Half-way and still truckin'

If I can keep myself from getting distracted by the Ali G dvd playing behind me, I'll try to give a rundown of the past week. Portland, Seattle, Idaho Falls, and Madison shows were really good. Minneapolis and Rapid City weren't as well attended, but still fun. PDX and Seattle were our last two shows with Imperial Leather. We were all sad to see them go: Cap'n Dan and the Profane Existence mini-mall, Matte the drummer, whose bandmates say he looks like the little wooden boy on a Swedish tv show, Kristofer the bassist who memorably drew a "new" Swedish flag on a small piece of paper (crude, thick male genitals with "Sweden" written underneath), Kanko (guitar/vocals) who told me I could borrow their drumset at the Gilman show only if I took off my clothes and played with the Imperial Leather banner wrapped around me like a cape... I could go on. Hopefully we'll get the chance to rendezvous with them in Stockholm if we make it over to Europe next summer.

Quick rundown of the shows...

PDX: Good show, good turnout. Matt got loaded and puked on himself. In the van. I whacked my knuckle on a cymbal, and it swelled up pretty good.

Seattle: The show was at a house on the outskirts of the city, and we didn't have time to wander around downtown. Which bummed me out...I like Seattle, and who knows when's the next time I'll be out there. Good show, great vibe. The first actual basement show of tour, and it was a true punk basement. Lots of people hanging out in the backyard, which featured a makeshift bar, the massive PE distro (of course), and a barn that houses a bike shop and a metal shop. The show ended late, we got to bed around 4 and planned to get up at 7 to make the haul to Idaho Falls. We woke up at 9.

Idaho Falls: We knew we were looking at 10-12 hours at least but we weren't exactly sure. Three hours into our drive we called our contact in Idaho Falls, and he all but told us we wouldn't make it on time. We checked in again in Boise at 6pm. We were told we were still four hours away, and that probably wouldn't cut it. I had been driving all day and moving at a pretty good clip, but we positively burned it from Boise to Idaho Falls. We got there in three and half hours, right on time. We set up really fast and played to a good crowd. We were all operating on just a few hours sleep, but we decided that it would be best to leave for Rapid City as soon as possible. We hung out in Idaho Falls for a few hours (at a farmhouse that some kids rent for ridiculously cheap) and then hit the road.

Rapid City: We were going to drive through Yellowstone Park, which is the most direct route between those towns, but when we got to the entrance, we learned that a) it costs $25 to drive through the park, and b) we were there at 6 or 7 in the morning, and parts of the road weren't even open yet. So we detoured north into Montana to pick up I-90 there. We got into Rapid City with time to spare. Got an oil change, and made use of the free car wash coupon we received. We were supposed to play a bar (oh man...wait till you all see the posters that the bar owner made for the show...wow). It looked like turnout was going to be far too low for the promoter to cover the cost of renting the bar, so the show was moved to Storybook Island. Cute, huh? There's a park in town, part of which is specially tailored for kids with things like an old-woman-who-lived-in-a-shoe shoe to climb in, etc. We squatted a park pavilion a played to 15 people with no vocals.

Minneapolis: In retrospect, we may have made a bad decision by choosing not to pay the $15 to take the scenic loop through the Badlands on the way from Rapid City. I would have liked to see all those craters where the aliens landed and gave birth to L. Ron Hubbard. Oh well. We played a basement show that had been set up late in the game at a house that doesn't normally do punk shows. Low turnout, but a good time. We stayed with Skell, who's an uber-punk-looking dude who put out our second 7". After the show I hung out with Michelle Lee, a former District resident whom some of you know (she's doing very well, busy with four or five different jobs plus activist stuff). She gave me a midnight driving tour of the city, which I had previously seen almost nothing of. She explained that activism there tends to focus on long-term projects rather than protest-y stuff. While not without drawbacks (a radical/punk community that tends to segregate pretty seriously along project lines), this approach has produced and sustained an amazing number of collectively run institutions. I need to spend more time in this city at some point.

Madison: Great show. We played in a frathouse that wasn't a frathouse (not sure exactly what its deal was) somewhere on the UW campus right on a lake. Pretty scenic. It was a diverse show (metal, thrash/powerviolence, and us) with a diverse crowd, and everyone was pretty into everyone else. So to speak. Oh yeah, and Iron Lung played and they rule! After the show we drove to Milwaukee to stay with our friend Zack (which is where I was when I started writing this thing, though I'm far away now).

