To go somewhere, first you must leave.
October 19th Grand Rapids.
The Ten Bells, you get there from the highway and you think you've rolled in to the industrial park graveyard midwest style, lots of space and cement. You just have to wonder how this way of life can last when there are 10 acres of parking lots eroding to weeds and holding 3 Budget rental trucks. There is a painting of a bravarian girl, holding steins of beer, reminding me a tiny bit of my german girlfriend Ines, who has a dress like that and goes to Octoberfest wearing it, but this painting injects way more Linda Carter or Bo Derek and an American burger to boot. Nothing about the club carries this German schtick, but whatever, and inside we plop down our equipment, look at Exodus posters, eat grilled cheese sandwiches and dig in to the case of Miller Lite that is waiting our tender lips. Tender and true. That is our lips. The first two bands offer 1- the worst kind of Dave Matthews bar rock, but done with class and sincerity (props) and then 2- cute boy poppy punk that reminds me of watching I Heart Huckabees, or some other hipster Details magazine cover come to life. We thought "this isn't the time or place for our pretentious overly long lyricless songs..." It makes no sense, but we did it, we brought what we had. We brought it. A little sloppy. Paucity plays after us, and they make instrumental music (just like us!) and we feel relieved because now we are APPROPRIATE. They are good. They are good enough to make me feel like we aren't. Matt the doorman says we can stay at his place. We sell some records. One human being, for a fact, shows up because he owns everything we've done and he wants more. So he got it. Matt's house is dirty, but this is standard, with the biggest TV we've ever seen. We watch a movie about John Holmes, half of us get silly baked, no, stupid baked, and we sleep. Matt is one of those unbelievably sweet men all tatted up and mohawked so that you think you should fear him but you should not. It would be a sin. We wake up and leave, beautiful sunlight, and a note on the door appears somewhere in the morning from the city housing inspection services warning them to clean up or leave. Wow.
October 20th Detroit
Oh Detroit, you have issues. You are the alien city, you are the future of the falling apart world. You crawl with weirdness. Nothing fits in, nothing feels appropriate. We can't come to this town anymore. I hate bringing the bands equipment up your Magic Stick stairs, the place no one walks past ever, because you have laws that force people to drive, because you dropped a bomb in the middle of your own city. Its a Clear Channel show, for christ sake, we are playing first, the second band doesnt show, and Clear Channel has to be called to figure out what to do with the schedule. What the f8ck? Can you imagine this conversation? The headliner, with a tour bus, 7 band members, a film projectionist, a manager, a driver, draws 40 people into the place. Jesus. The room is huge, the crowd is small. We rip it, honestly, but it feels like no one cares. I do the math for the headliner, i calculate the gas, people, bus rental figure and figure they need at least $1300 a day to break even. They probably got paid $300. The two drummers are nice guys, we do some nerd talking about equipment. I imagine their stresses. Our failures are much easier to endure.
October 21st Columbus OH
We arrive within the college town of Columbus, OH, and immediately realize we are in the land of young white people, girls with nice skin and ass antlers, guys with nice skin and baseball caps. Something quite unexplainable occurs as we sit in the van in the rain, eating cheese and triscuits and deciding to call this place "Clumbus" because we thinks its funny to drop the first vowel of words with hard consonants: next to the van a young overweight boy and his father emerge and walk away from us, across the street. I don't know why we are staring at them, but we all are, and then within 5 seconds they appear again, RIGHT NEXT TO THE VAN. This is weird. But Jason can explain it: he says its the The Chubb Portal. The Chubb portal sounds like a large, sucking fart. It has a taste for fat, lost Americans. There are plenty of those. Clumbus. The show is at Oldfield's on High, its small, we wonder about volume. We think of ourselves as loud. Our drink and food deal is completely embarassing: no food, half price liquor. Yes, you are so generous, you of the moldy carpet stink people, you grumpy dipshits. The frat bar next door offers far better looking servers, and a better food deal: free pizza and $4 pitchers. There is foosball too. The jocks get all the breaks. When it comes time to play we are too loud, way too loud, actually the sound man uses the word "blistering". But he tells us this after we finish, after our entire set within which he could have simply turned down the master volume at any point with his little toilet fingers. But he didn't, and he is mad at us. We are mad at us too: we had nearly cleared the room. Only the bravest remained, and somehow against all prevailing logic, they aboslutely loved it. I was self conscious about the 16 year old drummer in the room, thought he might look at me as his 15 year senior and think I was a wanker. Chris, from the Brown Notes, hooks us up with lodgings at him and his wife's place, and we divebomb into a night of substance abuse, Ween videos, all the tidbits of American alternative culture. Before filing in, Jon knocks over an entire cannister of cashews in the van because he is drunk, and because he is drunk he is completely unconcerned with his new problem. Andy and I scramble to scoop up his nuts, and just then Chris's wife emerges from the garage, flashing the van, OUR van, with her naked breasts. BOOBS. Jason breathes deeply and Andy and I are like "What? What?"
