Montreal, Canada - Show Day
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Up at 8:30am at the Canadian border, we all march into the Immigrations/Customs building. As they are going through the passports and making sure everyone is accounted for, they are searching everything in our buses. They eventually decide to bring in the dogs and go through everyone's bags and also have the dogs 'sniff' all of us too. They find no contraband, and I think they're a little disappointed. Since we have 3 crew buses we're not done until after 11:30am. And this is on a show day where we normally load in at 8am. Luckily our rigger and a couple of 'key' lighting personnel flew in last night to get a head start on the day.
Arrive at the venue around 1pm, sound isn't even in the air yet. Catering isn't set up and there's no internet as we are playing on an island. No use in me even attempting to go onstage and work, so I ride my bike around and take a few pictures (to be uploaded later). The island (park) that we are on is very beautiful, with gardens and sculptures. The gig is quite primitive with no buildings, everything is tents, trailers, and port-o-potties. The crowd will stand on a lovely dirt field (hope it doesn't rain).
Band comes in just as we are done with line check. Afterwards I'm off to the bus to nap, as I didn't get much sleep with our 3 hour border crossing.
Great show, Canadian fans are always enthusiastic. Short load out and off to bed, but I'm up around 2am as everyone else is going to bed (early for them) and I stay up until the merch guys roll in and we're off to Ottawa. I end up as the last guy awake and hit the bunk around 4am.