Well I guess I had it coming to me. Last weekend was so unbelievably smooth, logistically speaking, that a 24 hour period of misery was due to come my way. I’ll sum up my travel like this: Departed Atlanta three hours late, plane was diverted to Ft. Wayne, IN, where we arrived at 4 am, then left via TAXI for a six hour drive to Chicago O’Hare. Needless to say, it has been a struggle to keep my eyes open. As I type this, I am running on 3 hours of sleep, hopefully I’ll be sleeping shortly on this two hour trip home. We’ll see.
Anyway! We were under the threat of stormy weather all day, so we were waiting on pins and needles to make sure the show was still going to happen. The city of Chicago was underwater--as we discovered on our taxi journey into town. The good news was that Alexian Field is located in the suburb of Schaumburg. It is a nice little minor league baseball stadium. So nice in fact that since the ground was wet, they didn’t allow the audience to stand in the outfield for fear or messing up the grass. The stage was set up in center field and faced home plate, meaning that there was around 300 feet of distance between the stage and the stands. Because folks weren’t allowed on the field, it made it a difficult performance for most of the bands on the festival. But the sun came out, and dried up all the rain.... And we were pleased to see the throngs of people rushing toward the stage as we ate dinner in a skybox. Shortly after dinner while Jeremy Camp was on stage, we were able to prep the stage and get ready to rock.
We were two men down for this show, our regular Lighting Director John Hansen, and Production Manager/Monitor Engineer Matt Guice both had to miss this one. In their stead, we had a guy from Indiana named BJ behind the lights and our old friend Chris Biggs on monitors.
The band had their share of weather difficulties too, in the form of plane delays and cancellations. Its funny Tai mentioned after the show that it always seems to be hard to get from the country’s biggest airport to the second biggest. Ironic.
The show itself felt and sounded great. The band played the usual summer set list, including the two new songs, “Lift Up Your Face”, and “Gone” in the encore. The festival crowd was very energetic, and responsive. It felt like an absolute jungle up there, but we all pushed through it and finished strong.
We have a couple of weeks off, so stay tuned... I think I’m going to have some new goodies to post up here in the near future. Have a good one... Nathan
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