October 2, 2009 : Detroit Bar : Costa Mesa, CA
After a solid eight hours of sleep at the luxurious Crowne Plaza San Francisco, Ozzy guided us to Costa Mesa, California. Along the way, Dave got recognized by fans at both our gas stop and lunch stop, much like a famous rockstar might. It was my first journey to orange county (basically just a bunch of malls), and a long journey it was. The already bordering-on-lengthy drive from San Francisco was made worse when we pulled into L.A. rush hour traffic at 4:30 on a Friday.
Despite this, we had a decidedly more pleasant and relaxed sound check / set-up experience than yesterday. The Detroit Bar is a very odd room in the corner of a strip mall, it was also very, very sold out (“capacity” = 300. Attendance = 362). Out of the 362 people, about 250 of them were having loud conversations, and the club was hovering around eighty degrees for most of the night. Doors were at 8:00 and Say Hi didn’t go on until 10:00. Besides being odd, this meant that I had to babysit the merch table and didn’t get to go to dinner with the dudes. It also meant a lot of “when does this show actually start?!?!?!?!” from sweaty fans.
The dudes played a stellar set and emerged sweat-drenched from beards to toes. The crowd, when they finally quieted down, was a great one: everyone got excited for the Pedro jams, and everyone knew the new stuff. So far, people seem to be really excited about the Pedro the Lion song “Magazine” on this tour. Dave’s parents were in attendance, and his mom bought his dad a Bazan shirt and got very stern with me when I tried to not charge her for it.
After the show, we spent about 35 minutes trying to back out of the alley behind the club (vans with trailers are really hard to drive), and then headed to the hotel. When we arrived at the hotel lobby to check in there were 4 of the biggest dudes I’ve ever seen standing guard around all the entrances and exits in street clothes, and a posse of about 10 dudes and 7 girls. It looked like a rap video exploded in the Holiday Inn lobby. As it turns out it was the famous boxer Floyd Mayweather who had stopped on his way back from Vegas for some rest but not until he could “hit the Lion’s Den and get some ladies.”I can’t help but think Bazan would seem a lot cooler to people if he traveled with four body guards. Someone needs to do something about this.
