It’s one of my favorite weekends of the entire year—Summer X Games weekend—and yet, I can hardly concentrate on it at all. Why am I still so distracted lately? Earlier this week I got to spend a night with some of my favorite boys on Earth, Luna Halo, and I can’t get the night out of my head.

I got to see Luna Halo for the first time back in May and I’ve been anxiously awaiting the chance to see them again. I saw a show in Tallahassee, Floridaon their MySpace page schedule, and I knew that nothing was going to stop me from seeing the boys again.

So, Monday morning I got dressed for the show, stocked up on camera batteries, gum, and cough drops, filled the car up for gas, and I was on the road to Gainesville, Florida to pick up my friend and travel companion V.

After a long drive (most of it through a huge storm—SCARY!!!) I met up with V and we headed off on the three hour drive to Tallahassee. The show was at a small club called Big Daddy’s which apparently has a pretty big reputation for their Monday night tradition of 80’s/Indie Dance Night. After finding the club we were going to meet up with a friend of V’s, J. Unfortunately, finding the club was easier said than done. We got lost over 14 blocks away from the venue. We really should consider the possibility of bringing directions with us on these road trips.

We finally found the place and pulled into the parking lot about 7ish. The parking lot was completely empty save for two small cars. WHERE WERE THE BANDS? We had hoped to see the Luna Halo boys and tell them hi before the show. Doors were posted on the Internet as being at 8, so the bands should have been there by then. Where were they?

One of the boys hanging out by the other two cars came up to V and me and asked us if we were there for the show that night. We told him yes and found out that he was a member of the opening band. He asked us if we were local because he thought that he had seen us at a few shows before. We assured him that we weren’t the girls he was thinking of and asked him if Luna Halo was there yet. He looked at us like we were crazy and told us doors weren’t until 9 and the bands weren’t even being let in until 8, so it would be a while before Luna Halo arrived. WTF?

The boy left us alone for a minute while we discussed this new information. We agreed that we would simply find V’s friend J and get some dinner before coming and finding the band. But before we could leave, the boy from the opening band came back over and told us his band’s singer was on his way there and had some presale tickets for $5 if we wanted to buy some of them. HECK YEAH!

With our newly purchased cheap tickets in hand, we headed off to pick up J and grab some dinner from a pizza place down the street with pizza slices the size of my arm! These things were massive!!!!! Finally though, it was 9 and time to get back to the tiny club.

Big Daddy’s was pretty much empty when we arrived and V and I were afraid it would be like the last show we saw of Luna Halo’s where there might have been 15 people in the crowd. We looked around the handful of people to find the boys. Aaron was to the side doing something with the instruments. Cary was talking to some guy on the wall across from the bar. We noticed that he had dyed his hair black with highlights again and we liked it a lot. We didn’t see Chris or Nathan anywhere. Our first stop was the bar for some beer (except for V cause she was driving home).

We stayed at the bar for a while since there were bar stools to sit on. Cary kept looking at V and me with a look like “I know I know them from somewhere, but where?” We decided to see if he would figure it out and come over to us. Plus, we hated to interrupt his seemingly interesting conversation with the other guy.

We kept wondering where Nathan was and I was starting to worry that he wouldn’t make it in time for the show. But a few minutes before the openers took the stage, Nathan finally came through the door about ten feet behind us. He looked at us and smiled. Before he even said hi to his brother and Aaron he came up to us with a huge smile on his face and gave us a hug. “My Tampa girls!” He was surprised to see us there because he thought that we lived in Tampa, about four hours away. But he seemed happy to have some familiar faces in the crowd.

We talked with Nathan for a minute, but then he finally went to say hello to Aaron and make sure that all of the equipment was ready for the show. Cary had moved from his friend to the bar by then and came up next to me and put an arm around my shoulders. “I like your bag,” he told me, referring to the guitar purse that I carry with me to all of my concerts. “Is that the same one as last time?” He’d finally placed us as the girls he’d hung out with in Tampa.

The opening band started playing about that time and it became impossible to hold a conversation over the noise level. Cary left us to go and help Nathan and Aaron with the equipment and we noticed another guy dressed in black (we had noticed him before and assumed he was a drummer for the opening band because he dressed just like a drummer) helping them out too. We knew that the drummer for Luna Halo, Chris, was leaving the band, but it wasn’t until that moment that we realized he wasn’t even finishing the tour. They had a replacement drummer.

We listened to the opening band, but we were a little disappointed in them. They sounded a lot like a garage band and not very much like a professional band that should be opening for a band signed to Columbia Records. And their entire performance was very rehearsed. They weren’t just moving around the stage playing off of each other. Every move was rehearsed it seemed like. They all knew when to step up onto the speakers that made about a four foot long platform in front of the stage. They all knew when to turn around and start playing to the drummer. It was very staged and not as entertaining to watch. Their music wasn’t horrible; it just wasn’t good enough to make me a fan.

