ok so the last night at cornerstone i knew i just couldn’t sleep on the cold, hard ground again so i enlisted the help of my good friend colleen…she works for the management of the band cool hand luke and they put her and another merch girl up in the swanky days inn in nearby macomb, illinois…they just so happened to have an empty bed on said night so chris and i got the hookup…we didn’t get a lot of sleep but it was at least nice to sleep on a real, live bed…
we had to take a shuttle van from the festival to the hotel and the four of us had signed up for the last one of the night…while we were waiting for chris to get his things and meet us at the transportation tent none other than shane claiborne walked in…turns out he was staying at the same hotel (actually most of the bands and speakers from the festival stay at that hotel)…so we got to ride over and back with him…he really is a great guy, real down to earth and a lot of fun to talk to…i’m hoping to pick up his book “irresistible revolution” soon…you all should too if you haven’t already…
chris and i got back to the campsite saturday morning and helped everyone load the van back up…we took off on the 5-6 hour drive for indiana after getting lunch in bushnell with all the record machine guys…we played at some place in marion called “803”…i’m not sure if it was a church-run place or what actually…the people were nice but it was kind of a weird place to play right after all the craziness of cornerstone…about 20-25 people were there…a far cry from the 200-250 we got at cornerstone…we made it really fun though as this was winston jazz’s last show with us on the tour…they all got crazy and danced around during our set with their shirts off…then we had the whole crowd come up with us on the last song…that was pretty cool…
afterwards we packed up and drove through the night back to ohio…we dropped winston jazz off in mansfield, said our goodbyes and then continued on home…we got in around 4:30-5am and all went to sleep at our respective homes…
the rest of us are continuing on in the tour for another week…winston were only planning on doing two weeks because they had to get back to their jobs/etc…i’m going to really miss all of them and am especially going to miss hearing them play every night…they’re such cool guys and i hope we get a chance to tour with them again sometime soon…
######Note: This post is from a tour blog that I dutifully kept during the summer of 2007 while touring with the band State Bird. It lives on solely so that one day I can prove to my children that I was once cool.