One last morning waking up away from home, and after nearly two months, we’re going to see home tonight.
College towns. They each have their flavour, all underlined by the stink of youth.
Not really how I feel, but I enjoyed the sentence. I’ve been reading too much Dan Simmons recently to resist a fun turn of phrase, and they DO each have their distinct flavour. Back home, of course, I grew up dealing with College Park and the University of Maryland, and it’s frat-based campus culture shaped many of my opinions about universities through that all-important point in high school where I was determining what kind of college I wanted to go to.
At the time it was approaching 30,000 students and I couldn’t even comprehend how big that was. The “cool” clubs that my friends wanted to go to were all close to campus, most notably Planet X, which hosted the first open mic I was ever aware of. And the college kids WERE pretty cool, but they all seemed to be generally drunk or high all the time, and no-one seemed to know what they wanted. Not an environment that was appealing to a budding artist who wanted to be surrounded in kind.
This morning we woke up in Bloomington, IN – home to an even BIGGER college. Even at its most populous, UMCP apparently capped out at under 40,000 students – enough to completely take over its environment but easily swallowed by Bloomington’s Indiana University with around 47,000 students enrolled this year, and today we’re playing both in Columbus, OH (Ohio State has almost 58,000 students) and down to Athens, OH (where the local college has a little less than half that number). Tomorrow we’re playing a college in Greensburg, PA and it’s mere 1800 students feels small even compared to my time at MICA (where the student body was a little less than my 5,000 student high school experience).
And yet each environment is substantially different. College Park is practically OWNED by University of Maryland. Every shop reflects school pride, the central thoroughfare is often virtually impassable for young pedestrians and they’re constantly revising their traffic flow to deal with drunk children wandering into the paths of oncoming cars… like it’s the traffic pattern at fault.
Bloomington feels like an arts town. Columbus feels like a city with a college in it and is big enough to hold its own against the school’s culture. Greensburg? Who knows. I don’t know that we’ve ever entered part of the town that wasn’t the college. Athens feels more like College Park in its complete submergence in the local college culture and as we enter Casa Nueva to play a very, very late show, sure enough we have to do a little weaving to avoid staggering students.
We’ve played two gigs tonight. First in Columbus, OH, after a pleasant day wandering Short North, we load-in and do a fun three hours at World of Brewery with a good little turn out of local friends. Heather takes the last song solo so Kristen and I can start breaking down in preparation for a sprint south to Athens, OH. A favourite place of Heather’s, both the Athens and Columbus venue kind of got back to us at the last second – we did the math and figured out how to make it work and so some 70 miles later we were rolling into Athens and watching a band called the KGB power their way through a marvelous set of Americana and country tunes. Pretty bad-ass. Pretty bluegrassy.
They were also SO swift at breaking down and making a run for it at the end of the night that their bass player left his bass on the sidewalk. We’ve done some legwork in the hopes that some sort of reuniting could be perpetrated, but it quickly became apparent that even though we were both playing in the Pittsburgh area the next night there was no way we could fit the instrument in our car. I’d had a brief flash of optimism when I remembered that we’d sold ALL of our merch a little while ago… but then ALSOremembered that we’d picked up a new box in Belleville, IL.
Sigh. You can’t save the world. Not even one bass at a time.
By now we’re making our way swiftly back north and to the east to play Pittsburgh University at Greensburg in PA – and then even later tonight we’ll be making our way even further east back home to Baltimore. It’s gonna be a bit of a long night.
