The Story of Phoenix

With a long drive ahead of us (what's new?), we leave the oasis of a real house for the heat of the desert, with spectacular home made breakfast burritos in hand. It's hot. And humid. We arrive at the Willow House, a cafe/venue at 5:30pm. We can't believe our luck. We are problem free for the day! An easy show for sure! Jokingly, Hannah comments "with our luck it probably closed down last week or something." Not five minutes later, do we see the sign on the door, announcing the closure of the Willow house as of YESTERDAY due to unpaid rent.

The next thing we know, a young guy shows up on a bike, guesses who we are, and offers to help us find another place to play for the night. It's hot as hell outside. We check with a place called The Trunk Space, which is a little Venue in town, but they already had stuff going on that night. Something about the opening of an Abraham Lincon art show...

We tried a couple more places with no luck. It's getting late...

This guy, (named Ian) lead us to another place called The Fire House, where an open mic is about to begin. Better than nothing, right? The space is really cool, the venue is outside. There are tons of people there who seem genuinely excited, everyone was really nice. We signed up on the list with the guy who was in charge, (his name was Ernesto),

Then things get messed up, again. A local band goes on before us. Ok, cool... Open mic night, right? So they'll play like 5 songs and get off? Nope. They play for AN HOUR. Then we are supposed to go on, but another band shows up and starts telling us they "booked" this show. Uh, sorry... how do you "book" an open mic? They kept saying how awesome they were and how everyone wants to hear them play. So modest... They hadn't even signed up on the list. We had.

So we go on. I'm using The Hand That Bleed's amp, and I don't know the settings well. Something was fucked up but I didn't know what. We play a set that the crowd LOVED but we HATED because of the fucked up sound. We sold more records that night than we did anywhere else. The Hand That Bleeds, bless them, played only 1 song so we could get out of there and "out of the way" of the other bands. I felt, even though we only played 5 songs, that we took up too much time.

We packed up and left for LA. Fuck Phoenix. There was pink lightning in the sky, but it wasn't beautiful enough to make us ever want to go back.

We slept in a rest stop somewhere between Phoenix and LA, out underneath a sign that read "CAUTION: Poisonous snakes."