We wished the Luna Halo boys good luck with the show and made our way up to the stage to stake out our spots in the front row. The venue had filled up slightly when the opening band had gone on, but since they were a local band, most of the crowd was there for them, not Luna Halo. Everyone seemed to stay to see Luna Halo, but they weren’t determined to be front row like we were, so it was pretty easy to find a spot pushed against the speakers in front of the stage.

I wanted to stand somewhere between Nathan and Cary because Nathan is the lead singer that I love to take pictures of and Cary is one of the two most entertaining people to watch on stage. He seriously rocks out when he’s playing. Unfortunately, there was a group of wannabe groupies that made sure we weren’t anywhere near Cary.

I’ve been to enough concerts in my life to know the different kinds of girls who attend, usually just by looking at them. There are the girls like my friends and me who like to dress cute for a show, but obviously aren’t there to hook up with anyone. We’re simply there to enjoy the show and enjoy the company of the band after the performance. Then there are the girls who couldn’t care less about the band or their music. These girls are there for one thing and one thing only: the right to say that they had slept with the band. That’s the difference between Band Aids (what my friends and I are) and Groupies. Most of the girls at the show that night were groupies. The girls who refused to let us stand where we were hoping to were definitely groupies.

But when the boys took the stage, it didn’t matter where we were standing, V and I had a great time! They started the show out with a song called “The Fool” which I love. And it only took a minute or two for both Nathan and Cary to discover how fun it was to play standing on top of the speakers at the front of the stage. By the time they had moved on to playing “Over The Edge” I felt like they were competing to see who could stay up there the most.

It wasn’t a problem not being by Cary. Luckily the stage wasn’t too big (because the entire club was about the size of my living room—which isn’t big at all) so I could still easily get pictures of all of Cary’s fun antics, especially when he was standing on the speakers/platform. Because Cary and Nathan both know V and me, they both had a tendency to stand right in front of us on the speakers and were totally playing to our cameras. During the song “Kings and Queens” (which Nathan knows I love) Nathan stood on the speakers singing to me. During “Untouchable” he tossed his guitar pick down V’s top! And during the last song of the evening “World On Fire” (which I think is their latest single, though I could be wrong) Cary started out standing on the speakers and then he walked over to where he was right in front of me. Finally, he jumped off the speakers into the crowd and started dancing with me! It was so much fun watching them play!

But Luna Halo are SO nice that it’s really much more fun to see them off stage than on (even though I LOVE to watch them on stage, obviously). V, J, and I headed outside of the club to talk to the boys while they packed up their van and trailer. Nathan and Cary came up to us immediately. J introduced herself to the boys but had to get home because she had class the next morning. V and I, however, were there for the long haul and wanted to spend some time with the boys.

Nathan gave me a big hug and when he pulled away, there was sweat all over my arm. He was GROSSLY hot and sweaty. He explained that Luna Halo had played Monday nights at Big Daddy’s many times before and they had made a tradition of going to 80’s/Indie Dance Night after their shows. He asked us if we would stay for a few minutes while he and Cary “Go get showers so that we can get all hot and sweaty” because they wanted to talk to us some more.

Even though Dance Night in a teeny tiny club is not exactly the idea of fun for extremely claustrophobic kids such as me, I wanted to see more of the boys, so we agreed. We went to the car to freshen up ourselves while the boys all walked across the street to their hotel and we headed to the front of the club to wait for them. We figured maybe we could catch them all before they headed inside and talk to them so that we wouldn’t have to actually endure the horrors of two hundred sweaty kids dressed in 80’s clothes and dancing to bad indie remixes.

We caught Aaron before he went in and we talked to him for a long time. We discussed several bands that we are all friends with and we caught up with what was going on with each of us since the last time we had seen each other. Aaron told us the detailed story of how he and the boys had gotten one of my favorite bands of goody-two-shoes boys drunk to the point of puking at that very club the last time the two bands had toured together. Then he asked us how far of a drive it had been from Tampa to Tallahassee and we told him that we didn’t actually live in Tampa. When he found out that V had driven three hours and I had driven six for the show, he wrapped us both up in a big hug telling us that he wasn’t sure that he had ever felt as loved as he did right then. We took pictures with Aaron and he told us he thought that the other boys had already gone inside. We had missed Nathan and Cary and apparently had no choice but to go inside with Aaron and fight the crowds.

It turns out that even though it was hot, smelly, and crowded, it was also really fun! I had the best time getting to see the boys and talk to them. We exchanged some of the most wonderful stories and hung out almost all night. Finally at almost 2, it was time for V to drag me away from Big Daddy’s so that we could make the three hour drive back to her house. I didn’t want to go! I was having too much fun. But I keep telling myself that September isn’t that far away and the boys will be back at 80’s/Indie Dance Night, and so will I!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Posts About Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.