500 Days of Night

November 1, 2006 "Science vs. Romance"

2010-03-01T19:16:00.000-08:00

11/01/2006 House of Blues - Las Vegas, NV
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

The House of Blues in Las Vegas is buried deep in the bowels of the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel, which is the gold-leaf high-rise of Southeast Asian persuasion in the "Nevada gaming area" of downtown.

To say I was surprised to learn this fact is a bit of an understatement, given that most franchise venues of that ilk tended to be housed in a glitzy strip mall superstructure. This one, however, was housed in a glitzy mega-casino, one that I'd seen used as a backdrop in film and one-hour TV dramas involving characters who made more money in a week than I'd made in my lifetime and wore suits that had more style than fifty of my closets.

Big money.

We loaded in early, getting a nice long soundcheck and plenty of time to get our gamefaces on in the lavish, signature House of Blues backstage dressing rooms painted like Mediterranean bungalows, with tile mosaics and upholstered furniture. Because we weren't direct support, we still had the smaller of the two available rooms, but even then, it was still as if we'd lucked upon an ever-elusive free hotel room. Clean, spacious showers and a well-stocked larder and buffet table is usually enough to make a man such as myself forget about being homesick for at least an hour or three.

Spent most of my time walking around the loading docks, listening to our roadie Dan and Aaron Weiss pick around on an acoustic guitar. I'd saunter into the dressing room from time to time to see if the LAN cable was free, then I'd go back out and try to call Alison. mewithoutYou learned they'd scored a European tour and called a band meeting to figure out what kind of breakfast cereal they wanted on their rider.

We played well and could move around, unencumbered by a small stage as at 75% of venues we played. The Las Vegas crowd did what all Las Vegas crowds did when we played, which was to stand still, except for one girl who vocally demonstrated her disapproval in two succinct words as we walked offstage. I had given up on trying to figure out what it would take to get over in that town. I figured we were competing with the likes of Penn and Teller and we'd do just as well to simply enjoy our free tuna steak and cous cous, play our show and get on with our lives.

We learned that, as artists performing in the venue, we could reserve a room upstairs for a deeply discounted rate, which we did, breaking free from our Vegas Strip de riguer of the neon Motel Six and greasy spoon across the highway.

Bryan and I parked our van in a trailer-vehicle lot far, far away and cut through the Bellagio and its associated millionaire European tourists, and those wanting to appear to be millionaire European tourists, on the way back to the hotel. I always like to get a whiff of The Money each time I visited, even though I knew I'd probably never have access to the high-roller tables in the back rooms, much less the shops in the courtyard. But it all looked so nice. It never hurt to have a look, unless one were maybe Buddhist and having problems with that whole "death of desire" thing.

We had a room on the 33rd floor, high enough to look out over the desert through floor-to-ceiling windows. I chose to hang back in the room and enjoy my solitude, for as long as I could enjoy it, while the rest of the crew went downstairs to raise hell. It was the day after Nic's birthday, and he was drunk and on rollerskates.

I put on a bath and propped my laptop up on the sink and listened to Galaktlan, which seemed to be the thing to listen to in a luxury bath in a luxury hotel while trying to burn off the fog of war and tour in my head. It was dark, and somewhere in Estonia, a bedroom laptop artist's ears were itching.

After my bath, I fell asleep, then woke up to learn 1) Nic had been chased by hotel security on his rollerskates, 2) a girl we knew had passed out in the bathroom and had to be wheeled out in a wheelchair, and 3) that our tour manager drank all the five-dollar bottles of water left by room service after a drunken bender. Which I suppose meant it was a better night than our usual Vegas trysts of walking around with no money, collecting escort cards and comp drinks.

I probably made Dan feel a little too bad about the water thing than I should have. Money was still always, always a concern.

October 31, 2006 "Androgynous Noise Hand Permeates"

2010-02-24T15:33:00.000-08:00

10/31/2006 Glasshouse - Pomona, CA
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

Halloween last year was a raucous party in Seattle, yarling with good vibes and pozzy dreams of the medium-range future. Halloween this year was a drunken stopover in a tired LA suburb, a sleepy film scout location for scenes involving strip malls and aimless youth.

