Jeremy Porter Road Blog

Road Blog: Saturday July 23, 2022 - Traverse City, MI

Road Blog
July 23, 2022
Traverse City, MI

We left our motel in Bellaire, Michigan at noon on Saturday morning and headed into the town for breakfast/lunch. The Lunch Box is a little café that’s a couple blocks from Short’s Brewing and the stage we’d played the night before. It’s an old school joint with a salty hostess/waitress. You do things her way or you don’t do them, thank you very much. I got a scramble with a side of avocado and we were all generally pleased with our selections. Jacob, TrooperGirl22, and I headed towards Traverse City and would meet up with Gabriel and Angela later. It was a nice drive along Torch Lake. Our first stop was the state park beach just outside of TC on the East Grand Traverse Bay where we chilled for a couple hours and watched the waves. Jake crashed out, and I tried to but couldn’t get comfortable, and TG22 waded in the shallow surf. There are certainly worse ways to spend an afternoon.

After a while we headed into town, filled up the gas tank and topped off the ice in the cooler, and headed over to RPM Records where I picked up a Lee Hazlewood record I’d passed on in March and regretted ever since. Good people at this store, and they are now carrying our records, so stop on in and support them! There was a whitetail deer in the yard next to the record store eating grass and not caring much about us, and that is how things roll in Northern Michigan.

We met back up with Gabe at The Workshop Brewing Company at 6pm. It’s a big, cement, square building in the warehouse district of Traverse City. We loaded in, got set up, ordered a couple beers, and some food from the adjoining restaurant Archie's. The beer was fantastic, as was the food, and the staff at the Workshop was very friendly. A young man from Georgia introduced himself and wanted to talk guitars and gear for a while. He was interested in the Reverends and the Matchless. I told him to keep an eye out and we’ll see him down there this fall.

The stage sits against the far corner from the front door, playing out to the whole room. It’s all cement, so a tough and unforgiving room for sound. The sound booth is the front half of an old Ford van, hollowed out and embedded into the back wall – that was a new one. Our sound engineer Tiff arrived in a Led Zepplin tee shirt and got us all wired up and dialed in, peering out through the sun roof of the van. My friend Jay was there, and our friends Jonna and Doug, their daughter Lily, and a couple other friends arrived soon after too. We went on at 7 to a decent room of people. The crowd fluctuated, with a bit of a lull in the middle, but back to a respectable size as we got to the last quarter of the set. We wrapped up around 10, talked to our friends for a bit, loaded out in the rain, did our dummy check, tipped the staff, and hit the road. TG22 and I headed south with family plans and a concert in Kalamazoo tonight, and the rest took the van back to the city. It was an interesting night, not our typical gig, but nice place, great people, great beer and food, and always nice to be back in TC.

That’s a wrap for the back-to-back Northern Michigan brewpub two-show summer tour. Looking forward to my own bed tonight and gearing up for a quiet August. Thanks for coming out to these shows if you did, thanks for reading and following along if not. It was awesome to see so many people this weekend. We’ll see ya out there! Xx