October 22nd Washington PA
No one knows that there is a Washington in Pennslyvania. We're not playing here. We are just rolling in to eat and sleep and watch A History of Violence. The Econo Lodge room smells and has flies and rolling papers under the bed and 50 cigarette burns around the perimeter of the bathtub. There is a tomatoe in the drawer. Inspired, we try to go eat some "fancy italian" food, but discover its too fancy and end up eating some crap at the local mall. This simple incident spawns 2 weeks worth of jokes based on the phrase "fancy italian" with Jason repeating it in the voice of an old new york jewish woman, the limits of humor pushed by four men who spend every second together and have no privacy. Half of the band fries their tender brains on pot as I drive us around the parking lot, realizing suddenly that there could be nothing more suspicious than a conversion van circling a mall with the curtains drawn. After the movie we discover that there is nothing on earth funnier than the site of us peeing at the same time into adjacent urinals, then rinsing our hands in adjacent sinks, and then the hand dryers- yes all four running at once, and we are looking at each other, drying. We leave the bathroom giggling like girls or sinister pranksters and I spot a girl waiting for her boyfriend to come out of there, looking nervously at us. I had to wonder what she was thinking. No, I knew what she was thinking. I apologized to her in my head.
October 23rd Pittsburgh PA
There is a cemetary that is huge and hilly and its autumn and everything is gorgeous like an acid trip and we take up exercising next to a masoleum with large egyptian lions gaurding its entrance adorned with perky boobs. We do push-ups on the decline of the hill, sit ups and pull ups on a nearby tree, all the while I am apologizing in my mind for our behavior until I realize the obvious justification - we are just being alive. What could be wrong with that? A man named Matthew, looking from far away like a woman wandering the cemetary and grieving and cursing our presence in my guilty mind, approaches our graveyard exercise field, and wants to hand us a show flier and we get to talking about music. Its definitely a scene from a movie but f8ck it its nice to be away from home and meeting humans walking the earth in the sun. We walk up some stairs to get a drink at a bowling alley bar somewhere, its dark, there are huge paitings of balls everywhere. The guy who serves us beer tells us that the neighborhood where our show is, is a place he would never go to, and we say why? and he says "the only nice way I can say it is that its a bad neighborhood" and from his Packers jersey and the glint off of the cross around his neck and the smile on his face I knew he was trying to impress upon us that he was a racist prick. Congratulations chubby.
October 24th Brookville PA
We run screaming from Pittsburgh, after a show no one wanted to see. This is the thing we are gonna be honest about, most bands would not, but this sh*t happens, and it happens to everyone: We played for almost no one, besides the promoter Manny, the two guys in the second musical act and their friend. That was the show. We got drunk and called it a practice. This is all u can do. Its something everyone should experience, it will put the "f8ck it" in the "lets do it". We brought it to the 4 sets of ears in the room. One of the lucky ones set up some mics on the spot to record the show because he thought that it was just that GREAT, a fact that later, while trying to fall asleep and justify this silly ass existence, is clearly the high point of the evening - this man, the recorder who was blown away. At one point, while discussing whether or not we should play, Manny was rythmically knocking his head against a glass door. He lived downstairs. We all spent a lot of time in what turned out to be his personal toilet. He offered us the venue space to crash in, we thought better of it.
We drive, stopping at a Days Inn on top of a hill like in a scary movie. We end up calling this home for two nights and a day. We start to get mental- an explosion of laundry and substance abuse and Batman Begins commence at 3am despite our spiritual exhaustion. In the morning Jon puts in my contacts and complains that everything is blurry. Manic and bored, we grab our guitars and keyboards and write something new in the little room. We dribble away an entire day. Had we glanced at a weather forecast we would have shot out of those mountains like Batman with his eyes glowing and sh*t, but we don't because we don't KNOW. Following our instincts we get a 26" pizza and head to a basement bar we saw in town, where, I sh*t you negative, it is Men's Night. This means, apparently, an empty bar with free pool. Two girls roll in, fooling themselves ever so slightly that it is awesome that we are in a band. We chat it up with them and the bartender, doing shots and being funnny. These ladies are super sweet and buy our cd's unheard and we quietly wonder if someone wants to sleep with someone else. We chose to respect Men's Night, leaving finally only with the four men we came in with. Someone remembers one of the girls mentioning something about there being some snow or something tomorrow...