The Glasshouse never gave us no nevermind, it seemed. The room was big and vacuous. The crowds vapid. The onstage sound never quite right, as if it were coming from the building next door. It was Chain Reaction times two, and for a slightly older audience.

No one really dressed in costume for the occasion save James, who went in drag. Bender, mwY's tour manager, went as a boxer, and while I'm sure some of the other band members dressed as something, I never really cared to know what because I spent most of the time before and after the show in the labyrinthine backstage area drinking and staring at the wall.

James in a dress. Kinda hot.

2006 was the year of building walls. I didn't wander out into the crowd or hang out at the merchandise area trying to meet fans. Years of experimentation had proved that my time spent out in the lion's den was a disastrous source of anxiety. So I sat and built a wall of drunk. I stayed behind this wall from soundcheck to set time to load-out because it felt safe. It helped me think of one thing at a time.

At the Glasshouse we played and I walked out onto the stage, wrapped in tight fitting black leather and polyester and hair in my eyes. More bricks. New car caviar, four star daydream. Buy me a football team. The crowd was quiet and passive and not nearly as noisome as its size would indicate.

It was easy to get my brain lost in the songs now. I found the place where I could connect the words to bottomless feeling, that actor's reservoir. Body-consciousness had burned itself away like sun on fog.

Yet still, it was not lost on me that few bought merchandise and few sung along and few applauded, and so I kept my bricks in place and made a beeline for the dressing room to resume my position on the couch, sipping more beer, feeling the sonic pulse of the next bands playing outside. Numb to the sudden existence of loud applause to a band more familiar.

The show ended and I walked outside, keeping to myself in the alley and in the haze of half a dozen drinks. I wanted to leave this town and run along to chase the carrot to other locales along the itinerary. Or was it a retreat. A mad dash.

There was a small crowd of people at the end of the alley on the sidewalk adjacent to the main road. They turned to look at me and then became agitated, surrounding me, asking me for autographs and doling out gushing praise.

It took me by surprise and I felt just a bit remorseful that I hadn't made an effort to find these people sooner instead of writing off the entire evening as yet another day away from my two-year-old that I'd never get back.

It was all so exhilarating and confusing all at the same time.

October 30, 2006 "Allison Road"

2010-02-19T19:23:00.000-08:00

10/30/2006 Clubhouse - Tempe, AZ
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

It was about this time that we started seriously thinking about running on used veggie oil. Piebald did it. mewithoutYou did it. It could be done. The irony of my prior dealings with our first guitarist was not entirely lost on me. Admittedly, I thought he was certifiably insane for suggesting we buy a bus shell and throw in a new engine and try to run it on french fry juice. But, at least in this one instance, he may have been onto something.

Nic and James started spending a lot of time with Aaron Weiss and his brother, going over the infrastructure and special needs of running a Greasel conversion. Occasionally a guy from Piebald would pipe in, too, though they were touring in a smaller vehicle. One of those shuttle van things with a set of accordion doors.

It still seemed too perfect. We'd already spent hundreds of dollars on our gas for this one run alone, pulling just a van and trailer. mewithoutYou spent half that the first day and paid for no more fuel the rest of the trip. And they were in a charter bus.

So we started scouring the web for more information. Aaron pointed us in the direction of Greasel Conversions (now Golden Fuel Systems) out of Missouri. The site seemed legit, and the copy made it sound like they knew of what they spoke. Our obstacles seemed to be the twelve grand we already owed on our van, plus the cost of a filtration system and the cost of a new vehicle.

Word on the street was that mewithoutYou bought their bus on eBay for $1500. Then they spent another couple thou on the conversion and on gutting and outfitting the interior with beds and a galley. Minus our lack of an extra fifteen thousand dollars, it seemed like something we could maybe possibly potentially pull off.

