our NY hotel at 5 AM to fly across the country to Newport Beach to join up with Kenny’s tour. Blue Sky Riders is (are? am?) again the opening act. We actually had to skip the first few dates of the tour to be able to play Carole’s show. We apologize to all our BSR fans that missed a golden opportunity to watch us have First Show jitters and make a lot of mistakes…. but the chance to play with two music icons within a 24 hour period was just too cool to pass up. We flew all day and made it to the hotel just in time to jump on the bus and ride to the venue. We live in the Danger Zone.
We played a small amphitheater in a resort. We were facing people’s rooms so they could sit on their patios and watch the show. It was like a Spring Break crowd waiting for Kenny to sashay across the stage in a Wet T-shirt Contest. That did not happen tonight. The atmosphere was a wee bit strange but the show went over well. There were a few nice pockets of people who knew our stuff and sang along enthusiastically. We played a new song that we’ve written but not yet recorded for the next CD. That was very scary. We tried it for the first time at soundcheck and it was pretty darn good. My brain is still somewhere over Idaho so I really had to concentrate to remember the words but luckily the only words I forgot were articles and one participle so no one noticed.
The show is over. I feel very much like I have been on two alternate sides of the continent in one day. This is something I never had to deal with when I was an electrician. Not even when I was a songwriter!
I will sleep like a baby (waking every three hours in a pool of my own urine) and wake up ready to drive to Paso Robles and try our new song again. I feel like SUCH a rock star. A tired, grumpy, slowly decomposing rock star.