October 25th More PA
And it comes. Someone fast forwards from late October to mid January within a matter of two hours as we drive up and down in the western Pennslyvannia mountains. Ping pong ball sized snowflakes amassing on freakin everything including the beautiful fall colored leaves, who are as unprepared for this satanic turn of events as we are and droop like dr. seuss trees. We begin to see cars in ditches, than many cars in ditches, our awareness of our soft-fleshed brittle-boned bodies climaxing at the sight of a f*cking VAN in the ditch UPSIDE F*CKING DOWN. It is all too obvious to us that if our van rolled it would make for a gruesomely fantastic physics contest that at least some of us would surely lose. Cliff Burton, Exploding Hearts, people dying in bands in vans. No one speaks. Then the highway is like "I have an answer" and at first we are like "Bulls*t" but then we are like "OK, we can deal with this" as the entire interstate shuts down, everyone and everything stops and we sit for three hours. We, the band members in our shroud of band member righteousness with such a true and blessed mission to just simply bring ROCK for others to enjoy, we are spared and treated like kings, for it is our lucky fortune that we are prepared to LIVE in this vehicle of ours. We have leftover 26" pizza, fruit, vegetables, toilet paper, water, smokes, and frickin movies we can play on our laptop and we are not afraid to pee on the road in the plain sight of the others. Because this contains elements of most of our favorite things it turns out to be quite fun. We watch Election in its entirety and then it is time to drive again. 20 mph and a conviction that the entire Northeast must be covered in this avalanche of snow and that we will surely have to cancel our show in Boston the following night. We are comforted though by the knowledge that we will always be prepared to pee wherever we are.
October 26th Boston MA
13 hours in the van ends abruptly at the front door of an old high school friend of mine - Chuck - the renter of a really decent apartment in Cambridge with green green grass. His girlfriend remains unseen in the bedroom because it is stupid late to be rolling in on someone and we tip toe and limit as best we can the flushing of the loud toilet. We eat fancy pastries the following afternoon because we think this is what New Englanders do. We play at TT the Bears with bands half our age (not really) and we bring it the way we know and somehow we screw up our set-time-to-set-list mathematical formula, end our set too early and then have to pull out our least energetic song to close out the night, which makes me apologize in my head to the young people who we have so confused with our misplaced ups and downs. But this seems to matter not, the humans are into it, the show feels good, and we are smiling.
October 27th New York NY
Hi large city. You are the densest thing i have ever seen. You do not care if my large vehicle can squeeze into your Ralph Bakshi streets, you do not care if there is a freakin Hollywood movie being shot around the corner from the venue where I need to get to and somehow park near in order to roll hundreds of pounds of bullsh*t through the front door, a hippie movie that has painted an entire block of Lower East Manhattan in 60's peaced out greens and yellows and lined the streets with large glistening new semi's. Your facades are rough and grey, you dont necessarily think your clubs need to have a sign. But inside your Tonic doors you present to us a female sound guy, yes it is an oxymoron, and she is sweet and helpful and one half of The Timeout Drawer drools. She tells us we can leave our equipment here overnight, rather than Justin's Brooklyn street apartment, where it would have surely been ravaged by little pirates. Avary, Bob Davies, Justin, Stephanie, Sean- these friends of ours, these good people show up to watch us play. A group of young guys and apparently their driver roll in and buy our things. Someone requests a song, they shout out "Play 'the Gift'...", referring to the opening track on our 2nd record A Difficult Future, probably the closest thing we've had to a hit single, and Jason, having no idea what this person is talking about, says "What are you talking about?". We are THAT professional. Jon recovers "We can't". And he's right. Enough line-up changes and there is some things you can't do. We play a different encore. We bring it. We party before the show and after all night and we see Sean Penn and Tim Robbins and Rober DeNiro kickin it at a speakeasy bar. We get crazy drunk and laugh with our friends and we are so thankful you people. So much.
Money
All things considered the band's cash flow is OK. We shot out of Chicago with cash in our pockets from a great night at the Empty Bottle, a wad of several hundreds. Our groceries, hotel rooms and gas is siphoned from the show money envelope, cigarettes and booze from the thin individual wallets. The shows have paid about a hundred smacks each, which sounds like nothing, unless you pretend you are on a road trip with your best friends, and you have the luck to roll into a different city each night with the proper equipment to rock out in front of strangers at a bar where you will also get to sit and drink for free and then get paid for being there. In the context of a road trip vacations, you simply cannot beat this. In terms of career success nonsense, you certainly can.
