Wayward Son: Traveling with Tech N9ne and his Strange Music posse to Denver, Colorado

I hear the first cheers around 10 or 11 in the morning, before anybody on the bus besides the driver is awake.

From inside my capsulelike bunk, behind blackout curtains, the burst of screams and applause sounds strange and otherworldly.

It is Saturday, November 22, and the two trailer-dragging buses and the equipment truck have just pulled into the parking lot of Denver’s Fillmore Auditorium. It has been a 10-hour drive since the previous night’s gig at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City. We’ve spent a good portion of those 10 hours eating, drinking, talking, drinking, watching the Playboy Channel on the flat-screen TVs, drinking, and occasionally walking through the doorway into the driver’s compartment to stand on the steps just behind the front windshield and watch as the pavement and white highway lines rush underneath us. “Doing the Titanic,” they call it.

Cheering of some kind will continue intermittently through the afternoon and pick up steadily through the evening, until it’s at critical mass, and the headliner leaves the stage and goes back to the tour bus.

Click on photo for slide show of the trip.

Tech N9ne, it turns out, is huge in Denver.