But free gas has a price, at least if you really want to pay off your investment and do it right. A slew of maintenance issues await an eager greaser upon their conversion.

Giant filters, endearingly called "elephant condoms," needed to be changed regularly, which involved climbing into the guts of the filter system itself and getting covered in oil up to your elbows. Fuel lines needed to be flushed without fail. The veggie oil itself, Aaron explained, actually congealed at a lower temperature than regular diesel, so you had to start the engine in with regular fuel and power down the same way.

Adding these extra steps, as any developer of new technology knows, increases the odds for problems exponentially, not to mention the enormous increase in price by going from normal van maintenance costs to the costs of maintaining a roadworthy bus. Lose a tire and you'll have to do some magic sweet talk to convince AAA to come save your ass in time to make your next show.

Then there are the grease recon missions. There was even a burgeoning code of ethics and protocol on how to procure your next fill-up. (Approach the eatery manager personally, ask politely, hope that he/she had to pay to have it removed anyway, clean up your mess.)

Conventional wisdom amongst fuel freetards is that asian restaurants have the best grease. Fast food joints and American diners are at the low end of the totem pole in terms of quality and might very well fuck up your fuel filters before their time. How convenient it would be to pull up to any one of the millions of Denny's in the middle of the night and hook the hose up to the grease trap and suck it dry. But no. You're only asking for a world of hurt and smoke.

Because of this dramatic reduction in choices, alongside the slow increase in popularity of veggie driving, free fuel isn't as easy to find as it may initially be presented by the converted. In some regions, I've heard, some restaurant chains were actually drafting up contracts with firms that would pay them for their grease so they could filter it at a plant and then resell it. A veritable market inversion.

My hidden angst was that we may do well in the beginning, but to stay in the game long enough to recoup our investment plus make all the work worth our while could potentially be a game of diminishing returns. And we'd already played that game for a long, long time.

The Clubhouse was full and Arizona was a hit-or-miss place that seemed to tilt to the hit more often than the miss. The buses and vans were parked along the side on an access road and a makeshift lawnchair commons was set up amongst the road cases and elephant condoms.

I spoke with Max for the first time face to face. Merely said hi and a few niceties but nothing of much substance. He was nice and seemed in a daze, but so did every headlining artist coming off a bus I'd ever spoken to in my career thus far.

Our performance stayed consistent with our calcifying attitudes - tough and resilient and amped on the fumes of beer, pot and Axe body spray. We stopped considering ourselves a support act and started carving out our own 45 minute reality that just happened to share the same stage as three other bands.

Each day was a new chance to build a foxhole. To dig in.

October 28, 2006 "Those Who Are From the Sun Return To the Sun"

2010-02-13T15:05:00.000-08:00

10/28/06 Diamond Ballroom - Oklahoma City, OK
Other bands: mewithoutYou, Piebald, Say Anything

Wade was my best pal in middle school and most of high school. Two oddballs we were that shared the same abstract sense of humor and an inability to focus despite our inherent smarts. Both of us were kicked out of our seventh-grade advanced placement program for poor performance and behavioral issues.

We'd draw the weirdest shit all over our homework assignments and then almost hyperventilate ourselves laughing over it until the teacher sent one of us to the other side of the classroom or out in the hall for drawing a legume-shaped car. In the cafeteria, we'd stack five hamburgers under one bun and eat it and roll apples and giant disintegrating brownie balls across the floor until Miss Davis, a rotund matriarch with a chip on her shoulder and a sour countenance not unlike the anus judge on The Wall, sent one of us to the principal's office.

Wade was my old middle school smokin' bud whenever I'd find a half-full pack of squares on the side of the road. I rode my bike to school all the time, which was a seven mile haul over back country roads and you wouldn't believe some of the things people threw out, including half full packs of perfectly good Camel Lights. We'd hike down to the river and light up like a couple o' cool dudes in high tops and jean jackets and Zack Morris hair.

Overnighters were a blast because we'd would rent the shittiest sci-fi movies of the day for Friday, and then indulge in tennis racket mayhem to Metallica and Nuclear Assault the following Saturday morning after sugar-frosted Diabetes Bombs.

