Tues 10th August – Chicago to Indianapolis

 

Tues morning in Chicago I am faced with a decision – do I stick with the rental car option, or do I take the high society option and score a seat on the Greyhound bus? The thought of the greyhound wasn’t doing it for me this particular day – that time would come in due course. Better stick to the rental car… Not exactly the struggling artist thing to do – perhaps I should have stood on a corner with guitar in one hand and the other thumb out just so I was really living the dream.

 

I was wondering what the man at the Hertz counter thought of me when he asked about insurance and I replied – “You’d better give me whatever you’ve got there buddy”.  A little nervous about the whole car thing – I think a few years back when I was travelling around with Mike and Nick in the Ford Econoline it wasn’t such a difficult thing to come to terms with because if you were about to err slightly whilst at the wheel, there was always two other people to yell at you very loudly before the potential consequences of any such mistake could be realised. And being one of those people who likes to do everything whilst the car is in motion (I have been known to eat a bowl of cereal and read the paper on my way to work in the (manual) Tarago), I had a map and a CD selection to contend with as well, so that would no doubt make things interesting.

 

Whether or not I took the right route to Indianapolis is debatable, as is whether or not I actually caused any near-incidents on my way, but 10 Coffee Stops and 4hrs later I finally arrived in the downtown. At this stage of the trip, I was still yet to get my hands on a piano. The excess baggage charges from Sydney had prohibited me from bringing my own keyboard along for the trip, and thus with 24hrs till the first Indianapolis gig I was still in a bit of a predicament. Fortunately, in my research of local music stores, I had come across one that offered a “no questions asked 30-day money-back guarantee on all products”. This surely was an opportunity too good to refuse. So whilst still in possession of a car, I set out to find this mysterious and wonderful place – “The Guitar Centre”.

 

On thing I found about the people in these parts is that they didn’t seem to be familiar with a place if it wasn’t in their suburb. Several stops at service stations in the downtown had yielded conflicting arguments for the location of this “Guitar Centre”, and with a phone card that had run out of credit before I used it (International Airport Tourist Trap victim no. 5,023,456) it was only the kindness of Abu in the quickie mart and his donation of a local phone call that rescued the situation.

 

Sure enough, upon arrival at the guitar centre, I was greeted with an impressive arrangement of the finest keyboards available for sale….. and the “30-day money-back guarantee”. Probably shouldn’t have asked about that one so early in the conversation with the shop attendant – maybe it was the accent that gave me away completely, but in any case he was on to my scheme from the word go. Fortunately, he was a “struggling artist” himself, and thus could fully appreciate my predicament. Realising that the fate of guitar centre across America (several stores in every state – more guitars than I have ever seen in a music store…) was not likely to be resting on this one transaction of a bottom-of-the-range keyboard (wasn’t pushing my luck….), he fortunately sold me the thing and reassured me that, provided I didn’t destroy it, my Credit card would be charged back with the funds when I returned the keyboard (before I left Indianapolis). (…..Mental note – no beers at gigs….).

 

And so the final order of the day was to find my way back to Benchmark Records (the organisers of the summit) and meet up with the people who had kindly invited me across to play. For once I managed to follow the direct route instead of my own longer version, and 10 minutes later I was in “Broad Ripple” – the suburb hosting the Mid-west Music Summit. Kind of a student/artsy type area, but a pretty cool place. I noticed soon after arriving that there was no shortage of bars to choose from, and as is so often the case in America, no shortage of fast food stores to go with them. A fantastic place for a music event like this, with most of the venues being within a stones throw of each other. Not much else to report from the first night in “The Ripple” – but first impressions were encouraging…