Ancient River North American Tour: Winding Down

James and Alex (Ancient River)

[Editor’s Note: This is the eighteenth part in an ongoing series chronicling Ancient River’s 2014 North American Tour. If you missed the first part or would like some background on the series, click here.]

(5/9 – 5/11)

We crossed through the desert from Las Vegas to Santa Ana, California to play the Psycho de Mayo festival. Our friend Jeff was able to join us again, which was awesome. I really enjoyed the set up of the festival, as it was two connected indoor venues called The Observatory and the Constellation Room. There were tons of people at the festival, but there’s something about having it indoors (as opposed to a giant field), which allows for a more intimate vibe that I really love. I was very excited to see Dead Meadow again, as well as Kadavar, Dahga Bloom, Lumerians, and Prince Rama. We performed around 2 p.m., so we were able to kick back afterwards and enjoy the festival. There was food and beer for the artists, and a sweet halfpipe set up surrounded by vendors. Rolling Heavy Magazine was there with an array of tricked out vans. Needless to say, I’m looking for my bearded friend with the long hair and tattoos wasn’t going to work here. I think I can speak for everyone when I say we had a great time.

(5/13)

(Ancient River)

San Jose, California. Silicon Valley. The door guy at the venue was a Google employee. Of course, he was. We were excited about this one because we were meeting up with Steve, Scott, and Jason, who were all James’ longtime friends. Our new friend Clay from San Francisco came out as well, so we had a nice crew developing. The sound engineer was blind, and I thought that was amazingly cool. He could tell me what was going down with my drums down to which lug to tune, without even looking. Much respect for that dude and his audio wizardry. We spent most of the night with our friends, catching up on old times.

(5/14 – 5/15)

In San Jose we stayed up until the wee morning hours with some friends and left around 7 a.m. We drove to Weed, California and stopped there for the night. There’s some pretty sweet mountain views, and we got some good rest there and hit the road to Portland, Oregon the following morning. Portland was one of my favorite shows on the tour mainly because of the lineup. The Verner Pantons and Kingdom of the Holy Sun were great people, and it was awesome to play with them. After the show I met up with an old coworker of mine, Sky Blu. She had recently moved to Portland and was kind enough to let me crash at her place. I stayed up for a while hanging out with her and her roommates before finally passing out.

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Alex Cordova (@theAncientRiver) is a guest contributor for Little Utopia.