Once my parents busted us with some ripped out pages of Letters to Penthouse that a kid named Joe Barnhouse gave me. Through this contraband, I discovered a thing such as a threesome did exist.

In high school, Wade was the first kid listening to Faith No More and Pearl Jam before either had become worn out and tired airwave fodder. So I became a fan too, mostly of FNM and not so much Pearl Jam because Pearl Jam didn't have enough metal guitars like FNM did. And their name sounded gay.

Graduation was literally the last day I ever saw Wade. I didn't hear from him again until just under a month before October 28, 2006, when he saw that we were playing Oklahoma city - the place he'd been living since high school - and said he'd come out to the show.

He never made it out, but I kept my eye open. I had a half-pack of road cigs, some porn and the Game Over album just in case. (Not really.)

The Diamond Ballroom sat off a gravel road on the outskirts of town, one part cowboy dance hall, one part airplane hangar. An enormous quonset hut-style construction that had likely looked the same since boot-scooters of the late 40s shuffled across the hardwood floors in rhinestone neckstrings while Patsy Cline knockoffs sang weepy Ray Price shuffle ballads.

Pictures lined the venue the length of a football field, signed and air-brushed faces of pomaded white men in embroidered suits and dainty country belles. This was the kind of place my Grandad might have place forty years earlier. Hell, he might have actually played this very joint.

Say Anything was giving some sort of pre-show exclusive meet and greet to a herd of fans who won the opportunity in a radio contest. There was a table with refreshments set up off to the side and I grabbed a handful with no thought.

I spent most of my time waiting backstage, drinking and smoking cigars and waiting for my old pal to show up. Onstage I kept looking out into the crowd to see if I could discern some sort of age-progressed version of him. But there were too many people and not enough lights.

He e-mailed me later that something had come up with one of his kids. I told him we'd probably be through again some time, but that was three and a half years ago and I still haven't seen him since high school.

Stranded in Hell, Ring Satan's bell! Bus 23! Never change!

October 27, 2006 "A Shit-Ass Scene For Nature Boy"

2010-02-10T15:42:00.000-08:00

10/27/2006 Jaunita's - Little Rock, AR
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

Juanita's was the "other place" in Little Rock n Roll aside from Vino's, and barring any diseased punk collectives in basements of condemned houses on the bad side of town.

Not sure if it was dumb luck that both happened to have above average restaurants attached, but at each one we ate well, though moreso at Juanita's because at Vino's they usually gave us two pies and some beer, both of which were good, but gone fast.

El (La?) Juanita had an exquisite fajita buffet set up that reminded me of Warped Tour if it were inside a 500-cap rock venue. Members from multiple bands lined up with paper plates to load up, all except for Aaron Weiss who made himself scarce alot and would then appear in the shadows to scavenge for scraps. Sometimes I thought of Jonny when I looked at Aaron.

I sat at a table with Greg from mwY, who, if I haven't said it before, was quite possibly the nicest and most endearing of the odiferous bunch. The drummer Ricky seemed to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder at all times, but maybe he was still upset that he lost his cymbals at the Indianapolis show I booked for them four years ago. Greg was a straight-up dude though, and I always thought he meant what he said. You don't come by guys like that on the touring circuit very often.

Everybody was better as socializing with other bands than I. In practice it always terrified me. I always assumed, usually incorrectly, that no one liked us and saw overtures of well-meaning compliments as superficial niceties that veiled inward umbrage. Perhaps it's because I knew how brutal we were with our criticism outside the range of non-Brazil ears. Our in-van banter could sometimes peel the stickers off a 4x8 trailer.

I once again riled Say Anything's tour manager with my confetti cannon explosions. I'd already been doing it the whole run, yet Little Rock was the first time he happened to notice. The cannon, about the size of a bowling pin, put up enough confetti to cover the stage in a thin layer of sparkling plastic and I always shot one off at the end of Strange Days 'round when Eric started his gigantic Tony Iommi guitar god solo. Piebald didn't seem to care and Aaron Weiss picked it up and sprinkled it out on the crowd during the mewithoutYou set. For all I could tell, Max and company could care less themselves.

