I had a fantastic weekend. Friday night it was off to Pete‘s show in Hays at the Brass Rail. He had a very good show. Thanks to him for letting me open and thanks to his friends for insisting that I drink so much. Or maybe not.

I decided that his awesome guitar sound comes not from his guitar, but from his sound board. I plugged my Martin in to his board and it was the sweetest sound I’d ever heard in my life. He had some different speakers on Friday so it was pretty obvious that the sound is in his board. I’ve got to get me one of those.

After the show, I decided I needed to up my cheeseburger consumption total for the day from 5 to 7. I pull in to Burger King at 2:30am because they were the only place open on my route back to Victoria. As soon as I pull into the chute to where I can’t turn out or back up without hitting a curb or the car behind me, the place is swarmed by 4 police cruisers. They cuffed, questioned, and searched the car directly behind the drive through window. I waited in line for 45 minutes to get 2 cheeseburgers and a water. It was probably not the best time for me to wait in line around Hays’s finest.

Saturday it was westbound 70.

The Colby show was great. I hadn’t played with a band in a long time and certainly not with red dirt country music. I was amazed at how good we sounded, especially considering that we had never practiced it together before. We sounded so much better than anything I could have possibly imagined going into the show. I guess that’s what you get when you put together top-of-the-line musicians. It’ll be interesting to see what we can do once we have time for a few practices.

The crowd was pretty damn good. We had a lot of dancers. It’s not something to which you become accustomed with one man, one guitar. We took a 3 minute break after our first set which we ended with the auctioneer song and this lady came up to talk to me. She said, “Could you write down the name of the song and artist for that one song…um…” I decided to help her out. “Leroy Van Dyke’s ‘The Auctioneer?’ “No,” she said, “the combine song.” She couldn’t believe that I actually wrote that song and she seemed very upset when I told her that I had only a sample available for download. Oh well. There were two groups of people who knew and requested stuff from TGD. That was cool. I wish we had known more than the two or three that we played. We had a lot of dancers. That’s not something to which you become accustomed with one man, one guitar. Sure, you get a few couples dancing here and there, maybe some really drunk people towards the end, but we had a lot of dancers. The place was full all night, but after the show the owner said it was kind of lackluster, probably due, he guessed, to the football game that everyone came out early to see. Apparently the owner had several requests to have us back. We booked a Friday and Saturday in February. Check the calendar for information.

Upon returning to Hays by 4:30am I decided we had made such good time that I should not stop. I guessed that I had had enough caffeine, both black and white, to make the rest of the drive to Manhattan town. This was a decision I came to regret about the time I got to Salina. Thanks goes to the nice lady working at Salina’s Petro:2 which seems now days to be my favorite port out in the storm. I guess I looked so terrible amongst all the republicans that just woke up in their damn neon orange hunting hats that she gave me my coffee for free. That made me feel good enough that I didn’t start to nod off again for at least another ¼ mile until I got to the on-ramp back to my king-sized, four-lane, asphalt mattress. I got back to my house at 7:00am. Enough about my stupidity. I’ll probably be out of the loop for the better part of next week because we’re selling a division of Raytheon Aircraft in Andover, KS, on Thursday.

Go see Pete tonight at Rusty’s in the ‘ville. Should be a great party.