In the midst of a month long tour with High Hopes, we were on the east coast playing a bunch of places we’ve never visited before. Meeting a bunch of future long time friends, we played a house show at The Slam Dunk in Asheville, NC. To this day, despite my phone breaking and having to get a new one out of nowhere that day, the city is probably one of my favorites we have ever played.
The whole crew showed up and upon meeting the promoter/house owner they proclaimed they were a microbrewer and avid dumpster diver. They had small kegs all over the house, not much furniture, a head of cabbage that was laying in the hallway they bragged about finding in a dumpster earlier, but an awesome setup in the basement for shows.
Show started on punk time as you could imagine, but had a pretty good turnout, both High Hopes and us having good sets with eyes watching. Wasn’t until the last couple bands that a noise complaint got called in, cops showed up, bands kept playing, and cops showed up a second time for the last band. Show was done and was a pretty solid time.
We proceeded to stay at the house that night with members of each band crashing throughout and in our vans. Wasn’t the cleanest, but also was not the worst place we had ever crashed.
Next day we all woke up, my phone was dead and wouldn’t remotely take a charge which sucked. But I went to the bathroom and saw again this head of cabbage just laying in the hallway we were told about. Now this next part was not from my own eyes, but one of us saw this head of cabbage move down the hallway a bit. Looking closer there was a large beetle inside the cabbage moving it.
It was a nice rotted cabbage head on top of the sundae of the stay. However, I could not say nicer things about that city. At the time one of the leaders in microbrewing in the country, had a bunch of cool local shops and restaurants. Highly recommend Asheville, just not dumpster diving old cabbage.
Ryan