My Hearts In Texas

Back in Texas. After a week or so at home I am back in Texas. It was great to be home with my sweetie. It was sort of hard to back at work though. Makin music is much more fun. We had a gig in Ft Worth last night at J&J's Blues Bar. I had played there on New Years Eve so i knew what the club was like. We all met at Joe's place at 6:30 to go to the storage facility and head out. Ft Worth is about 30 minutes away...normally. Well a huge storm was bearing down on us. The weather guessers had been prediction thunder, lighting and tornado's. They were right. As we were all climbing in the van after hooking up the trailer the sirens started howling. I have never heard this and it was a bit scary. I later found out the siren means a tornado has touched down nearby. The sky was getting dark. We had decided to head over to the storage a block away and see how it went. At that point Phyllis, (The Voice Of Reason) came out and insisted we get our dumb asses in the house. We did and she was right. Minutes later the sky got darker and darker. We were watching the TV show a satellite image of this huge storm heading right towards us. the lightning and thunder started. Soon the hail came down like golf balls. The power went out n the house and we lit some candles. It dawned on me loading the trailer in this might suck. The images in the house were weird. Strange noises all around including a portable weather radio. I got my lap top out and we looked at a current satellite image. It appeared the worst had passed. Fun's over, back to work. We headed out in the light rain and got the trailer loaded. I drove the van over to Ft Worth. It was quite emotionally taxing as it was still raining and plenty of lightning. A tornado had touched down about 3 miles from the club. I guess a few semi trucks blew over and a store got it's roof ripped off. We arrived safe and loaded in with light rain helping us. The patron started coming in as we set up. We where about 2 hours later than we wanted to get there. Once we launched i totally settled in. We decided to go with the new material on the first set. I felt good about my performance. The place wound up about half full. We were surprised that many people braved the weather. The second set went well also and we had a guest up to sing the last few. The guest vocalist is a very old guy that comes every time Joe is there. It was a cool change of place. After the gig we loaded up and headed back to Dallas. None of us had had dinner so we stoped at Whataburger around 3:00AM and pigged out. The manager guessed we were musicians.. Good guess. We drove back to Dallas and loaded into the storage then to Joe's to unhitch the trailer. Joe then drove me to my suite at Motel 6. I arrived at the room at 4:30 and went to bed at 5:00. A day in the life of a working drummer.

I can tell you i slept really good.

Tonight i went to a few local clubs to check out some music and meet some of the Dallas Blues heads.

and now... Good Night.