Amazingly, Ghengis Tron has more crap than we do.

Driving back from Philadelphia. Tonight was the first of four nights in a row with Satan/Coleco mainliners Genghis Tron and Moog mystic Steve Moore. It's about 1/4 to one and we're just getting settled on the highway back to NYC. Bits of snow, but nothing like the whiteout that people just seem to love getting worked up about.

(Note: this would change by the time we got up the next morning. Change a lot.)

First time we've played Philadelphia and if there is a top of our game then we were at the bottom of it. Get this: in 10 years of playing live, Thad has not once broken a bass string. We swap 'em out during practice when they get too dull, I'll occasionally bust one when I'm monkeying around on the bass at home, but we've been safe as houses when we get in front of people. Well, he sure broke one tonight. There were a few minutes of us not playing music at all as he fought with the new tuner we got him. The bass, though, had other plans. Plans involving atonality and alternate tunings and not cooperating. A lot of me running over the microphone and apologizing, feeling painfully aware that while we're occasionally inept musicians, we're always inept comedians.

And when we did play ... well, I'd say we just about sucked. Smearing notes all over the place, missing cues here and there, just not able to nail these songs that we have allegedly written. All the while, the amp running the subwoofer was getting lousy power and so popping like Orval Redinbocker.

But Philly was kind enough to act the part and give us that brotherly love, or at least cousinly like. Several misguided folks came up to us and said they thought we were good. I wanted to patiently explain to them in a friendly way that we were a much better band than the one they'd just seen. But I'm not good at that kind of thing, so I just said thanks and tried to change the subject. "I appreciate it and what do you think about this McCain having an affair stuff crazy huh?

Later, to show that we're fun lovin' chaps, we stole 2 cans of Budweiser from GT. I took a picture of me drinking one and texted it to Mookie, the Tron Frontmon. Odd, it doesn't seem so funny now that I type this.

Of course the cruel coda to this mess is that we simply cannot get out of this city to head home. It took us about a 1/2 hour to get out of Philly. I mean, sure, Mapquest said the club was close enough to the highway that we might mistake it for the median. But, for some reason, every road brought us back to the train station and never to the highway. It's like the planning grid for downtown Philly was done by Amtrak. Now we're trying to get some gas, pulling off the Turnpike in South Jersey - the land where gas stations close early and are miles away from the highway. Someone could make a lot of money off this oversight. Although we were pretty close to just running on fumes, we eventually discovered a Lukoil that had the sweet petrol stuff we needed. Thad was so happy that he almost jackknifed the trainer going about 45 as he pulled up to the lonely pumps.

Tomorrow will be good. I just .... I JUST KNOW IT.