BALD EAGLE GOES TO OMAHA and PLAYS WITH CURSIVE

I mentioned in an earlier blog that my band Bald Eagle had been invited to play two shows with Cursive. On Thursday we played our home town of Columbia, MO with them and another band from Omaha/Saddlecreek Records, Ladyfinger. The show was at Mojo's and eventually sold out, I'm guessing somewhere between 200-300 people. That show went well, but was kind of a cluster fuck because of the small stage at Mojo's and the large amount of equipment on stage.

Now the real reason of this post is to talk about Saturday's show in Omaha, NE. Saturday morning we wake up and struggle to get a plan together about who will be tagging along with us to Omaha. Matt from Cursive told us we could probably get 5-10 people into the show, or also bring people as "crew" members. Which was great news, when we found out that the show was SOLD OUT. I tried to get my roommates to go, Kevin was in, but Billy had to shoot a video for The Foundry Field Recordings, so he couldn't make it. My friend Chris was also down for going, but we were looking for a couple more people to help split the cost of the drive and possible hotel room, after no such luck Bald Eagle and our friends Chris and Kevin left for Omaha. Bald Eagle in the van and Cris and Kevin in a car. The 5 hour drive actually went pretty quick, and we had little trouble finding The Slowdown (the club were the show was being held). The Slowdown is in a part of Omaha that i guess used to be pretty shitty, and now some developer has moved in and cleaned things up. It had a Urban Outfitters, and American Apparel store right next door. As well as a hip coffee shop, and what looked to be a upscale movie theatre. Not to mention the rad loft apartments across the street (i will get to that later).

So we show up at the club and walk in and are immediately blown away. The layout of this place was unreal. It is hands down the nicest club/bar/venue i have ever seen or had the chance to play in. The front room/bar area is huge by itself and has a small stage (maybe a little bigger than Eastside Tavern, and a lot taller). This room can be used for smaller shows as a divider wall can be pulled across the back of the bar blocking the main room (which also can make the big room smaller, for a little bit bigger shows i.e. something like Mojo's). However if you open the divider, you now have a full size venue about the size of The Blue Note (minus the balcony) though there is a small balcony at The Slowdown it is not as big as The Blue Note's. Here is a drawing of the layout.
We are told to go behind the divider wall, behind the wall Cursive is set up and doing a sound check. We get our first look at the stage and, really the club itself. It is designed very well, there is kind of a concrete pit with stair that lead down to it (which is the main area people would be standing in to watch a show) but there are also different levels around the pit with chairs, and stairs that go to the upstairs balcony as well. Plus people can be back at the bar/main room and still see perfectly. The sight lines were great and probably pretty well thought out. This club is only about a year and half old and is apparently owned by the guys who own Saddlecreek Records, their offices were in the building as well (didn't get to see them, but was told were they where located). Hopefully these pictures help you get a understanding of the stage and cement pit i am talking about.




So we are checking out the stage and rad photos on the wall, and Tim Kasher comes out from backstage and says hello. He says "why are you guys out here, come in back and say hello, there is real nice back stage area to hang out in" So we go back stage and at first we just see a load in area and a hall behind the stage with a bathroom. Tim says, "no you have to go upstairs, that is were everyone is at". So we go up a staircase and find a first room filled with tubs of beer, water, red bull, and soda. The rest of Cursive is hanging out in there. The room is very nice and has a washer and dryer in it as well as a full bathroom with a shower and fresh towels (it was out of this world to see a backstage area this nice. Down the hall was another "hangout room" with 4 couches and a giant window that you could look out of, right onto the stage. Basically if you wanted to watch the show from that room you could have by simply looking out that window (this room was more for us and Fortnight, the other band playing the show). However Cursive seemed pretty cool about us using their room too, until it got closer to the show, then they kind of closed things up. I however think that was more on the club than them. We all shared a growler of 2003 barley wine from flat branch, that was brought by friend Chris. Off of the hang out room were door that lead to the balcony were the bands could also watch the show and they were blocked off from the public. The backstage area looked like this. Though these pictures do little justice to how nice it was, the rooms were to big to get full pictures of i also missed out on taking a picture of the washer and dryer and bathroom.


