Chapter by Chapter features me reading one chapter of the selected book at the time and reviewing it as if I were reviewing an episode of a TV show or an issue of a comic. There will be spoilers if you haven’t read to the point I have, and if you’ve read further I ask that you don’t spoil anything further into the book. Think of it as read-along book club.
Last time things seemed to be looking up for Pocket Vinyl, thanks to a series of good fortune…but Elizabeth might be getting hit by the stress of it all.
Out of curiosity I wanted to see who held the record they were trying the break. According to the Guinness website the record holder for “fastest time to play a concern in each of the 50 US states” is currently Adam Brodsky, doing 50 states in 50 days, set in 2003. Presumably this is the record they were trying to beat. Unofficially, according to Google AI but they might be confused by the attempt itself, the duo Devon Allman and Donavon Frankenreiter went for a 49 state tour in 2023, just under the official record. Google thinks they set it and they claim victory on their site, but if they did it’s under a different record keeper. Pocket Vinyl was shooting for 45 with this book coming out in 2023, the same year as Allman and Frankenreiter’s attempt.
We know that this is going to be unofficial, but I’m not going to ruin whether or not they were successful. You’ll have to research yourself or keep following the book. Yes, it’s an old event, but I have to keep some suspense going, right? With that we’ll check out the next chapter. They’re halfway through the tour and we’re about to be halfway through the graphic novel.
Again we speed through some of the concerts, meeting friends, Eric losing his cough thanks to the garlic toast treatment from the previous chapter (I still hate garlic), and even a quick check-in with the house & cat sitter. We also get another fan cheering them on, but Elizabeth notices that the fans seem just as invested, sure they’ll do it and to not let them down. Elizabeth and Eric talk for a bit about how that’s been happening, that while this was intended to be just them doing it for fun, without even the official recorder on hand, but now it seems it’s not just that anymore. I wonder if this plays in her condition at the start of the book?
Part of their tour includes Grip! Fest, which I’ve never heard of. It’s an event for women and possibly non-binary people, but they let Eric do the singing part anyway. An art professor in attendance, who apparently has displayed his own art internationally, asks about Elizabeth’s painting and supplies…and then touches the art piece while it’s still wet, something which bugs her even when it’s time to sleep. I’m a cartoonist and occasional graphic designer and I’m with her. How does any artist, especially a professor of international acclaim, not know better? The hell, man?
We get another montage of events. Elizabeth gets her own cough, but they have the antidote for that. (Still sticking to hot black tea with lemon and throat spray.) Then they learn one of the venues suddenly closed down…and they’re supposed to be there in two days. This actually leads to the segment on affording to eat on this tour to get interrupted because Eric has to find a new venue or see if they can still play the old one under its new management, which the new management is all for. It’s a fun little bit of storytelling, complete with boom mic shot as Eric puts the segment on hold.
The next segment, however, is about speaking to a crowd after Eric lets the stress of this get to him and has to apologize to the audience for coming off dismissal. Luckily the audience seems to understand and all is well, but it leads to the fourth wall break about speaking to a live audience. We then get the affordable eating segment. It’s a good way to work all that in and I wonder how many drafts it took to reach both of those ideas?
After getting past a flooded area due to melting snow, they make the venue, with worries about a protest of the new management. Luckily for our heroes the protest was rather small because this is the last of their two-nights show. In Kansas the Democrats are celebrating a legislative victory (no politics, please–I’m fighting against that enough as it is), giving them a larger audience than the place they were just at. There are a lot of times they either share a stage or go on before/after a different group. This time it was karaoke, so I’m betting they were the better performance. There are big name singers who sound bad at karaoke. It’s karaoke.
So I guess they’re both starting to feel the strain of this event. Next time we’ll see where that goes, but so far I’m still really enjoying this presentation.
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