7 days @ 3 hours behind

Ok, I'll try to assemble a rough version of the past week out here in the wild wild west. Last time I checked in, we had arrived in Long Beach but hadn't yet played our show. It went really well, the LB warehouse is a great space (a little bigger than it needs to be for most shows, but apparently not for the recent Tragedy show that I'm told drew 700). Our crowd was a little lower than we anticipated, but at some 150 (guesstimate) folks, it's been by far our biggest show. I got some beach time before the show with some of the Imperial Leather dudes and dudettes, but it wasn't as remarkable as I hoped it would be. The beach, Sunset Beach, isn't particularly scenic, and the bodysurfing conditions were pretty poor: choppy waves breaking close to a sharply angled, pebble-strewn shore. But still, I was in the Pacific Ocean while you were at work, so there you have it.

We would have liked to drive up the coast to Oakland, but time constraints dictated we take the inland route. We had been added to the bill a little late in the game, riding Imperial Leather's coattails. (If I haven't mentioned it before, they've been very generous in that way.) It was a five-band show with two locals and a SoCal band. For some reason, the promoter had us play second, which was odd though not distressing. More distressing was being told, as we were still setting up, that we had 15 minutes of allotted time from that point. Rushed and confused, we played a shitty 10-minute set. The local bands - one before us and one after us - each played for at least 20 minutes. The promoter iced the cake by having his own band headline. We still don't know why things went down the way they did, despite spending the next day and a half spending a surprising amount of time hanging around with said promoter. Not a bad dude, but... who knows.

The next day, we wrangled our way onto Imperial Leather's show at Gilman Street in Berkeley. For those of you who aren't familiar, 924 Gilman Street falls somewhere low in the first tier or high in the second tier of legendary US punk venues of the past 30 years. If I remember correctly from glancing at the recent book about Gilman, the first show there in 1987 featured Neurosis. (For those of you who aren't familiar with Neurosis, well... your loss.) The bookers at Gilman were kind enough to give us a 15 minute slot, which we were perfectly happy about. Taken as a whole, we played a decent set, but it was marred in the middle by one complete trainwreck and one other sloppy-but-not-disastrous song. Our performance put me in a pretty foul mood, especially since the previous day's pile of crap hadn't stopped steaming in my mind, so I spent most of the rest of the show walking aimlessly around the neighborhood. Hopefully we'll get another shot at Gilman some day so that we leave a somewhat less, um, desolate legacy.

We had a day off on Monday, so we spent it eating, drinking, and record shopping in San Francisco with Imperial Leather. I made my second pilgrimage to Aquarius, which was a personal goal for this trip. I've been to SF three times now, spending a day, a few hours, and half a day respectively; and I really need to carve out a significant block of time there at some point.

On to Reno, Nevada, where we played once again with Imperial Leather. The last hour of the drive there from the Bay area is through the Sierra Nevadas, and specifically through the Donner area - Donner Pass, Donner Lake, etc. (Apropos of which, I read a recent Atlantic article about how a thorough forensic excavation of the Donner site yielded absolutely no evidence of cannibalism, contradicting some early testimonial evidence given by survivors and, of course, the popular wisdom.) We also passed quite near Lake Tahoe, which I don't think I could have point to on a map beforehand. The Reno show was decent, and it turned out that our roadie knew the promoter and his girlfriend from their Boston days, and we stayed with them.

I've gotta run, but that almost catches you up. It took 12 hours to drive to Portland yesterday, and we spent today bouncing around record stores, Powell's, etc. We play here tomorrow night with Imperial Leather, which should be a pretty high-energy show, Portland being the punk mecca that it is.

Short 'n sweet

I haven't had much computer time recently, nor do I have much now, but you can expect lengthier updates in the next 48 hours. We played Reno last night and will soon be leaving for Portland - no rush though, we're not actually playing there till Friday. The past week held some high points and low points on the tour; I'll get into all that later.

In the meantime, check this out.

A note

My main email account has been bouncing every email I try to send, so some of you may get emails from other accounts; others of you may not get any (don't take it personally).

Also, I've been living in a news vacuum for the past two weeks, so if you come across any articles of particular note, please send them along.

I just came across a wikipedia-style site for indie music, appropriately named www.indiepedia.org. I believe it's still inchoate, but will probably blossom into something worthwhile.

