Getting to Shows, the hard way..

What a day.

6AM, up and off to Dallas Love field for the "cost saving" southwest flight.

So, compared to American, I saved about $500 on the fare for the DFW->Chi->SF->DFW trip.

The first leg is 3 days in Chicago, 2 nights of MMJ, followed by a night of Umphrey's McGee, then off to SF for the Ratdog/Phil Lesh & Friends for the 30th and New Years Eve.

So I'm sitting in the terminal, we first get "news" that the plane is in "pattern" and will be delayed.

Then they announce it was low on fuel, and rather than land the damn thing in Dallas (it was a whopping 10 miles out), they send it to friggin Austin. WTF? That's like driving in to work to use the bathroom when you're sitting at home.

So now we're delayed at least 2 hours.

1:45 later? They cancel the flight altogether. Fuggin great.

Truth of the matter? Crew had been on longer than 8 hours, which means they would have had to call in another crew and pay the overtime. Rather than do that, they "cost saved" by canceling the flight completely.

So next they tell us that they have 40 seats to Little Rock on another flight, but they're going to have to "raffle" them. This takes another 45 minutes. I lose out on the raffle, but no worries, they come back on the PA and announce that the connecting flight from Little Rock to Chicago has been cancelled as well.

Joy.

Furthermore, they have NO other flights to Chicago with any available seats until (get this) MONDAY.

This is not gonna work.

On the phone to American, lo and behold they have a flight to Chicago, one way, last minute for a paltry $900. More joy. However, as I have all our tickets and unless I get to Chicago my brother's going to be left twiddling his thumbs at the happy assed hotel.

Break out the plastic, and now I have to hop from Love field to DFW. My wife heads back to the airport to shuttle me.

Finally, at my second airport of the day, with a new flight that will put me in at 4ish. Except for one small thing.

The plane to Chicago has landed, but can't "get to the gate" because the "just regated" plane at the gate hasn't left yet. So we sit and twiddle. For like an hour and a half as they load luggage, and meanwhile the people on the inbound flight (that's supposed to be my outbound flight) sit on the tarmac twiddling. Oddly, there were open gates at several other places in the terminal, but it obviously didn't occur to them to use them.

More joy.

So...

They finally get the luggage loaded, and our plane pulls in. My 3rd departure time of the day (1:45) has now morphed into 4:45, meaning landing in Chicago has gone from my original noon arrival into 6:30, and of course the show starts at 7:30.

Getting into Chicago, I share a cab with this woman, and we're both amazed that of all the crazy high speed maniac cab drivers we could have got (and that I would have really liked at this point for time reasons) we land the ONE cabbie in all of Chicago who insists on driving like 25 in a 45 while yakking non stop to his buddy in some unidentifiable (to me) language. My 20 minute cab ride is now pushing the 40 range.

By the time I got to the hotel, the band was due to go in in 3 minutes.

Lovely.

Fortunately for me, in the ONE break I got all day, they were late starting.

So off to Will Call to nab my press credentials. Security was very nice, they even walked me down to the "photo pit" which at this venue means "the aisle on the right of the stage" because there really ISN'T a photo pit.

Somewhat less than optimal shooting location, but oh well.

What followed, made the whole day worth while. The show was, in a word, friggin awesome (ok, that's two words but oh well). Now my bro has this nitpick bit about most shows, (I think he suffers from "been to too many shows and now we have to grumble about them as a function to prove just how many we've been to" disease, but I digress in the interests of busting on him).

=)

They brought it, big time. More in depth review to follow.

Published again, and didn't even know it.

I completely stumbled across this on the web last night:

Tampa Tribune Story

I remember shooting the event (Dean Zelinsky is a friend of mine and flew me out there to cover the event). I knew that a bunch of my shots from the thing were used by Guitar Player (I got a 10 page spread out of the deal), because the check showed up.

However, it was a bit of a shock to find this thing and go, damn, that shot (the one of Navaro) looked really familiar. Then I saw my name there. Oddly, I have no idea how they got them. GP & Dean used some of the shots, but I have zero clue how the hell a guy from Dallas shooting an event in LA ends up in a Florida paper. Spose I should be flattered, although they didn't do a great job on the halftones. I should call the guy and ask em for a decent digital copy of the story I guess.

This isn't the first time, I had a bunch of folks tell me about some other stuff I shot showing up in Vintage Guitar last year, and I still haven't even seen that one.

Ah the joys of teh intrawebz. Funny assed stuff.

Butchie joins Phumes!

I'm really thrilled to have Butch Worrell join the Phumes site.  It's really great to have a shooter of his caliber here.  Butch has been shooting the scene for WAY longer than I have, and a quick glance at his .org photos gives you an idea of how long he's been at it.

As we're still just getting set up, we don't have his stuff here... yet.

Rest assured, once the techie stuff gets ironed out, his killer shots will be here for everyone to enjoy as much as I do.

Again, welcome, and damn glad to have ya.