Face it: You still love the Toadies. Try as you might, you just can't help getting all the feels any time you hear that opening riff to "Possum Kingdom." It might as well always be 1993. In fact, more so than you think: This weekend marks the seventh-annual Dia De Los Toadies (and the second at Panther Island Pavilion in Forth Worth), but it may as well be the "Year of the Rubberneck." Vaden Todd Lewis and the boys have been celebrating their signature record most of this year, and the festival (which will be two days, not just one) marks the unofficial close to those celebrations.
But if you need a reminder what's to love about the Toadies, here's a good one: They'll be wandering around downtown Dallas and busking tomorrow, Thursday afternoon, during the lunch hour. Because, you know, they just like to hang with their fans.
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Not that they don't want to keep things a little extra fun; if you're looking for a set time and/or location to find the band tomorrow, you're out of luck. All that they'll offer at this point is that it will be "during lunch" (which for some people can be pretty early, but then again they are still a rock band). According to manager Tami Thomsen, the plan is for a full-band arrangement with a "very minimal acoustic set up." They'll be wandering around, she says, but "they will play two to three songs at each stop."
These impromptu performances should be a perfect warm-up to the shows this weekend. On Friday, after all, the Toadies will be playing an acoustic set for the first night of the festival, joined by the Old 97's Rhett Miller doing his own solo set. (Nonetheless, Friday should be a lot less bare-bones than tomorrow.) Then on Saturday the band will be in its familiar "rock band" format and run through Rubberneck in its entirety, just as they did at Homegrown Festival in Main Street Garden Park back in May.
So if you'd like to see the Toadies this weekend but don't feel like driving all the way to Fort Worth, you pretty much have no excuse now. Except, of course, having to find them first.
