Seventeen years ago today, we’re in Minneapolis with the Magnetic Fields and Stephin Merritt sings “Attack on Love” with us, but I’m not here to tell that story, because I think I’ve got a better one. . . . Our 2004 tour with Antietam finds us in Tucson on this date, at a now-defunct club called City Limits, named for that which it was way outside of. It being June, the temperature was in three figures, so at the conclusion of soundcheck, Tim, Tara, Georgia and I went back to the hotel, a short walk from the venue, for a swim. While poolside, we noticed some sort of function underway, food and drinks and a bunch of people. As we were wondering if our swimsuits would make us too conspicuous to crash, someone approached us and asked if we would “like to meet The Champ.” Though we had no idea what she meant, it was clear that the correct answer was yes. We headed over to the shindig and there was Sugar Ray Leonard! What he was doing at a hotel miles from downtown Tucson, we never found out. I was too busy trying to figure out how to use the digital camera we had recently purchased–it only took me two or three tries–to capture this moment for posterity.
