Tour with The Cramps finished. And what a crazy little tour it was. Mostly good venues, a couple of stinkers here and there. We were lucky to have a good bus driver, though it was his rookie tour, he was a smooth safe driver, which always makes things less stressful.

Numbers, Houston, TX – Aztec Sound bring in one of the better rigs on the tour, a XL-200 and and an EV-X rig.

The Roxy, Boston, MA – great working with Brian of Showmix again and his Ameks.

you guess where, Orlando, Fl Ahhh the Crust, eh hem, I mean Crest.

On the tour we stopped in Washington D.C. to play the most excellent 9:30 Club. Was great to see that they replaced their Crust, ah hem!, Crest with a new desk. Something I hadn’t seen before, the Audient Aztec. With the exception of the color choices of orange and light blue for many of the knobs, I liked it quite a bit. 12 VCA’s (what is one to do with 12 VCA’s?) Good sounding desk, nice eq’s and mic pre’s. Definitely a big improvement over what was in there. Some other cool features – the ability to assign aux sends to the matrix, and a “ambience” section in the middle consisting of a stereo mic pre, bass and treble eq, and assignment to aux sends (cool for bored tapes or in ear monitors audience mics).

During the tour my Tour Manager Itinerary File Maker Pro Solutions got tweaked a bit. I’ll have an updated version out soon. But before I put it up I want to make some other changes. There are allot of venues that only take a percentage of your T-shirt sales (or anything that isn’t a CD or record), so now my next puzzle is to get my merch files to be able to handle this. I also want to get it to work well in a GST or VAT situation. Other modifications include a label layout for printing the guest list (so you can put labels on envelopes), more ticket price spaces on the deal sheet (along with some other small layout changes). And I ponder weather or not I should make it able to do two different hotels, which it used to do long ago, but I took it out, as it was extremely rare that I was getting two different hotels (band, crew). But on the Cramps tour when we were in NYC there was the need for two (one for band in NY and one for bus and crew in NJ). So I contemplate adding it in again, the main hassle being able to fit two hotels in the itinerary book pages (as I try to make it so the small itinerary books can be printed up 1/4 page). Any suggestions?

I said goodbye to the Cramps after the show at Irving Plaza (sold out, went great, hate mixing from the balcony there) and then spent some time in Queens visiting Josh before heading upstate to see how Mercury Rev were doing, and doing well they were, busy on all sorts of projects besides working on their next album.

Then a long drive to Slippery Rock, PA to visit my friend Jennifer, then up to western NY to visit friends and family, back across NY state to Queens again, and then back up to Albany to Fly back down to Newark and finally back to San Francisco.

Current Projects? – Cleaning the kitchen, and the living room, and my room, and the bathroom, and the hallway, and the back room, and the little closet off of the kitchen, and the…..