But for Say Anything's TM, disrespectful was the word used as answer to my CO2 driven grand finale, so I put away the remaining cannons for another time. Even though I had perfected my trajectory.

Our repertoire of voices increased by one that day also. On arrival, James jumped out to secure a parking space in front of the venue, while another car simultaneously tried to take the spot. James refused to budge and let the New Jersey flow until the guy in the car rolled down his window and said something about getting a pistol in a tiny helium-pitched voice.

And we latched on, in the way we did with such things. For the next six months, we'd taunt each other with microscopic voices that said "I'm gonna get my pistol."

Higher and ridiculously higher.

October 26, 2006 "Corporate Deathburger"

2010-02-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

10/26/2006 Emo's - Austin, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, and Piebald

I discovered a system of viaducts and tunnels underneath Austin that I'd never noticed before, so I did what I always do'd when my ass ached from a long van ride and my brain ached from stale company. I went walking.

The tunnels weren't like some labyrinthine Gaston Leroux wet dream nor were they like the lost Cincinnati subway system, derelict and decadently rotting, but it did have an air of secrecy and lostness, and I felt like I had stumbled upon something forgotten even if it was a place where every train kid west of the Mississippi came to huff aerosol during SXSW.

I walked and walked and walked underneath the beer-soaked party town of Austin, squatting down under low archways, hugging the abutments at the spots where the water was high. I found a spot on a rock next to a bridge and sat and existed.

People overhead went to weekend grilled dinners and to drink booze in sports-themed bars, gilded in jewelry and expensive leather digs. Their cars and voices floated overhead like a television in the next room. Every now and then another grifter would saunter by in my underworld.

In the tunnel, I was neither happy nor sad. Neither hot nor cold. Neither rich nor poor. I just was.

We played on the big stage at Emo's, graduating finally from the tiny triangular one inside. We were still the first of four bands, which meant our backline was the first of four layers of amplifiers and bass rigs, thereby likely giving us even less room than if we had played on the small stage anyway.

There were probably 400-500 people at the show. Most of them there to see mewithoutYou and Say Anything. Piebald's draw was similar to ours except that they had been around much longer. They seemed like indie rock godfathers when I saw them on tour six years prior.

It was still daylight when we performed and I stood on the arms of more kids in front who chose to cross them and remain motionless. I still hadn't looked back after having discovered the thrill of pushing buttons. Even when the kid looked back at me like I was the biggest piece of shit he'd ever met, I pressed his arm harder.

We drove back to Eric's aunt's house outside town for another night of decent food and hot showers.

October 25, 2006 "Piney Woods Money Mama"

2010-02-02T19:58:00.000-08:00

10/25/2006 The Door - Dallas, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

One thing I can say about the screaming high colonic is that rather than signifying a mental implosion, it initiated the final breaking off of a thirty-year ice floe. Or put another way, an accelerator was mashed to the floor of my brain and my injectors were knocking off stone-cold black deposits of old-think like a stock car on Carb Day.

I was transfigured again.

The day started with sleep paralysis. We rolled into town well before dawn to stay with some Texas friends, a group of girls with crushes on all of us. I was in the passenger seat, vaguely aware that we were stopping in a parking lot. When the engine went off, I realized I couldn't open my eyes. Couldn't move my hands. Could barely breathe.

I felt like I was drowning. I could say, for dramatic effect, it was because of my fragile state of mind that I was trapped in my corpse-like body. But to be truthful, sleep paralysis happens a lot when you sleep sitting up. And I had been, for the past few drives. It was scary as hell, and I was kind of afraid to go back to sleep thereafter.

The Door filled up with another gaggle of the girl-jeans-for-Christ crowd. In these Bible Belt shows, the direct support act was getting more love than the headliner. I wondered what Aaron did with his money, because it seemed like he wore the same clothes and ate tossed food. Story was, he gave it away. Which must have been a lot, because I have good reason to assume their nightly guarantees were more than we were making per week, not to mention long lines at the merch table.