October 28th Fredericksburg VA
The stop that was never meant to be. Our conversion van, with its interior of wood panel and runner lights and carpet designed somewhere in Indiana at a shop called Sherry, which has led us to call her by that name, makes that f*ckin SOUND that you do not want to hear, a sound that means "things are gonna change". We pull off the road, get a room, gonna get her to a garage in the morning. The good news is that this is the first night of three that we have off in a row. We have time, we think to ourselves. No big deal.
October 29th Fredericksburg VA
We find a shop in the phone book down the street, drive the van over there at 9am, its a Saturday. She is making more sounds now and there is sweating involved in getting there in time before she sh*ts the bed entirely. Because this is America, there is no sidewalk to lead us back to the hotel, only a series of strip mall entrances and drainage ditches and I am just hating on it, this wasteland carefully constructed to eliminate the pedestrian. It is garbage. At noon we get the call you do not want to get: its the transmission, they can't work on it, no one else in town can until MONDAY. And it will be by god mother f*cking expensive. These are my words, not theirs. I am freaking out at this thought, this no work on sunday, half day saturday bullsh*t. Monday. It gets worse - once they start, its a 3 f8cking day job. Thats Thursday morning. We have shows every night that week, starting Monday, so we are screwed. And its still only Saturday. Jesus. We talk to everyone, the waitress, her brother and her boyfriend, trying to find an answer. Every phone number is called in the yellow pages. Then there's the issue of leaving the van unattended in a lot until Monday with all that equipment in it. STRESS.
October 30th North VA
Our good friend and ex-guitar player Chris Van Pelt drives out to pick our sorry asses off the floor and take us to his remote place in North, VA, a place where we wrote half of Nowonmai two years ago, by the Chesapeake Bay, a place that once adorned Jon's penis with a tic. Once again relief is sought in substance abuse and we giggle with Chris and his wife Cassandra into the night. In the morning we sit on the dock, play with a kitten and try not to go mental. We check van rental prices, quickly realizing rental companies have covered the angle of possible band customers very intelligently: there is nothing suitable. Mini-vans and overpriced cargo vans. Garbage. We get mental. Not knowing how we are going to get to DC the next day, we go to sleep, after watching shooting stars light up the night sky on the dock and avoiding sexual contact with a female friend of Cassandra's, choosing instead to shoot potatoes with a potatoe gun into the bay. This is how we roll.
October 31st Washington DC
We get to the shop in the morning. They give us the bad news: new transmission, $2300. Jesus. The good news, if it even matters in light of that hefty figure, is this: it will be ready tomorrow afternoon. Great. Next door is an Enterprise, they have a cargo van, we rent it for $80 for the day, load it up in the repair shop with all the gear in the world while the service guys look on in disbelief. One of them used to be in a travelling Marine Corps band. Jason, intelligently, is wearing his Millions of Dead Cops shirt, here in the South, in front of the good ol boys who will be working on our vehicle. Someone says "Interesting shirt." Thats code for "My cousin is a cop". We drive off, hoping the weight of the equipment doesnt end up crushing the two souls who have to ride in back with all of it. Jason turns his shirt inside out. DC is every band for himself. Our posters aren't up. No one sticks around for any band that their friend is not in. Someone shows up who saw our Empty Bottle show last year with Mono. He wonders if we do this full-time. His answer most certainly comes when we play to him and six others. Rough. We sell records, somehow, but it must certainly be because- no matter the size of the audience, our size remains the same: LARGE.
November 1st Chapel Hill NC
We get our van back and its like having a home again, it feels THAT good. Our crumbs and little seats and all the familiarities are there, including a smell that is attributed to an ONION, yes an onion, that Jon bought for a couple slices on a sandwhich and it sat in the cooler too long, and the water leaked at a drop a minute and now the van smells. It smells LARGE. Interestingly, or not, the onion was chucked out the window just minutes before the van trouble started days ago, but its spirit has remained. And with it, a further plunge into despair as we roll into Chapel Hill and the promoter has listed the show for the wrong night, meaning effectively, there is no show. No show. This makes DC look good. There is nothing worse than no show. No show is like coming out of hyperspace to discover Alderaan is not there. Nerd reference but you get the drift. We are bumming. The promoter hands us 3 six packs of Pabst and some money as compensation and dispirited we go see a movie and get drunk and laugh despite. Trying to keep it together. A phone call comes from tomorrow nights promoter in SC, saying the venue has been shut down by fire marshalls, and they are moving the show to a STORAGE facility. Jesus. But, I say to my good friends, either the show will be horrible or it will be awesome. Turns out its...
