"Morgantown"

Finally we come to a story that isn’t about ME tripping!

Morgantown, West Virginia has long been one of my favorite places to play, and I wouldn’t even know it existed if not for that first shoestring tour in Ed’s camper-shell pickup that Miracle Room undertook in 1988. Several places where we performed on that tour were “pay us whatever gas money you can” gigs, and a few weren’t even booked at all but were “show up and see if you can get on the booking at the last minute”. Yeah, none of those worked out.

One of those “Hail Marys” was the 9:30 in DC. Nothing doing. So with nothing better to do, and no place to stay, we set out a night early for our next show, which was in Morgantown, WV at a place called the Underground Railroad. We got there and found the promoter, who graciously allowed us to stay with her (I think she even fed us that night), and said we were free to see the night’s booking at the RR: Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen!

The night of our first show in Morgantown, some hippies who lived up in the mountains outside of town decided to take acid and go to the Underground Railroad to see what was happening. We blew their minds! They took us home to their compound, fed us and let us crash there, and sent us on our way the next morning with full bellies and tie-dyed clothing! And every time we came through Morgantown after that, they would have a bigger crowd than the last waiting for us at the show.

About the fifth time through or so, The Underground Railroad had undergone a name change: The Machine Shop. And there was a full house on hand. We ripped through our set, triggering our own lights and strobes and laying it on thick. The final song was our usual showstopper, “These Are My Friends”. We got to the end of the song, I shouted “Okay” one last time into the mic as i turned off the strobe on the final beat, and the echo trailed away… to silence.

“Thank you, good night”.

Nothing.

The whole audience was still staring at us. We looked at each other for confirmation (“this is weird, right?”), and then walked off the front of the stage, through the crowd and to the bar at the back where we ordered our beers. Everyone was still staring fixedly at the stage as if we were still playing. As our beers were delivered to us, the first few people in the audience started looking around a bit and clapping tentatively. Damnedest thing I ever saw…

I know our hippy friends would drop for our shows, and I’m sure they also assisted lots of others in getting prepped for our performances, but there were about 250 people there. They couldn’t all be tripping, could they? But one way or another, they were.