The merch table. Our merch table.

Our lonely merch table.

Kids still weren't biting in droves. Five to ten shirts a night was still the average, and on a tour like this I was usually too embarrassed to provide our management or label with accurate sales figures, and instead chose to say something vaguely positive like "we sold more than last night!" On rare occasion, I inflated the numbers. Lots of bands did that, even when it was numerically impossible for them to have done so.

$1500 worth of merch sold to a crowd of thirty, you say?

It used to bother me. But now I didn't care. Not about anything. The sole purpose of my existence out here was as a conductor of energy. In a manner of speaking, I was killing my self.

And it felt good.

The rest of the year and beyond saw the finest shows we had ever played.

October 24, 2006 "Snappy Kakkie"

2010-01-25T19:52:00.001-08:00

10/24/2006 Numbers - Houston, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

I shot a kid in the face with a confetti cannon at close range.

It was an accident, but I wasn’t sorry. Nic suggested I aim higher next time. I laugh now, because I saw his hair blown back by the force and that’s the only thing I remember. I had about eighteen of the twenty cannons left from our ill-fated release show several days before, and I figured I might as well continue to end our sets with a CO2 bang as long as I could.

Aaron Weiss was eating out of a dumpster when we arrived. He was dirty, unkempt and stank. It was just how he wanted to be. He was a far cry from the mop top indie kid I knew from 1999, and the dapper Edwardian catechumen he became in 2002. I fault no one for evolving.

Our entourage was now three buses. Two of them were powered by restaurant grease. We were, again, the small man out. Still putting 87 octane through our injectors like petroleum dependent chumps. I’m half-joking. For as expensive as gas was at the time, the “free” alternative seemed to have a lot of time-consuming strings that eroded its overall net gain.

It stopped seeming an any way interesting, odd or exciting that our work week would begin with an eighteen hour drive south. Our main battles were to stave off boredom, stave off whatever it was that pissed us off about each other, and stave off our odds that increasingly favored a highway-related death.

Wiseguys in airports always like to quote the statistic that you're a million times more likely to die in a car wreck than you are a plane crash, but I always seemed to feel safe behind the wheel of our Super Duty. It sat high and it didn't take very long to get where you could feel like the trailer was extension of ourselves.

I was slowly becoming obsessed with death and with the macabre humor of the absurdity of life that had become a relentless joke upon every tenet of gospel that I had been hardwired to cognize: that if you would work hard, you would find your Alabama leprechaun.

If this were a David Fincher film, this is the sequence where you’d be directed, as a viewer, from my mind’s eye to the real-time scene in which I sat in the dank Numbers dressing room, surrounded by the debris of seven appetites to a nauseating wide shot of me screaming at the top of my lungs.

I don’t know when I started screaming. Nor breaking the bottles. I more or less came to, sometime after our set and found myself throwing half-full bottles of beer at the cinder block walls. I must have smashed two cases. The floor was covered in malt-smelling glass. And I screamed.

I did not know what I was screaming about at the time. There was still too much disconnect between me, myself, and I but the barbaric yalping was something to the effect of an emotional high colonic.

I was screaming because I was lost and had no money. I was screaming because I was a nerve ending, gradually exposed and scraped clean over the course of half a decade. I was screaming because the thought of humping another 120-foot aluminum extrusion from a semi at minimum wage was making me question the worth my existence and render morbid calculations in my head on the value of my current life insurance policy against the debts I held the family under. I was screaming because Max Bemis was considered the crazy one and I wasn’t. But fuck if I felt like it.

The universe was unjust.

The universe was unjust.

I did my best. Social justice is never served in the marketplace.

We were, however, served a warning by the TM in charge.

Intermezzo Intermezzo

2010-01-15T19:53:00.002-08:00

The man I let into my apartment was neither tall nor short. He was neither handsome nor ugly. He was older than me by about thirty years, but he was not ancient. He had an air that was at once serious and mischievous, and his countenance was neither calm nor tense. He smelled of smoke but did not stink.

