San Francisco!

Mark here! I have been a bad boy and not done a blog for a while so I thought I better pull my weight!

Ok, so after the epic drive across america which at the time is always hard but in retrospect always beautiful, we drove into sunny San Francisco which at this point was a sight for sore eyes because we knew we would get out of the car! Its worth noting we had only chosen to continue on with the Tarja tour a few days before as we were planning the texas thing, but it was going so well we decided it would be in our best interests to continue on with these dates!

So we arrived late afternoon at The Grand at the Regency Center which was grand indeed, a large classic style ball room, it was just lovely! We were greeted by the in house crew and began to unload on one of San Franciscos many hills. We entered the venue to see Tarja just finished her sound check, as usual cedric was tunning guitars and maria was tinkering on her keys, mike was messing around on his kit, after getting used to seeing this everyday, its kind of comforting to walk into, for starters it means we are in the right place haha and that we didnt just drive 40 hours in the wrong direction!

We had heard ticket sales were lower for this show, which was fine, even though it was one of the bigger venues. We were second on this evening so by the time we hit the stage to my eyes the crowd was quite healthy and very responsive, I must say i was overall really proud with the way we played on the Tarja tour, some of our best live perfomances to date, San Francisco was no acception even after 40 hours of hell we pulled together a tight set, so it was showing, our 30 gigs previous had payed off:)

After a successful set (kartika / means for an ending / everlasting / down / without reason / blood) we celebrated with a few beers, which turned into quite a few beers, during the tarja set dave and myself when about our nightly ritual of tormenting maria the tarja keyboard player with stupid faces and general annoyence to which she generally seemed amused. By the end of the Tarja set it was safe to say I was quite tanked and went to pass out in the van for a while, I woke several hours later to an even drunker marty beating the shit out of me, it turned out that him and dave had found a nice bar that gave them both endless free shots, these two payed the price the next day, well dave did but thats another story…So San Francisco was not the biggest show but a damn fun one!

Next and final stop on the Tarja tour: Los Angeles House Of Blues!