Jorgensen Music

Murray Theater

The Desert en route to Salt Lake City was hot in a way I had never experienced. It was so hot and so dry that it was almost comfortable when we got out of the van at rest stops. We pulled off the highway in Las Vegas and drove through the throngs of tourists and garish casinos, and Luke observed “I think that this might be the worst place.” Stopping at 1am, we crammed seven people into a nasty motel room, woke up the next morning, and got to Salt Lake in time for our radio performance. An attempt at jogging proved futile, as all roads in Salt Lake’s outskirts seem to abruptly turn into freeways and sidewalks appear and disappear in no predictable pattern. Escape from the heat was especially sweet as I warmed up my trumpet while standing over a powerful floor a/c vent in the station’s boardroom.

Our final show with Gomez was in a suburb called Murray at the old town theater. Immediately upon arrival it became clear that the promoter and crew were a disorganized lot. We loaded our stuff into the lobby and nobody could tell us anything about where to put gear, where the greenrooms were, etc. We learned later that part of the reason for this was that the promoter also supplies the area’s best pot. He offered us his wares for sale, but claimed he couldn’t afford to fulfill our rider because of weak ticket sales. Gomez didn’t even show up until around 5:30 and proceeded to rehearse until 6:40. The doors were supposed to open at 7:00 and the Gomez crew was showing no urgency in clearing the stage for us to set up. We got the stage at 6:55 and set up lightning fast, but the promoter had only hired one guy to set up the whole sound system and run both the house and monitor boards. Our band is very complicated, usually there are three techs working on it for an hour, and the poor guy doing it alone this night also had to deal with lots of bad chords and broken equipment. At about 7:10, the promoter came in and asked if we were done yet so he could open the doors. Finding out we were not even in a place to make sound yet, he stomped off muttering profanities. They opened the doors as we still sound checked, some of us in our running clothes, and fans streamed to the front of the stage. Getting things the best sounding we could, we took a five minute break to get dressed and then played our set. It sounded like whale songs on stage due to feedback, but we had a spirited show anyway since most of the house seemed to be there for us rather than Gomez. Then it was off to the airport hotel to grab a few hours of sleep before heading to the airport for a 7:10 flight to Chicago.