And he spoke with a peculiar slant.

“Beg pardon for dropping by at this hour,” he said. “I thought I heard some familiar music coming from your open window. The doorman let me in.”

He pulled out a cigarette and made a move to light it, catching himself and quickly turning to me before touching flame to tobacco.

“Mind if I smoke?” he asked. I offered to take his coat and hat, but the only thing he handed me was his dripping umbrella. The cigarettes he carried with him were tucked away inside a silver case with onyx inlays of small stones. He took a drag and let loose a stream of noxious citronella smoke that filled my room with a living cloud of faces, places and things. It was like lying on my back on a hill, watching dark clouds.

His black suit was stiffly pressed and his grey hair was pulled tightly back from his high forehead with a generous amount of sickly sweet-smelling pomade. He was neither smiling nor frowning and his eyes shone dark and obsidian.

October 21, 2006 "White People Do This"

2009-11-29T17:09:00.001-08:00

10/21/2006 Irving Theater - Indianapolis, IN
Other bands: Theanti, Them Roaring Twenties & BIGBIGcar

Words do little to describe how much planning went into this concert, our official release show for our third offering for public consumption. Our second, long-awaited full-length album.

It started weeks before in Kansas City, in the massive basement entertainment center of Aaron's aunt and uncle. The idea struck me that it might be a good, or at least interesting, idea to go whole hog on the absurdity tip and make this concert a confetti-fest of Spoonful Weighs a Ton proportions.

So in our downtime, I scoured eBay for cheap confetti cannons and beach balls. I passed a small budget by the rest of the guys and went on shopping spree of sorts, buying up entire lots of balloons and beach balls. I found a case of 20 twist-to-fire confetti cannons, each about 2 ft. high and in the shape of giant champagne bottles.

I bought a shitload of those tiny confetti poppers that drunk people pop on New Years to pass out at the door, and I looked for a place I could rent those giant dancing air-filled balloon people that are always in the front of car lots but all the places I could find were out of state and too expensive. I thought it would be great to have those things spring to life at the end of Strange Days when Eric launched into his solo.

I bought pancake mix and borrowed a portable self-heating pancake griddle to fling pancakes at the crowd. I made muffins to do the same. (To be fair, I didn't invent the pancake gag. Everything, Now did it at their release show and I was riding their jock.)

In short, I was preparing for massive messy mayhem in a room full of sweaty, confetti-soaked kids floating dozens of volleyballs above their heads like enormous pastel molecules floating on a dark sea of hands. I was preparing for aural armageddon in a wash of bright blinking lights and the smell of fog and burnt pancakes.

Captain Mainwaring at The Irving Theater, 10/21/06.

The venue was an old historic building, an old 600-cap venue with a stage that once lived in Market Square Arena and that supposedly supported Elvis' fat ass a few decades prior. A local kid I'd never met but who was a friend of a friend of a band I knew made the connections to set up the show. He promised a massive flyering campaign all over the city.

We also partnered with a national Darfur campaign, who put our name on glossy promotional material and slapped our pics up on their smooth website right next to the likes of Sparta and Rise Against. We were one of only a dozen bands on the carousel, and because we had agreed to lay out some literature and say a few words between a song or two about the cause, our show was listed on the site in front of millions of eyeballs worth of traffic.

This show, by all intents and purposes, had the makings of greatness. Another stepping stone to The Storybook Ending and a monumental reminder that we were, in fact, still relevant and that good things come to those who wait and that Jesus Christ and Ray Kroc and John Wayne love us all.

So when the twenty ticket holders trickled in the door, including my wife, whom I had finally convinced to come to another show after nearly four years, all the while hoping she'd see the vast amounts of progress we'd made (only to leave early), I went backstage and got drunk on Canadian Club.

"Oh god, people actually listen to these guys." -written on a Brazil poster at the Irving. We think it was Bigbigcar.