None more west

After logging just shy of 5,000 miles, we finally made it to California late last night. I say "finally" not out of any sense of desperation but rather because a) I'm as far from home as I can get in the continental U$, which is a cool feeling, and b) all our best shows will probably be out here (at least in terms of attendance). Our show in Phoenix was ok, and the hospitality was excellent. We stayed almost all day yesterday, ran some errands, and were treated to a ton of really good free pizza. In case anyone had any doubts, Phoenix is still hot as hell. We did the drive to San Diego late last night. I-8 goes along the very southern edge of AZ across the Colorado River into California, bumping shoulders with Mexico on the way. About 100 miles from San Diego, we hit mountains that I'm sure would have been quite scenic had it been daytime. Imperial Leather played there last night and stayed with us in a small apartment in Chula Vista. It was cozy. We stayed up late shooting the shit, and it was the first time I had spent any time actually talking with any of them. As some of you already know, Swedes are the funniest people on earth. This was confirmed for me last night.

Today we made a short visit to Imperial Beach, a few miles north of the Mexican border, and then headed to the show, which was a matinee at a spot called the Hot Monkey Love Cafe. The owners of the cafe had forgotten about the show and showed up two hours late, which created a crunch since there was another event booked there for 6pm. We and Imperial Leather played shortened sets (they had been added to the bill at the last minute), and only one of the two local bands booked actually got to play. Not a bad show, but as my bass player said, it felt like we were on a field trip and being given a short amount of time to recreate freely before returning to the bus.

After the show, we drove up to Long Beach, which is where I am now. Our show here tomorrow will likely draw upwards of 200 people; it's a Friday night, and from what I gather, the punk warehouse here is one of the best diy venues in the country right now. The guy who booked our show is a dude named Allen, who put us up after one of our CA shows last year and treated us really well. At the time, he had just opened a record store and was working on renovating the rest of the space here into living quarters. It's finished now, and it's really cool.

Can't wait for tomorrow's show... In the meantime, here are some pics from today:

PUNX ON THE LAWN



IMPERIAL LEATHER





ODE to ODB



SHIRT OF THE DAY



EDIT: I didn't see any of these or these in the past 48 hours.

Pics

The tall cacti are called "dromedaries"

Posting from hot, sprawling Phoenix, AZ. Tonight's a house show that will be starting very soon. We've been doing pretty well since I last checked in. San Antonio was fun, Austin was well-attended, and Albuquerque kids brought the mosh. In a good way.

The Austin gig was in a new warehouse space called the Artillery that will soon feature a record store upstairs. I chatted with one of the kids who books there, whom I recognized from Philly shows once he told me his name. I didn't share with him my particularly vivid memory of him briefly catching on fire at a show in Philly a few years back. (His band, Heros=Shit, opened for An Albatross at the Killtime, and on the way to the show, which was a couple days after Christmas, they had stolen a bunch of plastic lawn ornament Virgin Marys. One of which they set up with a candle on its head. Inevitably, Mary took a boot, the candle flew, and things got scary for a couple seconds. No harm done, except that I lost a camera at that show. Anyway...) Austin was our first of a half dozen shows with Imperial Leather, who draw a crowd. There's a good sized punk scene there, and my bandmates know a bunch of the folks (who are mostly just acquaintances to me). We may have hit our culinary apex at Java Noodles, which is a ridiculously good Indonesian joint that I can't recommend highly enough. But steer clear of the meat: our roadie Matt, who eats red meat, lit into it there, and the result was two days of flatulence that could have stopped a Panzer division.

We had planned to leave Austin right after the show to get to Albuquerque, which is an 11 hour drive, give or take. But my bandmates wanted to hang out with their friends, so we stayed the night, got very little sleep, and hit the road at 8am yesterday. We got into the 'Bou-que at 7 or 8, and played a house show to 20 kids who were going nuts the whole time. Caught up on sleep last night and hit the road at noon for Phoenix. First really scenic drive of the tour, passing through the mountains between Flagstaff and Phoenix. We didn't really see canyon country in its full splendor, and it's really frustrating that this is my third time driving through Arizona and the third time I won't be seeing the Grand Canyon. We need to work it into the plans next time we get out this way. Apparently Imperial Leather's bummed they'll be missing it too, but at least one of them is getting married in Vegas. We have no such excitement on the horizon.

We've been eating pretty well, making gas money, and Shravan's distro is bringing in the green. We have three or four shows on the west coast that will probably be pretty big, i.e. fun and good for our financial well-being. Two best signs spotted so far:

Houston: a sign for a joint funeral home/cemetary called the Earthman Resthaven

Some small town in central Texas: a banner strung across the street announcing the apparently annual Spring Ho Festival. I have no idea what that actually means. None.

