ECHO LOCATION

ECHO PROJECT – ATLANTA, GA

OK! I know, I know, where have I been? Well, I'll tell ya....I've been all over this vast country of ours! Sorry for the delay, getting on the laptop & updating the blog has proven to become more & more challenging as the tour ripens like the stench on our rapidly decaying uniforms.

I think I left off as our heroes traveled to Atlanta, Georgia to play the Echo Project Festival with other bands such as The Killers, The Roots, Brazillian Girls, Thievery Corporation, Les Claypool, The Dirty Dozen, The Flaming Lips, Cat Power, The Bravery, Spearhead….and on and on. Check out their website….www.echoproject.com for a complete list. A lot of great music, 5 huge sound stages, and we camped in the VIP area so we got to rub elbows with a lot of them. It was their first year doing it, so I think the ticket sales weren’t as high as they had hoped, but there were about 10,000, so there was a pretty good crowd for most of the shows.

The first day we did a long, dusty hot march to get the word out about our 12:30pm show the next day. It was fun, we made friends & got some free beer out of it. We had the rest of the day to chill out, nap, play poker in the VIP lounge, and check out some great music. I was pretty psyched to see the Killers, and they put on a super high energy, very well played show as the headlining band that evening.

Next morning we were up & at ‘em & marching to the stage at Noon for our set at the 3^rd stage. Despite our early set time, we packed the tent & played a rocking show that started & ended bang on the dot. Everything had to be timed very precisely because the next band would go on a half an hour after us & the sound guys had a lot of work breaking down all our mics & such. After the set we were whisked away on a rock & roll series of photo shoots, interviews & even a video feed “Hi, we’re the MarchFourth Marching Band & we’re having a great time here at the Echo Project in Atlanta, Georgia!” (Scream, run around & then run out of frame.) That was pretty fun!!! Then a bunch of us got backstage for The Roots. THEY COMPLETELY ROCKED!!!! I was sooo blown away when they did the most amazing hip-hop cover medley/odyssey through musical history EVER and then they did a screaming version of “masters of war” that made me CRY!

Then it was back to camp for Tallboy & Mr. Bitter’s birthday party @ the VIP lounge. Things got inevitably fun & crazy & we decided we should do an impromptu gorilla march after the last band was done playing. SO, at 11pm, we went out & freestyle jammed for all the late night crews that were still carousing about. Even Michael Franti came out & danced into the night to the sounds of a very inebriated M4 crew. At some point, the band started marching back towards camp, but a whole lot of security guards told us we could not go that way. I went back & asked them why & in his Atlanta drawl, he said, “we closed all that area down, if you go that way, all these people will go that way too.” SO I asked, well, would you like us to take all these people the other way & put them to bed for you? He said, “I’d be much obliged”. SO, we did just that. We marched everyone over to the public camping area & then to the “afterparty” which consisted of a tent with some lights & when we got there, us.

A bunch of us decided to head back to camp, so we headed up a posse & started the walk back. I wound up hanging out on top of the bus until the wee hours of the night with some other musicians from Spearhead & an afropop band I forget the name of (SORRY!). We were exchanging stories about life on the road. All of them were in deep appreciation & admiration for the fact that we (at that point in the tour) had 35 people on our bus & we hadn't killed each other... yet. We also learned some potty protocol that was even more bad ass than our potty protocol. Seems the Spearhead bus driver will not let anyone pooh in the potty UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES! If you have to go # 2, you have to put it in a BAG! WHOA. We're not that hard core. Our policy is only pooh in the potty in extreme emergency circumstances. But maybe we should be more harsh, DANG that Potty is STANK!

All & all Echo Project was a huge success, and a whole lot of fun. We even got a write up in the Atlanta paper on Monday morning with the Headlining phrase for the Echo article “Marching band gets crowd going” and a big photo of us at our stage show! That was a lot of fun, we’d love to go back next year!