Simon Rushworth
The Quireboys are making rapid progress across North America as they celebrate their 30th anniversary in style and guitarist Paul Guerin is keeping RUSHONROCK readers posted every step of the way.
Check out his exclusive blog all month and remember the boys are back in town later this year…
As we rolled out of Golden at 7am in our beautiful fully air conditioned night liner I couldn’t help think about the settlers way back in the day heading out in search of a brave new world with their horse drawn wagons and the hardship they must have endured on the way. Our ensuing 17-hour drive didn’t seem so daunting after that.
After five hours of cornfields we drove through the Archway monument which is nicknamed the gateway to the west, an impressive erection which houses a Wild West museum. Nebraska was identical to Colorado – corn, corn, corn and more corn. We even saw the Kellogg’s plant!
I spotted a road sign for Desmoines – this was the birth place of John Wayne and the home of Slipnot….not obvious bedfellows but pretty cool to see nonetheless. I’m busy reading Ray Davies’ Americana: The Kinks, The Road And The Perfect Riff – I devour biographies realising nothing has really changed (well, apart from mobile phones, iPads, laptops, video games, nightliners, Evian, FaceTime, Subway…what did the romans ever do for us?). There are still the gigs, the road, the late nights, the early flights, the fights, the laughs, the expectations, the disappointments, the euphoria, the camaraderie through thick and thin and I’m just a player in this big game called the music biz.
Driving through Illinois we passed another small town which was the birthplace of Ronald Regan. I couldn’t help thinking how did you get from there to being the king of Hollywood and then become the President of the United States of America? Guess he had a dream…
Pounding through Rockford I realised this is where Cheap Trick hail from. It would have been nice to pop in and see Rick Neilson and chat about guitars over a pot of tea but it wasn’t to be. We had to keep moving.
We finally rolled into our hotel parking lot in Chicago at 1.30am. That was the fastest check-in in the history of rock n roll as we had to be back on the road at 4am to appear on the Mancow breakfast rock n roll TV show (15 million viewers!). I enjoyed my two hour snooze.
PG
* The Quireboys’ new album Black Eyed Sons is out now!
* Click here for a full list of tour dates in 2014.