Southern Hostility Tour

“The Eagles..friend or foe, love’m or hate’m?” Thus began the interview portion of last night’s Old Town School of Folk Music show in Chicago. Robbie Fulks delivered the line to Brian Henneman and I sitting on stage beside him under a tall lamp. Brian was for, I was against. “Come on, Brian, you can really sit around your house and play “Desperato” and keep from laughing?” “Well there are bad Eagles songs and then there’s…” Robbie says, pausing to search his mind for a good one. I blurt out “See! You can’t think of one can you?” It was a spirited debate. From there we talked about everything from zoysia grass to the state of South Carolina. It was pretty fun. I was a bit nervous during the exchanges but held my own and even got a few uproarious applauses for some of my comments.
After we were done, the OakTeam theme song soon played and everyone in the band scrambled to find each other to take the stage at the appropriate time. We let it be known that we were glad to be there by playing our hearts out from the first note on. Our only lull in the excitement came when I stopped to drink water to coat my very dry mouth or when I introduced two of the songs. We finished with our goodbye number “Check Please” and took a bow before running off. I think we impressed a few folks who had never even heard of us before and that’s what we came to do. Hopefully, it will impress folks enough to buy the records when the show airs on XM radio in a couple of months.
Getting there was no easy task though as we started the trip off with a good ‘ol parking lot situation out on I-40 just an hour out of town. An hour and a half later we had moved about 200 yrds. Even our new Tom-Tom GPS system had no answer. It’s loaded with Mr. T’s voice and it’s funny for about the first hour or so but after a while it starts to drive you crazy. We were gonna use George Bush’s voice but after just five minutes into our 15 hour drive he proclaimed “Mission accomplished!” and we we had to go back to Mr. T. Finally, Greg pulled out the Atlas and found us a back road off of the next exit only 5 or so miles out of the way. We were so punished. We wouldn’t have gotten out of the state on Saturday if we hadn’t taken it.
Somehow the name Patrick Swayze came up and Greg accidentally used “swayze” as an adjective to desribe something. “Yeah, like sweet and crazy” I said. So from then on in the van everything was “man, that is sooo swayze!” or “You so damn swayze”. You get the picture. Dumb! And it was VERY weird when merch guy Paul (AKA Clutch Munny), looked down in the checkout line in Wal-Mart and saw Sir Swayze on the cover of this week’s People magazine.

Word. On to Cleveland!