Tour Diary: Paradigm

Days 5, 6 and 7: Crested Butte & Telluride

Crested Butte is a little town modeled directly in the style of those old spaghetti western towns with the swinging saloon doors. Prairies surround the town, of which has one main commercial road and a bunch of houses off to the side; in other words, out of the way of tourists and their cameras. To the northeast of the main strip is a gigantic mountain, a 'butte', which has a crest in it somewhere, hence the town is aptly named. The saloon-looking buildings along the main strip are all clothing stores and souvenir shops, which is boring enough, but they are prohibitively expensive to boot. Your parents might shop in these shops for the sake of novelty, but unless you like the idea of spending a couple grand to look like the narrator from "The Big Lebowski," you probably would not be interested.

Anyway, the people are a great, close knit group of people, who gave us free drinks and forgot to mention that when you are 7,000 feet above sea level, you don't need as much alcohol to get you drunk. I had a beer and a half, and the room was spinning. It amazed me how bars in this town stay in business.

After Crested Butte, we had a night in Telluride, Colo. Telluride is a town of around 2,000 people tucked away in the valley of a gigantic mountain range. It sits at 9,000 feet, and the highest peaks around it reach around 13,000 feet. You can take a gondola up to the main ski peak for free, which is fortunate for us, because everything else in this city is ungodly expensive.

I could blather on and on about the scenery in Colorado, as I imagine anyone who has been here could do. Paradigm has taken me to many parts of the country that I never thought I'd visit and I have loved playing with them for that, but I'll at least say this much: there are absolutely no places we have ever been as beautiful as Telluride and Crested Butte. There are red mountains covered with evergreen trees all over the place — you look up and it's all you see. At night, you can see every star in the sky. Quite different from Louisville.

In Telluride, we played at a place called the Bubble Lounge, which was an oxygen bar, meaning this: the bartender gives you a tube, of which one end goes into your nose and the other end goes into a beaker filled with scented oil. Pure oxygen bubbles through the oil, and you inhale it, breathing normally. It is supposed to relax you and cure high-altitude-sickness, but I was so concerned about getting my money's worth and not breathing any of the regular oxygen that I hyperventilated and started to feel dizzy, which made my altitude-induced headache worse. I am sure it works for normal people.

Anyway, the owners of the club were super-nice and put us up at their condo in Telluride. We leave for Denver tomorrow, have a show the next night, and then we pack it in for home the following day.


*******

Denver and Elsewhere


After Telluride, we headed back to Denver at a place called Quixote's. on our last day off on tour, we had the fortune to visit Red Rocks, a famous amphitheater cut out of, you guessed it, a bunch of red rocks. It's probably the prettiest stage I've ever seen. A friend of ours was the food manager there and comped us lunch, which was delicious(I have a little bit of a foodie streak in me, so I checked out the elk and shi'take mushroom crepes). The venue itself has a sort of mini-museum set up that lists every act that has played there. If you play, you get your name on a big wall with people like the Beatles, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Bonnie Raitt, Phish, Medeski Martin & Wood, and many others. It's inspiring, especially since the people that are up on the wall are either people that have influenced us or people that have made it possible to make the music we play popular to a large audience. You look at that wall and want nothing more than your name on it.

Our last show in Denver, at a place called Quixote's, was strong musically even though we played to a nearly empty room. Sometimes shows are like that; you play your best when you don't care if what you are playing is going to work, and new ideas tend to pop out. Anyway, the bartender and the sound guy though we were great. The people from the halfway house, located across the street, thought we were okay.

Most of the car ride from Denver to Louisville went without a hitch, until around 12:30 in the morning; as John, Dave, and I sat at a gas station on the way home, we got a call from Brian saying that he and Myron got in a wreck and flipped their car two or three times on the highway. There was a little hospital in Sweet Springs, Missouri, about five minutes from where they wrecked. Brian and Myron were sent, via ambulance, to Sweet Springs, and Myron was then transferred to a university hospital in Columbia, about an hour out of the way. He got a nasty bump to the head and his injuries were thought to be serious. Thankfully, they turned out not to be. We picked Brian up, who was released first, and then picked up Myron in Columbia and got two hotel rooms in each respective town. The next day, we rented a car and visited the garage where the wrecked car was.

I couldn't believe anyone survived the accident when I saw the car, yet Myron and Brian walked away with mostly scrapes--no broken bones or concussions. Just as amazing was that most of the gear was still intact, and some of it seemed even completely untouched.

The remaining six hours that we covered today from Columbia to home were spent in mostly silence; maybe sporadic talk about the accident, but not much more. Which is fine. I've spent four or five years on this project and I've known mostly everyone in the band since we were at U of L together. I've grown inseparably close to the others and my life and career after undergrad has been more or less devoted to them. I can't imagine losing any one of them. At this point, we're all a little bewildered of last night's events, and we haven't so much as reacted because I don't think our situation has really sunk in. Tomorrow, some of us have to deal with insurance, tow fees and car rentals, and the loss of thousands of dollars worth of stuff. Tonight, everyone is home and alive, which is more than enough.