Minneapolis: IWW/Bail Fundraiser @ Bedlam Theater
Welcome Rude fans, to a backwards look at where we’ve been between our last tour-report post and today’s “we’re alive” post… it’s true, internet has been scarce, and updating the blog has been low on our list of priorities. When you’re spending all your time surrounded by, making food for, cleaning up after, coordinating the day-long movements of, unpacking and repacking, playing 2 gigs a day with, sleeping on a floor with, and squishing onto a bus with 35 other people — not to mention daily food shopping and fuel runs and navigating and bus-guarding and general wrangling — you get pretty exhausted. And it’s not like there’s a ton of room on the bus to use, or even pack, a laptop. However, I’ve just returned to New York because I have to start school tomorrow (while the rest of the band continues until Saturday), so I will take some time to give a little recap for those of you who were wondering what the hell happened to us. Because normal life is just not that exciting in the aftermath of the Big Gay Tour, and if I can’t live in tour mode anymore, I’d like to hang onto the memory of it for as long as possible. Stay tuned for the upcoming NYC Indymedia headline, “Rude Mechanical Orchestra goes on 2-week No More War tour, never returns.”
Anyway.
Sat, Aug 30th — Minneapolis, oh Minneapolis. How long we’ve talked of you, how long it’s taken us to get to you. The longest day on the road yet, clocking in at 8 hours and 10 minutes (including rest stops featuring cheese hats, “Florida” t-shirts and an enormous wooden horizontal cowboy statue), and we arrived mostly on time. After many legal and medical trainings and much precaution, we headed out to our evening show with the Brass Messengers. Who are AWESOME. We played a particularly rousing set at the benefit to support the local IWW/Starbucks union workers and kick off the anti-convention activities set to begin the following day, danced our butts off to the Messengers, and then some of the more daring among us grabbed our instruments from backstage and jammed with our new friends to Mesecina and a few of their other Balkan-inspired songs. I almost busted through my drum head, I played so hard. (I also kept forgetting to watch the band, and a couple of times almost missed a “stop-playing” cue because my eyes were closed. I get really into it.) It was nothing short of ecstatic, and we are so incredibly thrilled to be a part of these communities of musicians and activists.
And then Sunday morning saw the reluctant departure of a few of us, myself included. Stay tuned for further blog entries updated by band members actually still *with* the tour. Maybe someone else can upload photos from these above gigs, or maybe I will someday learn how to do it and attach them later. Thanks for following along, folks!
