Over a year ago, after practice we decided if we ever went on a national tour we would get a tour tattoo around Kansas saying “We’re Not In Kansas Anymore”. Don’t ask me why we chose this, it is as absurd now as it was then. Nevertheless, a week before the tour became a reality, our good friend Joepi (who designed the art for both albums and the tour poster) did a sketch of the flying monkey from Wizard of Oz, so we could get something other than the text tattooed on us. It came out awesome so when we had sometime to spend in St. Louis before our show at Plush with Rusty Nail, we cruised over to TRX Tattoo, a place we found online, and low and behold one of their tattoo artists was available. His name: Midwest Rick. Perfect! He was a great tattoo artist and was so cool that he came to our show later that night and brought his wife and a friend. So, me, AJ, and Vince all got the tour tattoo Joepi designed and Casey got the fiddle wing logo tattooed on his hand to cover up a mistake tattoo from years ago.
I was the first to get done, which only took about an hour. It came out just as I imagined…smashing! I put it right next to my other tour tattoo on my right leg I got earlier this March with the Ramshackle Army and Hoist the Colors. While Vince, AJ, and Casey were getting inked, Bryan, Cami and I headed over to the Gateway Arch to check out one of St. Louis’ main landmarks. Seeing it up close was jaw dropping and we had just enough time to pay $10, get into a little capsule and go to the top for a view that is breathtaking.
As if we didn’t already have a full day of fun, we had a show to play too! We played this new venue over by St. Louis University called Plush. The venue was way nicer and bigger than we could imagine. Joining us on stage were local Celtic rockers Rusty Nail. They put on a great show, a nice rock edge to some Celtic and folk songs. Chris and Chad from Rusty Nail even joined us on stage when we played “What’s Left of the Flag”! Also in attendance was Randy from Rocking the Craic blog. He took a bunch of pics and we were glad he got to see us live and hang out with us some more. The rain started coming down after the show, just in time to close out a very memorable time in St. Louis.
– Beau Gray