Great weather and beautiful urban planning [WARNING: SARCASM]

Houston is a sprawling disaster of a city, possibly the most repulsive metropolis I've ever seen. We're staying with a couple of Justin's friends on some edge of the city in a nice little house in a residential development with three dogs and movies and video games. Both of our Texas shows have been cool venues with low attendance, due to a last-minute venue relocation an hour away from the original spot and minimal promotion, respectively. We're headed to San Antonio in less than an hour. Not sure what to expect from that show. Tomorrow will be the first of a number of shows with Imperial Leather (awesome early-80s style rockin' punk from Sweden) that will probably be relatively big.

Tijuana's a no-go, but we picked up a show with Imperial Leather in Reno during our five-day break between Oakland and Portland.

Texas

We rolled into Fort Worth last night after driving all day from northern Alabama. Our Denton show has been relocated here, which was disappointing for all us. Disappointing for me because I hoped to get a glimpse a town whose sons and daughters give it high marks; disappointing for my bandmates because the house show in Fort Worth will not offer the same levels of free bowling, beer, and pizza.

Huntsville was a good experience. Cool people, cool venue (indoor skatepark). Acoustical nightmare. We're not meant to be playing big boomy warehouses. With the likely exception of San Antonio, our Texas shows should all be pretty good, and we have friends in Houston and Austin. Our Phoenix show, which had been shaky, has been confirmed (we're playing with a handful of "experimental metal" bands), but Tijuana is not looking good. Here are some updates on our tour experience:

-Number of really good meals eaten in hospital cafeterias: 1 (the hospital in Orlando is run by 7th Day Adventists, who are apparently into vegetarianism...the punx go there to eat all the time.)

-Number of mint-iced chocolate donuts consumed by yours truly at said hospital: only one, but I could have easily put down three or four

-Number of friendly visits from a cop while hanging out in a grocery store parking lot in Alabama: 1 (number of times the cop referred to himself as an "old-school Pantera fan": 1)

-Number of times our roadie Matt has stayed at Kim Deal's house: 1

-Number of showers: 1 (except Matt, I think he's still holding out)

-Number of times that Shravan, while using a gas station bathroom, mistakenly took someone repeatedly jiggling the doorknob for one of us and exclaimed, "hold on, I'm pinchin' a loaf!" only to emerge and find it was just some random woman: 1

Awaiting the UnRapture

There is a very young kitten launching repeated attacks on my shoes and occasionally clawing my flesh, so I'll keep this brief. Tallahassee: played to a very small crowd in a shed decorated with Christmas lights. Ambiance does count for something. Very cool hosts as well. Not much else to report.

6/5

Played Uncle Lou's Entertainment Joint last night to a decent-sized and receptive crowd. Who knew Orlando had a punk scene? For all the jokes we've been making about Florida being a well of despair (Florida: Just South of Worthwhile), our experience here this year has been far superior to that of last year.

There was too much party for me at the house we retired to after the show, so I eventually hunkered down in the van and got a surprisingly good night's sleep. It's not too hot at night yet down here. We've got a relatively short drive up to Tallahassee today, and then on to Alabama. Shravan knows people in Tallahassee and it sounds like folks in Huntsville are really looking forward to having us come, so it should be a good two days.

I'm watching some little lizard on the deck outside this room do some sort of funky dance. He's bending quickly at the knees like he's rocking out to music and puffing out his brightly colored neck thing (sorry if the technical parlance is hard to follow).

You're all ready for tomorrow, right?

\m/

On the road

I'm going to do my best to keep a tour diary of sorts here. No promises though. I'm historically terrible about these sorts of things.

6/2

-First show (Raleigh) cancelled due to house issues (evictions, etc.). Which means

-Starting our second consecutive US tour in f'ing Florida. Hooray. Despite the first $140 in gas coming out of our pockets, we did get to pay $2.58/gallon not once but twice.

6/3

-Brandon, FL. Show at long-time punk record store Sound Idea. We got into town too early after spending the previous night with acquaintences in Jacksonville, so had to wait quite a while till showtime. Decent show, we played ok. Lots of younger kids. Drove down to Sarasota after the show to stay with Shravan's school-year housemates. Cavelike conditions with a mountain of records, various pets, and copious grub. We stayed with these folks for a few days at the beginning of our tour last year, it'll be a shame when we have to leave in a couple hours. Orlando, you are not ready.