About the Fastlane
Part 3
14 HFO Shows
So, we saw 14 shows on that first leg of the HFO tour. Like many of you, we were surprised at how after seeing one show, we wanted to see another and then another and then another.... you know how it goes. Along the way we had some adventures, made a lot of friends and started the newsletter that would eventually morph into the online community that exists today. Before we get to that, though, let's talk about the 94/95 tour.
The blue notebook from the 94/95 HFO Tour
The first show we saw was San Antonio. At the time, we were living in the Rio Grande Valley...about a 4 hour drive away from San Antonio. It was hot. We didn't have great seats, but when the lights went down and the fake thunder cracked over the apocalyptic set, we knew we were in for something special. That's when the show opened with Hotel California and when the crowd heard those iconic chords they went wild. Little did we know how that first show would transform our lives.
Now remember, when this tour happened, we were in our 2nd/3rd year of teaching. We were each earning about 19,000 a year, so funds were tight. We bought the cheap seats and did our traveling on a budget. When we went to Houston, we decided not to get a hotel room. We had a cooler filled with peanut butter and bread and were going to live off of that. Before the Houston show, we spent time at a mall food court, reading books and spending time until the mall closed. Then, we drove around the Houston loop about 5 times listening to talk radio. The OJ trial was going on and I remember that it was when the knife had been turned over to the judge. We got a little sleep in a rest area. Thinking back on it now, it probably wasn't very safe.
We were ready, though, to see the show at Rice University. Before the show, we were hanging around by the gates and by chance almost got run over by Don Henley's Town Car. We were excited to have seen him, sunglasses clad sitting in the back seat. I don't remember many specifics, but we had this little blue notebook where we wrote down everything. Looking back at that notebook now, some of the things we wrote down don't make much sense, but we did write down what the band members were wearing and any unique/fun things they said or did. We wrote down when the show was great and we wrote down when we felt they were phoning it in.
We had some adventures, though. We sat in the middle of Azoff relatives at Alpine Valley. We decided to go to New Orleans after visiting our families in Wisconsin (by some twisted logic, NO is on the way back to Texas from WI). We stopped every few miles to find a pay phone and call looking for tickets. We eventually connected with a broker and secured our tickets. We met another broker behind a barbecue restaurant in Tupelo after driving past Elivis' birthplace. We met people we had talked to only online...Tom and Audrey in Chicago, for example, and learned that all those horror stories our families tried to tell us about scary Internet people weren't true at all.
Of course in the middle of the HFO tour, Glenn got sick. We heard bits and pieces online about how in September, the shows in Philadelphia had to be rescheduled. It was hard to get information and at the time, the entire tour wasn't just postponed. Each date would be postponed shortly before it was supposed to happen, so there was always hope that things would start up again. We drove to Nashville with that hope, but found out in the middle of Tennessee that we had driven all of that way for nothing. It was during this uncertain down-time that we launched our paper newsletter, The Wasted Times (we'll talk more about that in the next chapter).
Eventually, though, Glenn got better and the tour got going again. We had made the acquaintance of some really nice people who worked for the band online and thanks to them, we got to experience some really cool stuff. We went backstage at the Austin show. We were terrified. We only had a name and were told to ask for our Internet friend. We weren't sure it was going to work, but it did. We were escorted into the bustling backstage world of a major stadium tour and it was fascinating. We went under the stage and saw all of the electronics powering the sound and light. We met John Corey and talked to him about food. We saw catering where opening act Kenny Wayne Sheppard was eating some local Texas cuisine. We met the accountant and the wardrobe ladies. We were introduced to Irving and then we met Timothy. Just a few minutes before the show, he was walking around the dressing room area looking for his show pants. He was incredibly nice. We don't remember much about the show except that we sat near Governor Ann Richards and the show was rushed because a summer storm was coming in.
The tour came to an end in Lafayette, Louisiana (where we met Internet friends Deb and Dave....Deb was a radio DJ and we went on her show to talk about the Eagles). We had seen 14 shows and it seemed like the end. At that time, there was no guarantee that there would be more. The crew was taking photos on the stage. Joe smashed a guitar. Our Internet acquaintance got us autographed programs and that was that. We didn't know what was next.
