I bet you never thought you’d hear me say this, but I had a great time in Yakima this weekend.
It’s true.
If you didn’t happen to see my previous post, I went up to play two gigs with Chad Bault, a singer-songwriter and friend who used to live here in Portland, but recently moved back temporarily.
DrummerAdam and I drove up there on Friday night after work, stopping only for milkshakes and prophylactics–his girlfriend lives up there–and we ended up at SongwriterChad’s house at 11:00. BassPlayerWayne and HisWifeMeg had arrived minutes before us, and Adam’sGirlfriend showed up a little later. We all had pizza and beer and talked until the wee hours, and then Adam and I went to his parents’ house to sleep.
Their house is amazing. It’s a large-ish house on the top of a hill, and the view is amazing.
My eyes popped open at 7:00, so I decided to get up and take a shower, then I went to the back yard and read in the cool morning air. After a while, Adam’s mom came and asked if I’d like some coffee and orange juice, which I dutifully accepted. I went inside and we talked for a really long time, until Adam and Adam’sGirlfriend left to go up to the lake, and Adam loaned me his Honda Element so I could explore Yakima on my own.
I went to get my hair cut and then headed out to make All The Rounds. I went to my old houses and schools. My grade school and junior high school look almost exactly the same. The high school looks mostly the same as it has for fifteen years, but it’s different than it was when I went there. There’s a hilarious new mural that involves a rock band featuring Mr. T as a heavy metal drummer (?), with a sign on the top that says something like, “The Word of T, ‘I Pity The Foo.’ ” Weirdest mural I’ve ever seen. Yes, I took pictures. I’ll have to post some in a separate blog entry. The apartment I lived in (for four years!) was a dump when I lived there fifteen years ago, and it’s only gotten worse with age.
The house I grew up in is very different. The subsequent owners have removed all the fences and almost all the trees from the yard, but the brick front steps that I rebuilt with my ten-year-old hands are still there. The house my mom lives in now–which we moved into when I was in high school–looks great. They’ve completely redone the inside, and now they’re starting to work on the outside as well.
After making The Rounds, I drove over to see my stepdad before having to pack up and head over to Songwriter Chad’s for rehearsal.
The show that night was great, except for the other guitarist who joined us. The Plan was that he was going to play pedal steel (it’s that twangy-sounding instrument that you’ll know primarily from country music), but he showed up with a regular electric guitar because his pedal steel was broken. So we all decided that since he hadn’t rehearsed with us, I would be the main lead guitarist, and he would play sparse slide guitar parts around what Chad and I were doing. But as it turned out, he kept jumping in and taking solos on every single song, and he cluttered up the whole sound of the band. I actually had to walk over and ask him to ‘please lay low on this one?’, and when we took a break, I asked Chad to have a word with him because he was totally stepping on what I was trying to do. That’s the very diplomatic way of saying it; I was about to throw my water glass at his head. So when we came back from the break, I turned up my little amp, and BassistWayne and I just played as if he wasn’t even there, which worked really well, from what I heard later. We had a blast, and the place was packed like it’s apparently never been packed before.
We went home, ate dinner, drank beer, and talked until even later into the wee hours. Adam and his girlfriend went home at 1:00 a.m., but Chad, Wayne, Meg and I stayed up to talk, so I didn’t drive over to Adam’s parents’ house to go to bed until around 3:00 a.m.
The next morning, we had a gig at 10:00 at a raise-money-for-cancer-research walk at Eisenhower High School’s football stadium. Ironically, the band I was in in high school, Iron Horse, had played the exact same event many years before. The sound guy was telling us what we could expect from the sound and from the audience, and he punctuated that by saying, “I’ve been working this fundraiser for twenty years.” I said, “Really? That’s amazing, because I played here eighteen years ago.” He asked which band I played with, so I told him, and he actually (said that he) remembered us. Riiiiight. But it was still a cool and hilarious moment, and he did say that Chad’s band was by far the best band that they’d had at the fundraiser this year, and a few of the nearby volunteers chimed in to agree with him, so that was nice.
After that, we went our own ways, I gave Chad, Wayne and Meg a hug and went to my mom’s house for the afternoon, which was really nice. We talked a lot while I rested and did a load of laundry. I found some hilarious old pictures of myself that I’ll have to post here soon, because you’ll totally crack up. For years I either had a mullet and/or huge glasses, and I looked really gay, except that I didn’t dress well. Gosh, I wonder why I didn’t have a girlfriend for years.
Anyway.
The trip was a blast. A huge thank you to everyone involved in making it the best time I’ve had in Yakima for as long as I can remember.
