tool time (again)

this happened back in the early 2000’s too…

…and that was without the aid of the pandemic.

i saw tool on the lateralus tour three times – twice in SA (once indoors, once outdoors) and in between at an austin date. we did the same thing here, but the last one i finally got my chacho’s fix with a frozen jack n coke:

i saw them the first time from the seventh row floor and the show was stunning, both visually and aurally. killing joke opened, and my only regret was grabbing the alex grey SHIRT versus the print. i tried to go back for the print but that didn’t happen through no fault of my own. oh, and parking sucked and randy and i missed each other.

the second time this go around was at the frank erwin center in austin ’cause an old club buddy had an extra ticket. i DID see randy, parking was free but a few blocks away, i did get the print (where they misspelled “erwin” as “irwin”) and then…ya know…rona, since this was in january of 2020.

so now onto the third – i get there, ignore the “permit only” sign on the main parking lot and just breeze in. everything is cashless ’cause of rona, so i roll down my window and say “i don’t have a permit, but i have a visa card, and it’s supposed to be everywhere i wanna be!” the parking lady laughed, took my card, and directed me to the lot closest to the door. score number one!

(number two was the aforementioned frozen booze)

number three shoulda been the print but i was apparently at the one merch table that didn’t adhere to the rule of “only two prints per person” so people were buying five or six although, honestly, i didn’t really care for this one. score two came when i got some chill out time with randy while blonde redhead played their set. then came the reason we were all there:

they had the “no phones or cameras” signs up again but they sure as fuck didn’t enforce it this time. at one point when the arena was lit i saw a friend who was there to celebrate her 50th (she’d told me what section she was in and my seat basically faced it) so i ran over to wish her a happy birfmas in person between the set and the encore:

breezed out during the last song on the encore to beat the traffic and was home by midnight. then came the ice storm that’s kept me in the house until…well…now!