Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Every Shirt XVI: Exodus

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shirt: Exodus 2009 tour
size: XL (US)
vintage: 2009
provenance: band

Also picked up at the gig Friday, this shirt illustrates something I alluded to in that review, as to how Exodus is super-underground. If you compare the tour dates on the back of this one to the ones on the back of Kreator's, you'll see that the start and end points aren't the same, in space or in time, and that Exodus' dates are a superset of Kreator's.

There's a pretty easy explanation of this just from reading the itineraries. Kreator's tour starts at the Sonar in Baltimore and ends at the Jaxx in Springfield, VA, after doing a counterclockwise loop through the generally-habited areas of English-speaking North America. The band probably got cheap flights in and out of Dulles and booked the tour accordingly. Exodus, though, comes from the other coast, and though they will probably make enough from the Kreator portion of their tour to justify just coming straight across by road, or by JetBlue and mating up with a U-Haul full of guitars, they decided to do nine dates driving cross-country before meeting up with Kreator, and taking seven dates to drive home at the end, hitting smaller markets and places that Kreator just wasn't stopping for some reason. Yes, it's also an economic winner. But playing en-route dates is what working underground bands do: a few dates define the tour route, and then as close to every night in between them and home is filled out with other shows, because gas is not cheap, and many fans are.

This is the only Exodus shirt from this show; they also had a FedExodus design that was hella funny, but I had, as mentioned, no money at the end of the night to buy one with. Maybe another time; maybe in the fall, or maybe next year, but something tells me those shirts are going to sell out right quick.

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