Taking Over The West Coast

I am in scenic Los Angeles as I type this. At the moment I’m in my room at a hotel in West Hollywood which, for some reason, has filled me with an overwhelming urge to sit naked on all the furniture. Then again, I feel that way pretty much anywhere I’m left alone for an extended period of time. More often than not, however, hanging out in my boxers is about as bad as it ever gets with me. That’s just how I live my life.

Last night I went to see Trainwreck, my close personal friend Kyle Gass from Tenacious D’s other band (This is the namedropping portion of this entry), at the Viper Room. It was the last night of their month-long residency at the club and the place was packed.

Trainwreck were awesome and rocked balls for about 45 minutes before coming back out on stage for an encore. The first song of their encore was “The Rocker” by Thin Lizzy, before which Kyle gave me what is known in the industry as a “shout out from the stage” because- as mentioned earlier- we are close personal friends. Since I had earplugs in and was slightly liquored up, I couldn’t hear everything he was saying though. Apparently neither could the people I was sitting with because they swore that Kyle had asked me to come up on stage and play guitar with the band. I didn’t hear him say this but- being half in the bag and jetlagged and all- I took their word for it and climbed on stage to play “The Rocker” and a couple other covers with the band. It was good times. I felt a little silly after the show, however, when I found out that I was right about Kyle not calling me up on the stage. Fortunately, Kyle and the rest of the band seemed to appreciate my joie de vivre and just figured I was wasted and couldn’t fight off the impulse to rock. That’s just how it goes with us rockers sometimes.

On a technical/guitar geek note, for my accidental guest appearance with Trainwreck last night, I played Kyle’s custom Tenacious D SG, which was pretty badass and is apparently an SG from Gibson’s Gothic series that some friends of his customized for him. It says Tenacious D instead of Gibson and KG instead of SG on the headstock, but I was too busy rocking out to notice any of this at the time. Kyle filled me in on this detail later.

Shortly, I will put some pants on and hit the town for more West Coast mayhem. I think I’m supposed to get dinner or something. As you may have noticed from this entry, I am pretty brain dead from lack of sleep, etc. already, but I will be back with another spine-tingling report from the West Coast soon. In the meantime, deal with the suspense as best you can.

Dave Hill