We woke up around ten in Pittsburgh. After repacking the car and eating we headed out for Columbus. On the drive there we kept ourselves entertained with my portable DVD player named Coby. We named him Coby because that is the brand of DVD player he is; pretty clever of us. We plugged him (Coby) in to the car stereo so we could all hear the same thing and watched "Harold & Kumar." Coby was good to us. He allowed us to laugh and have a good time with toilet humor and pot jokes while working his ass off to keep that disc spinning.
We arrived in Columbus at about 3 in the afternoon and went straight to my friend Oli's house to get our heads straight before the show that night. Oli wasn't at home so we walked up the street to find her in the craft store she owns and runs called Wholly Craft. This place rules. It's full of tons of handmade crafts for a million different tastes. Handmade shirts, skirts, wallets, photo albums, you name it.
She gave us the keys to her house and told us to make ourselves at home. On our way back we took a short detour up High St. to Kroger to get some eggs so we'd have something to eat the next morn. While we were there Ryan bought a sweet 3 piece Elvis Pez dispenser set for a friend of his. They were beautiful.
When we got to Oli's, Andrea got to work on some of the projects she had to get done for her job. Ryan, Saysha and I took Oli up on her offer to make ourselves at home and proceeded to thumb through her record collection in search of something enlightening. After finding Boston's first record and throwing that on we had an impromptu interpretive dance session. The perfect way to balance our heads before a show.
At about seven we left Oli's to go scope out the venue, Bernie's. This was the one stop on the trip we were a little unsure of because Bernie's had never technically got back to us with a confirmation on the show. When we got there we undertsood why. This was the most laid back little rock bar ever. The bartender was really nice and just told us to set up and play when the feeling was right. So easy. We took our time setting up our gear, including our kick ass custom Stewart kick drum and waited till we all felt comfortable enough to get started. My friend Chris Burney played a solo set before us which kicked ass. It was a Wednesday night and the bar was pretty slow (our huge Columbus following must not have heard we were playing, or thought it was on a different night!) but Chris was still cool enough to get up there and rock it for us.
Since the only people in the bar were us, three of my friends (thank you Oli, Sarah and Matt), and a couple of local punky lookin' kids we all just took over the bar. We had full control of the stage and pool table. Pretty kick ass, really. After we were all satisfied with our pool games and our respective buzzes, we decided to play. Columbus dared us to rock, and shit! did we rock. It was one of those nights we opened with Dark Side, so right off the "audience" could sense this show was something special. It was. We started in mean and loud and didn't stop until our encore, which was The Misfits "Saturday Night."
Set List:
-Dark Side
-This Happens
-Don't Look Back
-Falling Stars
-Half Here
-Try So Hard
-Consider Me Gone
-Guiltless
-Stuck In My Head
-Saturday Night
