After the Ft Worth show we had a day off in Denton, TX. starting then, and up until right now the whole next couple of days were a blur of extreme peaks and valleys, highs and lows, a roller coaster of fun and fear that finally appears to be drawing to a close. I'm gonna go ahead and jump in here....
Here's tim on stage in Ft Worth before soundcheck. Cowboys hate Tim, but that's because they secretly love him. It's the age old tale...
After the show we drove to Denton and met up with Doug Burr at his folks' place. This would be our homebase for the next three nights. It was totally comfortable and Doug's parents were very nice to us. For you super fans out there, this space we're in is also where Doug does his rehearsing.
After we woke up around noon or so we set out on our mission for the day. The goals were, find a Chinese buffet and eat there, go to a post office, go to a bank, go to a music shop, and check out Denton. Here we are demolishing goal #1. We stayed long enough for each of us to visit the facilities and clear out a little room so we could attack the buffet one more time before we left.
After we ate we went to the Denton junk shop and Zac played with this battle axe while bryant got his american brain sucked out by the turbanator.
Then, we hung out reading in this coffee shop literally for hours before the action started. It was very relaxing.
Once our friends realized we were in Denton it didn't take long for word to reach us about Greg Dixon. Greg is the brother of our good buddy Mike, who Zac and I each play in bands with back home. Greg is also a very cool dude. One of these guys that you meet and instantly feel like you've known him forever. We grabbed dinner with Greg and he got to know all of us a little bit before we headed back to his place to chill out and listen to records and tell jokes. Another thing about GD is that he, like his brother, is a real world genius. Alot of our time in his living room was spent with us grinning and giggling while he happily unloaded knowlege of Zeuhl, Brian Eno, and Captain Beefheart on us all while we fired endless questions at him. It was a great night, and it's super cool now to count Greg as a friend.
The next morning, this is what we woke up to. It seems normal enough, but this was no ordinary sleep. Zac was actually entranced in a magical coma that could only be undone with a kiss on the lips. Tim tried, but it didn't work. So, I knealt down beside him and gently pressed my pursed lips against his, to no avail. Finally, Bryant took a crack at it and after a long slow smooch Zac finally woke up. We were worried for a minute, but everything was pretty much back to normal after that.
Once we got cleaned up for the day we went outside and tim grabbed Doug's unicycle to take a crack at it. Turns out, they are hard to ride! Bryant was sorta starting to get the hang of it but we had to go to the show before he really had it mastered.
Greg came out to the show, and his wife Rachel came with him. She was equally as friendly and enthusiastic as Greg, and also a Hoosier. Im glad we got to meet her. Greg recorded the show, too! If we did any good, maybe we'll post it here sometime so you can hear it.
After the show we hung out just shooting the breeze with Doug for a while before we headed back to his parents' place. That's where things were going to get interesting. Unfortunately, this was the only picture I got of Doug. What's happening here is that he is wearing a headlamp and climbing into a tree that has a zipline attached to it. It's about 2am. He took a trip down the line and gave us some advice and a little warning about the end. Bryant was feeling brave, so he climbed up the ladder, settled in and launched himself off the platform. Doug's headlamp only reached so far, so just before Bryant faded off into the darkness, we noticed that he started to spin around and get a little off-kilter. That's bad. Once he went sliding into the darkness we lost sight of him, then heard a crash, a smack that sounded like Frank Thomas smashing an out-of-the-park homer, and a thud. No laughing, no expletives, no grunting...just silence. We ran up to find him and just saw him laying on the ground like a pile of laundry. We picked him up and he couldn't stand or walk at first, he just stumbled around. He was also speaking in tongues and chattering away in complete jibberish. Eventually he started to come to, but was kind of forgetting stuff and not making sense. Over the next half hour or so he got a little better, but was still forgetting things and asking weird questions. We decided to take him to the emergency room. We were in the ER until about 415am, and found out that he was concussed, but that he was going to be ok. By the time we left the hospital he was more or less in his right mind and we were all feeling a lot better. We did have to wake him up every two hours and check him out. Ultimately though, there was really only one way to fix him...
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