DAY EIGHT - THURSDAY, MAY 06 - JACKSONVILLE

Once again! Up early to hit the road in time to make it to the next city! We were heading to Florida! And what a drive it was!
We made it to Beautiful Jacksonville! For once, we got to the club early and no one was there. The club is called Jackrabbits and its pretty legendary. Everyone has played that at one time or another. We have also played here four or five times and tonight.....we would play here again!! It was pretty hot and humid and we were just sitting there waiting to get into the club, so everyone split to go do laundry.. you can imagine the stinky clothes piling up in your bag after awhile...it starts to leak onto your clean clothes and then suddenly... you have a trunk full of stink. Well, lucky for us there was a coin laundromat ...right down the alley from the club. And, boy, was it ever awesome. Coins in, water comes out! OH THE THRILL!

After doing laundry, we all rushed back to sound check where .. tensions started to creep in... Between stinky clothes, lack of sleep, and the heat and the small stage, dudes be starting to get grumpy. Almost like a REAL rock band...ha...Nate tried to help the mood by putting on some cute shorts and tuning everyone's guitars. It was cute but it may have bummed more people out than was intended.

After sound check we rushed over to the local Super 8 motel to check into some cheap rooms and go SWIMMING.. in the hotel pool....across the street. We were like little frogs on the pond.. jumping in, swimming, and jumping in again... OH THE JOY!

Back to the club to catch the tail end of KOO KOO KANGAROO. Who have, incidentally, challenged the Aquabats to a 3 on 3 basketball game and seem to be talking an awful lot of junk about the Aquabats losing. Well, their set was good... but... they may be in trouble.


Action Design is always great and we love playing with them. I think the kids have a harder time accepting them though because they have the tricky misfortune of beign wedged between two HAM bands. Bands that are playing for jokes as much as they are playing music. Might be tough on the Action Design at times. Fortunately, for the most part, the kids that come to the shows are all pretty open minded and understand the Action Design wouldn't be playing if we didn't like them.

We hit the stage around 10pm and it was a full on punker type show.. small stage, small room, lots of people smashing into each other.. it was pretty gnarly. We had a great time and played the hits like they were on fire..? i guess, we did pretty ok. No one threw bottles at us.. or even worse pulled a gun on us... so that was cool. Our Russian prison parolee Evan came out on stage in some pretty short shorts during Pool Party.. .. they looked a little like these...

After the show we met some kids out in our dressing room... which looked incredibly like the dirt parking lot.... ok which was the dirt parking lot. Standing in an alley, changing out of your sweaty superhero costume on the broken glass littered dirt... is really kind of glamourous if you think about it. It so macho...

Kids just poured around the side of the building as we were changing and loading out.. not too private but... what can you do?
We met two cool surfer dudes, who were actually from FT. LAUDERDALE but were up in Jacksonville for school. Ricky and the MCBC were discussing the finer points of surfing with these two young dudes and the possibilities of surfing Jacksonville Pier in the morning were discussed. Numbers were exchanged and a plan was hatched to go surfing early the next morning! HOORAY FOR SURF!

As we finished packing up, someone in the band thought it would be funny to spray Ricky with a fire extinguisher .... but it wasnt funny. Ricky got extinguisher powder in his eyes and lungs and a dark cloud of bad vibes spread through out the camp. We did our best to fight of the flames of turmoil but we all realized it would be best to get back to the hotel and sleep it off.

Back safely at the Super 8. Jacksonville... tonight was great.