California, there we go

This license plate was affixed to a car down the street from the house in Sacramento where we played the final show of our tour last night. It really sums up the experience of the show.

We played in the back yard of this palatial house in the burbs, for a private party celebrating the safe homecoming of a soldier friend who had been in Iraq. Very nice people all. Plenty of free food and booze. So, all the makings of a fun party but hardly the right conditions for a Hands of Plenty show. The audience was all either over 45 or under 12. And no one paid us much mind. And we learned that we play pretty poorly beyond a certain level of intoxication. So it was quite a way to end this string of shows.

But whaatev - California has been good to us. Sure, Arcata sucked (much to the consternation of our once-Arcata-based friends), but San Francisco was wonderful (the show, the company, the city), Davis felt like a recharging of our batteries, with a ravenous crowd and wonderful people to relax with.

The show in Sacramento was equally good, but in yet another kind of way. When we arrived at Luna's, we greeted somewhat brusquely by the owner who, due to some communication breakdown somewhere along the line, was expecting just me and my guitar to grace his tiny stage - not five smelly dudes with four amps and a drum set. We could see his eyes bulge from their sockets when Dan wheeled in his enormous, coffin-like bass cab.

But i think we won him over in the end. We played between two very talented local songwriters, Vinnie Guidera (pictured) and Scott Bartenhagen. The place was tiny and so packed, with Jesse and Lisa, some of Dan's local entourage and bunch of other folks. So instead of going the Sophia's route, we played it cool and quiet, starting with Telephone and Empty Bed and easing ever so slowly into the more uptempo numbers.

And as the dance-happy crowd in Davis pushed to get dancier and happier, this small, polite audience pushed us to be ever more intimate. I loved it. I reflected on the idea of terroir that I wrote about here a couple days ago - the idea that there are still things that you have to go the source to find, that you can't have delivered to you. For an example, I slow-jammed a number of excerpts from the wall in the men's restroom.

A few samples:

"I just want to be a good father - bu the bitch won't let me."

And:

"The problem with poetry is that nothing rhymes with scrotum." (Though an older audience member rightly pointed out that "totem" fits.)

At any rate, while these were sentiments you might find expressed in any bathroom stall anywhere, these particular ones existed only in the men's room at Luna's in Sacramento, Cal. I'm struggling to articulate for myself just why that's important, but it has seemed almost magically so on this trip.

We crossed the border as I've been writing this. So hello again to Oregon and thanks to California for one of the best musical weeks of my life.