Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

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anguyen92
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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by anguyen92 »

All right, made it home after waiting in line to get a smoothie and fried tofu from this teahouse that's opened late and is somehow always packed. More about the day at a later time. I'm very pleased on how everything went. This show is up there with the Toronto show despite hearing 16 of 17 songs already prior to this show.

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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by anguyen92 »

At the Yaamava theater at a casino in Highland. Final show of this leg.

Edit: there’s no poker tables in this casino. This makes me mad and relieved at the same time.

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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by gbruin »

anguyen92 wrote: Sun Mar 26, 2023 6:28 pm
The only things I want to get the point across to the band if I get a word in with them are that A. I was at the Toronto show in the Shinedown Hockey jersey in the 2nd row center and B. consider the idea to team up with Puck Hcky to have hockey jerseys and related apparel up for sale. The wallet will go to town on it if that happens.
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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by maximzub »

anguyen92 wrote: Sat Apr 01, 2023 6:32 pm At the Yaamava theater at a casino in Highland. Final show of this leg.

Edit: there’s no poker tables in this casino. This makes me mad and relieved at the same time.
Ouch. Looks like you got the exact same setlist as in Anaheim.
I'm in love with somebody...
Found someone who completes me...
I'm in love with somebody...
Oh yeah...
And it's Lzzy Hale!

MaraCarr wrote: It is not like a crush or a lust thing.
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My Long Alter Bridge Facts Post
Order Of Me Hearing Alter Bridge Songs
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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by anguyen92 »

Same exact setlist, sure. But I still had a great time nonetheless. This casino crowd was all right. Still sorta wished the casino itself had poker tables though. Otherwise, other than concerts, there is no reason for me to drive 60+ miles to this place.

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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by maximzub »

All right, this is the long-overdue Part 2 of my write-up about my Alter Bridge weekend. The one where I got to meet my favorite musician of all time. I wrote this only a few days after it happened and was going to post it much earlier, but I waited until I could upload the video of me meeting Mark to YouTube.

The week of the show, I was scrolling through Facebook like every day when I saw that Mark Tremonti had just announced a Meet & Greet at the Fret12 shop in Chicago the day after the show. Well, this might be interesting, I thought. Checked how much tickets cost. Free? No way we're passing this up. I called my parents that night to ask about it, and in no time, we had reserved 3 spots. Bring it on!

So Sunday came and obviously I'm having post-show hangover. But we had to be out of the house by 11 if we wanted to make it in time to park and get a decent spot in line. My parents were already awake and my dad was marking a spot on my Tremonti PRS for Mark to sign. Meanwhile, I was eating a different breakfast than usual: scrambled eggs and Romanesco broccoflower, plus some meat that I can't remember what it was for the life of me (chicken?).

We brainstormed what else we could have Mark sign as the description of the event said he would sign anything purchased at the shop and up to 2 personal items. We didn't have any Alter Bridge/Tremonti CDs/vinyls/posters, so what else could be somewhat music-related? Another guitar? No point. The accordion? That one got a laugh out of my dad, and he said he was thinking about it, but it wouldn't make sense either. Yeah, I was trying to make a joke anyway. We eventually concluded that the next best thing for him to sign would be my patch jacket which has a Blackbird patch on the right side. We packed a silver-tip Sharpie, the guitar, and our lunch (homemade muffins, which are usually my breakfast). Actually, I shouldn't say "we". While I was getting ready, my parents had already packed their stuff and my dad was calling me to come to the basement, but I couldn't hear him. This is where the problems started. They were mad at me for not helping with preparing the stuff at all and contemplated just not going because I didn't deserve it. That's what you get for being me and having my parents. Anyway, I managed to apologize to their liking and we left at around 11:15, later than we wanted to.

The drive was mostly quiet as we were all still upset with each other over the events of the last few minutes before we left. Not the first time anything like that has happened, but I wish it were the last. We don't need that kind of stuff in our lives anymore.

So GPS directed us towards the Salt Shed and we realized that we hadn't looked up parking for the event. We quickly searched for parking lots and my dad drove around looking for places to park, and we finally found one down the street. People were walking out with their guitars, some with the same cases as mine. Cool. I'm not going to be the only one coming home with a signed guitar.

I think it was around 12:30 when we made it to the line. Not long after, my dad decided that he wanted to check out the shop to see if there was anything we might want to buy. While he was gone, I remember it was 12:40 when a black truck drove by and the man of the day was in the passenger seat. So far the closest I've been to Mark, even though the window blocked our view. Funny thing - they ran over a traffic cone shortly after passing by us, and somebody picked it up. My mom and I joked about how that would be a silly thing to sign ("Hey, Mark? Can you sign this cone? You ran it over a couple hours ago.").

So my dad came back from the shop. My mom then offered to go get our coats from the car because it was cold. Don't remember what we did while she was gone, but by the time she came back, my dad and I were discussing the possibility of me going into the store just to see what the Meet & Greet was like. So I went in. Nice shop. They were playing Alter Bridge music over the speakers (at the time it was The Writing On The Wall), and they had lots of shirts and hoodies with the Fret12 logo on it. No Alter Bridge or Tremonti shirts or hoodies. Kinda disappointed. It wasn't a problem though, since I already have two Alter Bridge shirts of the kind that I wore to the show on Saturday and that's enough to keep me happy. Also, of course there was Mark right in front of my eyes, signing some stuff for his fans. They talked for about a minute, which is about what I expected.