After hanging out for what must have been an hour of Cursive doing a sound check we finally loaded in. Having Kevin and Chris proved to be pretty useful, since it was pretty cold in Omaha. Instead of 4 people we had 6 to unload. The show was also big enough that Kevin ran our merch table all night (instead of the usual me running it). This was a huge help as the merch table was very busy all night and i usually have to bust my ass to get there right after we play, this way i could relax and help load out. So we load in (which was easy because the club had a drive up for vans and a garage door that opened for easy load in). No bullshit stairs, plus plenty of room to store all the equipment. We then do a sound check and everything sounds great, both sound guys are really nice (the only club i think we have sounded better in is The Beat Kitchen in Chicago, maybe The Blue Note, but i think The Slowdown sounded better). After sound check we go searching for some batteries (because one of my adapters broke) and some food. After driving around and kind of getting lost we settle for the coffee shop next door to the club. They pretty much just had sandwiches (which took about 20 minutes to make) they were good but not 20 minutes worth of waiting good. The girl behind the counter looked like Thora Birch, but she was wearing over sized dumb ass 80's glasses that seem to be cool (they are not) i just wanted to reach over the counter and push them up her nose, or better yet throw them away. After eating Chris and I go across the street and get two hotel rooms, we wheeled and dealed with the lady behind the counter and i mentioned us playing across the street to see if would get us a discount (it worked, $20 off of each room). This hotel was pretty new and offered a free breakfast and flat screens in the room. SWEET!

We go back to the club and chill for a bit and meet Fortnight, they were all really nice. Fornight took the stage first and the club started filling up. After their set we loaded on stage and began our set. Everything went great, besides a small fuck up at the end of our first song and Mikey's guitar going out (which happened while we were tuning and luckily not in the middle of a song, it was recovered by Danny having another guitar, and McCrady and I providing some bass and drum dance beats also accompanied by the micro korg). All in all i thought we played great, and had a good response. Danny had to give away some guitar picks and a set list and i had some kids that drove from California state talk to me. We ended up selling over $300 in merch. Which was like 12 copies of Hot Shoulder on CD and 4 or 5 on LP, plus 4 or 5 shirts and a few copies of the older cd's (we are officially out of the Wind Up Dead In A Camaro e.p.). I had pretty much everyone of the bartenders and staff tell us how much they like us. Even a few people who had come just to see Cursive told me they were kind of bored by Cursive (i thought Cursive was great that night), but were very glad that we had played and that they got to see us.

Cursive went on and played great, they gave shout outs to both us and Fortnight. We just drank and hung out while they played, and i got to see my old friend Lincoln Dickinson and his wife Kate. Plus one of the bartenders was my friend Boz i know from way back when who played/plays in a band called Her Flyaway Manner (from Lincoln, NE). So it was great to catch up with them. After the show the promoter (Marc from 1% productions) had a lot of good things to say and invited us back, and gave me his card. I felt pretty good that we had impressed so many people and had a chance to play a SOLD OUT show with a band like Cursive who has been around for 15 years and that i respect in so many ways. There ended up being somewhere between 500-600 people at the show.



So the show finishes and we are loaded up, we stick around for awhile and shoot the shit with Ted and Matt from Cursive. They pretty much decide they are gonna call it a night. They had to drive their gear back to a practice space and Tim and Cornbread were both sick. I figure they had more important people to see and hangout with than us anyways. Lucky for us Fortnight had invited us to a party at their loft which happened to be right across the street. So we bought some beer from the bar and went to the party. The lofts used to be a Ford manufacturing plant. Someone came in and gutted the building and built a ton of lofts in there. They were amazing and i really wish Columbia had something like this, not sure what the price tag on them would have been, but the design and layout was pretty impressive. Fortnight had made us some mac and cheese, so we hung out and drank with them and later most of the bartenders from The Slowdown and a few people from the show showed up. Chris got hit on by a couple of milfs, pretty great. Mikey and McCrady had already gone back to the hotel, so Danny, Kevin, Chris and I stubble in around 3 or 4. Chris and I went and talked to this Russian girl at the counter and got her to get us a roll away bed for the room. We all pass out and wake up to a bunch of snow. FUN! So we get up and get our free breakfast, which wasn't to bad for a hotel (eggs, muffins, cereal, fruit, doughnuts, juice, coffee, yogurt, etc.) and then we pack up and hit the road. Our windshield wipers were sucking so we went to a gas station to buy new ones and had a hell of a time getting the old ones off, to realize we bought the wrong size. I had to go return them and then we went to a different gas station to see if they had the right size. We found what we needed and got them on, they still sucked. The ride home was cold, and wet. The heat wasn't working well, and our windshield was hard to see out of. My feet were wet and cold from snow going through the holes in my shoes. We made it back in under 5 hours and everyone was tired. We unloaded and went our separate ways. The trip was over.

All in all i had a blast, there was a small argument that i left out that kind of ruined the night. It isn't worth mentioning on here. I looked past it and had fun with the people that were in a good mood. I am really glad that we got to be a part of this show, and i was super impressed with The Slowdown and Omaha in general. The other two times i had been to Omaha sucked. We played at shitty clubs to pretty much nobody and it wasn't much fun. Hopefully our next trip there will be as good. Thank you so much to Cursive. It was nice to play in front of 500 + people who had never seen us, and for it to all go over so well, and get the great response that we got. Lets do it again.

Here is a video of a new song called "Barf City" it was our last song of the set.