On the morning of Day Two: The Crimson Tides went to pick up the tour van and the rental place had gone and rented someone else our fifteen-passenger van. They offered us two cars, which would never work, so after a flurry of drama they found another 15-seater for us. The only catch was that it was located four hours away in Saint John, New Brunswick. So we drove to Saint John, the city where I grew up, and we picked up the van and tore out the back seat and put it on my parents’ lawn.

I had phoned ahead twice to the venue in Fredricton to make sure they were clear on our sound system requirements. It didn’t matter. We showed up and they had a dinky little 150-watt karaoke PA with two small Yamaha speakers, one of which had a blown horn, and a monitor speaker that was paralleled out of the mains. So I got to pretend to be a pushy road-manager-type and the bar owner finally took me on a trip across the river to pick up a sparkling 1500 watt PA, the best that Behringer has to offer.

There were 25 or 30 people at this show. And just like my Dog Day party, most of them were from Halifax. I don’t know what’s wrong with New Brunswick but the place seems to have totally forgotten how to party, or maybe Halifax is a black hole that has sucked all the enthusiasm and party energy away from the province of New Brunswick. The low turnout for this show was criminal but everyone had a pretty good time at Vixen’s on Thursday and we ate good food thanks to the Crimson Tides cooking up a curry meal on a campstove in the parking lot before everyone wound up getting drunk on 40’s and dancing like fools to Windom Earle.