I came back from the shop and told my parents what I had observed. This is where the worry started to kick in. If they were spending a minute per party, we wouldn't make it in by 2:30. In fact, half of the people in line wouldn't make it in by then. My dad figured that they would probably speed it up some, but not enough to get everybody in. Cue all the accusatory comments from my mom saying that maybe if I hadn't argued with them before we left, maybe we would have been closer in line, and then we wouldn't miss out on meeting Mark.

I tried to keep a positive mood throughout. One of the members of the group in front of us pulled out her phone and started playing Tremonti music. From what I could tell, it was all from A Dying Machine and Marching In Time. I recognized some (A World Away, Let That Be Us, Take You With Me, Throw Them To The Lions, Would You Kill, The Last One Of Us, and Now And Forever), but I didn't know the rest. (The day before I wrote this originally, I listened through the entire A Dying Machine album for the first time—an amazing album, better than Marching In Time—and one song that I recognized from that day was A Lot Like Sin.) I sang along softly to some of it. By the time we reached the door, she had turned it off just as Not Afraid To Lose was starting.

My mom went in at one point to check if there were still signed drum heads available as that was something that my dad had mentioned they had and would be great for us to hang up somewhere in the basement. Nope. They were all sold out. Oh well, I thought, the most important signature will be the one on my guitar.

I kept checking the time. Less than 10 minutes until 2:30. We were inside the building waiting and there was the possibility that we would be cut off. Waiting. Waiting. 2:30 rolled around and the Fret12 guys kept on checking tickets and guiding people into the shop. Well, I guess they were doing the right thing by extending the Meet & Greet. Besides, I figure they knew how many spots were reserved. They weren't possibly going to leave so many people hanging, right? If someone that was there was cut off, I'm sorry. But I hope there was no one that didn't get the chance to meet Mark.

One of the guys checked our tickets and my dad tried to make small talk with him. "It's nice that you're extending this so everybody can get the chance to meet Mark." He responded by joking that he's tempted to say it's not extended so he can go eat lunch. "Do you have any food with you?" my dad jokingly asked my mom. Anyway, the line proceeded and we found ourselves at the merch table with a plethora of options to choose from to buy. Some CDs—we already had all the albums. The Sound & The Story DVD—it's all on YouTube. (Not that I wouldn't support the band and Fret12, but we live in an age where there's so much music and video that's digitally accessible. It's a fact of life, like it or not.) Tour Of Horrors—I'm not much of one to read comic books. The one thing that we considered was an A Dying Machine poster signed by Mark, Eric, and Garrett. We asked how much it was. $45. No thanks. Although we didn't know it at the time, we were about to get signed posters for free.

The big moment. We went in and another one of the Fret12 guys asked us how we were and offered us some posters. He asked us whether we wanted an Alter Bridge (Blackbird) one or a Tremonti (All I Was) one, and I said Alter Bridge, but he gave us both anyway. Not a problem. As for my encounter with Mark, you can see for yourself in the video below. I didn't ask him any questions, on one hand because I hadn't thought about anything and I didn't want to ask something out of line or too cheesy, but on the other hand because there really was no time. They were rushing like crazy by then and Mark was clearly tired, so of course everybody should give the man a break. All I really said was "it's so nice to meet you" and "great show last night". Maybe I could have said something about how he's my favorite musician and we have similar mindsets when it comes to music, but I guess I just wasn't thinking about that at the time. He seemed happy to sign my guitar, though, and he was nice about the whole encounter. We took a couple pictures with him, I said "once again, it's nice to meet you", he said back, "nice to meet you too", and that was it. We picked up our stuff and left.

One thing I didn't mention is that the song that was playing in the store while I was getting my stuff signed by Mark was none other than Broken Wings. How symbolic for the first song that I ever heard Mark play on to be the soundtrack to me meeting him for the first time.

On the way home, we talked about the experience and about the concert the day before. We also listened through some of the videos I took and posted about the concert and the Meet & Greet on my dad's Facebook. Towards the end, I had some songs I wanted to show my dad that we could learn for our acoustic shows: Think It Over by Mammoth WVH and Daughtry's cover of Separate Ways (Worlds Apart) by Journey. Anyway, we arrived home at around 4:45 and went on with our day after that.

Well, that's what I have to say about my Alter Bridge weekend. I'm looking forward to seeing the band again next time I have a chance, and maybe down the line I'll meet Mark again, and/or the rest of the band. That would be really cool. Maybe I'll have something better to say next time.

I'm in love with somebody...
Found someone who completes me...
I'm in love with somebody...
Oh yeah...
And it's Lzzy Hale!

MaraCarr wrote: It is not like a crush or a lust thing.
Check out my coolest TABN posts!
My Long Alter Bridge Facts Post
Order Of Me Hearing Alter Bridge Songs
Order Of Me Hearing Tremonti Songs

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maximzub
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Re: Pawns & Kings US and Toronto Winter Tour 2023 with Mammoth WVH and Red or Pistols at Dawn

Post by maximzub »

In case anyone wants to see, here is my Tremonti PRS that I got signed by Mark in February.

Image
I'm in love with somebody...
Found someone who completes me...
I'm in love with somebody...
Oh yeah...
And it's Lzzy Hale!

MaraCarr wrote: It is not like a crush or a lust thing.
Check out my coolest TABN posts!
My Long Alter Bridge Facts Post
Order Of Me Hearing Alter Bridge Songs
Order Of Me Hearing Tremonti Songs

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