November 2nd Columbia SC
Awesome. What a f8ckin party out in the chilly air, in no man's land next to railroad tracks in South Carolina, pabst bottles and tons of kids show up at 8pm for chrissakes, a reality that could never be in Chicago. Our set closers, What Looked Like Morning was Only the Beginning of Endless Night and The Exorcist were meant, by god, to be played EXACTLY right here. It is a blast. The other bands are cool, the kids are young and psyched and we are old and psyched. We stay with Andy's girlfriends mom, who smokes up with the guys in her big southern home and she is a theatre professor and she's 60 and she busts out into 3 verses of an Outkast song and Jason thinks he's tripping on acid. She tells us she did that in class and her kids were like "huh?" and her response to them was: "What? You think you are at the apex of your cool now?" An awesome sentiment I think. What a cool lady.
November 3rd Athens GA
We played the Caledonia Lounge years ago and it was alright. But tonight something happens that is never supposed to happen for a bill of two instrumental bands: girls show up. And I mean tons of girls, without boyfriends even, when we play they are three rows deep of young girls. It is bizarre. The South is awesome we think. We sound really good and we bring it and we meet tons of nice people, Jon flirting with a nice girl named Renee and we go to some bars afterward with her and her friends and I have an amazing intimate conversation with a guy as skinny as I am who is on leave from Iraq and his girlfriend Beth who is against the war and his sister Katherine who doesnt say. These people are amazing. Its a ten minute talk on the sidewalk and I am reminded how great it is to meet humans walking the Earth when your are a stranger. Everyone should do this. We part ways with the Jon flirting team, hop in the van and we feel good. We discuss how impossible it would ever be for a nice girl like Renee to invite us to her house for the night when suddenly her face appears in the driver-side window and she's like "You guys wanna come over and get high?" Suddenly it 5am and we need to be in Tampa (8 hours away) by 7pm, which means we have lost our sleeping time because we are stupid and its time to hurry up, sleep for 3 hours, and drive like f8ck. Dammit.
November 4th Tampa FL
The day is a blur of sleep deprivation and endless driving but the good lord jesus christ has something in store for us tonight, by god. This night will go down in my head as one of the best nights of my life. Its that good. Sometimes everything comes together and a show is just that awesome. Jack is the promoter and he also gave us our favorite show of the last tour, here in Tampa. There's an instrumental band Red Room Cinema, and a grindcore band Light Yourself on Fire that play before us. RRC roll out the beautiful thick posty rock music. LYF has a stack of guitar amps that is unbelievable and they are LOUD. The show is outside in front of the club, under palm trees. You can't beat it. There is every kind of person streaming through the front gate - club girls, indie rock kids, jocks, metal heads- and they can hear the blast from down the street and heck if they are going to slow down to pay their dough and get in there to check out the rock freakshow and have a beer. This could never happen in Chicago. And the show is late for our hometown standards, its 1am before we start playing. From beat one of our opener, track 4 off Nowonmai, a mellow song called "This Narrow Room is World Enough", I feel so alive playing the drums in this warm air I can't believe it. When "Bursting With Tears.." comes ripping out of nowhere, the good people and the band are just going nuts. It is good to be breathing. And right up to the end of the set, people are trying to get us high and drunk and we keep bringing it. We are unleashed like little manic nerds because this is the last show of the tour, and these 200 people feel our mania, or maybe they are just drunk. Yeah, they are drunk. But we finish the set and there is a demand for more, and we bust out a 9 minute song from an upcoming EP no one has heard. And they want more, so we out comes track 5 off Nowonmai "Nothing Can Stop Me" which we play shitty I believe but what the f8ck ever. Thank you people. You kind and awesome people of Tampa Florida. May god have mercy on your good sinning souls.
We proceed to get wasted, sell tons of records, make new friends and two really great people named Ed and Ananda allow us to come back to their apartment, for more beer and grass and we keep it rolling till 7am and the plan is beach time tomorrow and they will take us there and then out for some vegetarian pot pie on the coast and jon lets their cat out but she comes back in the morning and we have sh*tloads of fun with these two and sitting in the sun feels freakin awesome. It absolutely blows that we have to leave and leave our new friends and drive straight back to Chicago, but this is the way of it. And so we do and we are all good humor and there is money for all the gas and the silliness of driving all the way to Chicago becomes torture at some point but its a blur and there was a moment when we found ourselves peeing on the lawn of a Fire Department somewhere in the US and Andy said it was bad karma and we apologized to the cold air but this actually had to happen. And then we were home and sleeping like good citizens and then there is nothing left to talk about.
