The Hourglass Cats - CRAZY TOUR STORIES

In this Crazy Tour Stories segment, the rock n roll/reggae/hip-hop band, The Hourglass Cats, shares one of their stories from being on the road. You can check out the story below:

We've had a lot of funny and crazy stories on the road, especially when going down to Mexico on one of our regular trips down there to play some tunes. I would have to say though that one of the stories I won't forget is the first time we went down to SxSW. We were booked on an Arizona showcase as the headliner and about a week before our tour, our bass player got arrested and was put on house arrest. We hired another bass player who bailed on us the day of leaving for tour so he could bartend somewhere in Arizona. Instead of calling off all of our shows we were set to play, we decided we were going to roll out to SxSW with a sax player, drummer and guitar player/ singer without any amps and no drum set due to the size of the car we were traveling in.

We left Az at about 11pm and headed to Austin. Everything was smooth sailing and when we got into El Paso we figured we had enough gas to keep going. We were definitely wrong, about an hour later we ran out of gas in the literal middle of nowhere at like 3-5am in the morning. We called AAA to get some help and they said they wouldn't have anyone near us for awhile. Our car battery died and the wind was going about 80MPH so taking a pee outside was nearly impossible. We used our phone flashlights to do make-shift hazard lights so no one would hit us. Eventually some guy who seemed like he came out of the movie The Hills Have Eyes pulled up and we couldn't understand anything he was saying and he tried to convince us to drive off this dirt road to some sketchy location to get gas when there was a gas station about 10 miles up the highway. He ended up topping us off with a gallon of gas and we coasted into the closes gas station and set off for Austin again clocking in 28 hours on the road.

When we showed up to Austin we played these two metal showcases that were packed before we got there. We showed up and asked the bands before if we could use their drum set and amps and they declined. So we played with a Jembe, Direct electric guitar and a sax to people who went there to see a metal band. We got booed off both stages pretty quickly. The weekend ended with us asking one of the organizers of the AZ showcase we were set to headline to fill in on bass without knowing any of our songs. We turned his bass amp nearly all the way down and rocked out and ended up having a killer show. On the way back from SxSW we got detained in El Paso and luckily got out without any legal infractions. I would like to say that was our last trip to SxSW but that was just the beginning of many crazy, fun and ridiculous trips out to Texas.

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