Kahuna Summer Stage
Wilmington, Delaware
July 22, 2001
The Big Kahuna indeed! We’ve stuck around in 2001 for the 3rd volume of Porch Songs…and for that matter, the same tour. To set the stage….Wilmington was the 2001 summer tour’s show # 29 out of 33. Starting about as far west in the United States as possible at the Navy Pier in San Diego, CA and having been south to Texas and north to Minnesota, a spot on the Christiana River in Wilmington, Delaware made perfect sense. Sandwiched between three night runs at the Beacon Theater in New York City and Oak Mountain in Birmingham, having The Earth Will Swallow You film crew in tow and cueing up for a date with David Letterman the next night, this show wasn’t necessarily set to be anything spectacular. But once again, that seemed to be the right recipe as this night was going to be anything but normal.
That lack of normalcy was especially true for our very own Chris Rabold, WP sound engineer, since Wilmington was his first show running front of house sound. With not too much going on in the periphery, I’m sure Chris was as cool as a cucumber. Right! The first set opening with Glory > C. Brown > Give seemed to give him a chance to get dialed in prior to the band taking off into a little more free-flowing territory with Diner and Rebirtha. After Blackout Blues ended another first set paragraph, a rare E on a G was a very nice surprise with the seldom played Dirty Business to follow before an All Time Low signaled the end of the first set. Evidently, earlier that week had seen the Delaware River ripe with controversy as a chemical explosion had apparently emptied quite a bit of toxicity into the river…..and with lots of talk going around about causes, responsibility, etc., this was certainly an “all time low” for the local area with some “dirty business”certainly in the river as well as possibly being the underlying cause. Obviously, with the venue set on the Christiana River just before it empties into the Delaware itself, this backdrop added to the intensity of the musical conversation. With the crowd, the band and the crew finally catching their collective breaths, I’m sure no one enjoyed that set break more than Chris.