(just) The Bass Player

Touchdown Jesus was stuck by lightening a few days ago.

It caught fire and burnt down.

If you’re unfamiliar with the “King of Kings” statue that faces I-75 in Monroe, OH.  It had quite a reputation…and a few comedic nicknames, the most popular being “Touchdown Jesus” because of the way his arms were up as though someone scored a touchdown.  A Google image search will bring up a half dozen unique results of people highlighting this.  It’s also been known as, “Big Butter Jesus” because of how much it looked like a butter sculpture at a fair.  There’s even a song about that nickname on youtube.  Anyway, since I-75 runs through Toledo, anytime we have shows toward the South, it was a regular landmark for Sanctus Real.

To be honest, I always thought the statue was a bit ridiculous but mostly just funny.  Now that it’s gone though, I’m finding my heart a little sad.  I guess I miss the landmark.  However, I also recognize that there is a large dose of irony that a controversial Jesus statue was struck by lightening. I’m not sure if I should dig up meaning in that, or just consider it a coincidence.

Anyway, I hear it was insured and they plan to rebuild it.

Have any thoughts?

Ps: Be nice.

dan

Here’s a photo of Pete draining the waste-water tank.  We had 12 people on the bus, so there was a lot of “water.”  It smelled like…asparagus.

Speaking of asparagus, we’ve been enjoying a healthy amount of time off lately.  I say healthy because leading up to it, we were on the road since March and were in dire need of a break.  I’ve since been filling my time with many boring, non-blog related things…dentist appointments, vehicle repairs, etc.  I did sell my car the other day, so that was good. And for some reason I don’t feel a need to buy a new one right now.  Who knows, this may be a motorcycle-only summer.  What do you think?  Should I go for it?  I should probably get a rain suit…

Anyway, we played at a festival in Missouri yesterday.  Fireflight was there.  Stars Go Dim was there.  A friendly chocolate lab was hanging out on stage.  We had gooey butter cake for dessert.  By most measures, it was a fairly decent day until showtime.  Then it quickly went south.  Our set length was 75 minutes, but we didn’t take the stage until nearly 10:45pm.  This means it was midnight before we finished.  People had been standing outside all day long.  They were exhausted before we even hit our first note.  On top of that, we had major technical issues.  Our monitor mixes were completely different from soundcheck. We couldn’t hear each other, which made it nearly impossible to play together.  Then the sound company that was hired to manage the stage never patched a line to Matt’s acoustic guitar.  When he went to start the second song, nothing came through the speakers.  We couldn’t find any of the stage crew to fix it because they had all gone home.  Then adding insult to injury, halfway through the show, my straplock came undone, and my guitar fell off.  The icing on the cake though…the real cherry on top of the whole Friday…after we tripped and stumbled our way through the whole muggy night, we finally start packing our gear to go home.  I walk over to where my equipment is and find that the friendly chocolate lab left a big, stinky present on top of my cases.  Seriously, how does that happen?  Even the dog thought we were terrible!

So what’s the lesson here?  Some days your the dog, some days you’re the musician whose gear apparently looks like a tree.

Anyone else have a day like this to tell about?

dan