October 17, 2006 "Avalava"

2009-11-29T17:08:00.000-08:00

10/17/2006 Village Green Records - Muncie, IN
Other bands: Arrah and the Ferns, Works Cited

Flat-bed trailers, I'm convinced, we're invented with the expedient musician in mind. I knew a guy once - actually the guy that recorded our demos at The Back Forty in Markleville - that hatched up a plan to do drive-by banding, wherein his band would set up on the flat bed of a large truck, drums and amps bolted to the floor, and they'd pull into parking lots and intersections, power up, and rock the fuck out.

He had electrical schematics drawn, welding scenarios, the whole bit. I don't know if he ever did it. He smoked a lot of pot so it likely never got farther than the couch. But I always thought it was a great idea.

Flat-bed trailers are great, especially because an instant stage is never more than a friend-of-a-friends-dad away.

There was one parked in front of Village Green Records, which was the new town hipster nest that had opened up in a former video rental place owned by a blind guy.

It was a house-ish property that had grown a dense crust of paint and flyers and faded vinyl stickers. The barnacled crust of youthful liberalism. Short-term boarders crashed and long term renters stayed in the back rooms, rehydrating dried asian food in an obliterated kitchen with out-of-code wiring and unseen, but smelled, water damage. A vinyl utopia saturated in the esoteric stench of incense.

Eric and Aaron and I had worked up some acoustic versions of some songs, none of which were very solid but they were interesting arrangements nonetheless, replete with accordion and glockenspiel. My new props from the theater of the Absurd. It felt surprisingly good to break away from high-decibel walls of sound from time to time.

I was nervous, feeling like someone's lame dad playing for all this new blood. My guts still churned with ammonia residue of caustic criticism both heard and imagined. One local kid trolled our message board the previous summer and tried valiantly to wound our pride with snide comments about our exploitation of another country from our choice of band name, and our sonic derivations from bands I never owned records of but whom he was sure we listened to constantly. A post-adolescent blowhard, intensely opinionated but intellectually inept. We traced his ISP from the message board and gleaned a few clues from his posts to find out he was a dishwasher at a local dinner spot.

Something about a prophet is without honor only in his hometown.

So we sat up on the trailer bed in folding chairs, singing dark and serious songs that were loose and held together by a vague sense of tune and time, playing after two sugary-psychedelic-devil-may-care indie pop darlings of the time. Our music, to me, felt overwrought and melodramatic in those climes. My banter felt contrived and indulgent.

Because I rarely left the house anymore when we were home, the sets of eyes staring up at the truck bed felt critical and unwavering. My scene was gone. I no longer had my finger on this town's pulse.

Intermezzo 9875

2009-11-29T17:03:00.001-08:00

I forgot to mention that we'd been offered a two-week run with the band Say Anything during the space between our ill-fated college tour and the beginning of our long and quizzical stretch of dates with post-grungers Smile Empty Soul.

This marked a well-deserved return to large stages and sold out venues and guaranteed free dinner every night there was a show. A tonic for the ego, even though the inevitable subconscious fan envy would undoubtedly take hold the minute we watched our tourmate's merch tables get mobbed. Regular hot meals would almost make up for it. Almost.

The band had a singer named Max who, it was said, suffered from an acute personality disorder that required fistfuls of medication in order for him to function properly in normal society. I talked to him a few times during the run, but most of the time he shuffled around the bus area in pajama pants and a band t-shirt. Every interview I read about him started with a few paragraphs about an infamous incident where he was found running down the middle of a Manhattan street, naked and incoherent.

He may very well have been certifiably insane, but the way his batshit antics were almost too perfectly baked in to the press release made it seem as if there was a preconceived marketing concept at work under the surface. And to those of us who were under some real mental duress at the time, any insincerity in Crazytown was highly, highly frowned upon. I kept my eyes open.

But in the meantime, I grabbed a couple days of work from the glass and aluminum shop. I grew to hate the cochlea-raping scream of the aluminum saw that used to hit me as soon as I walked in the door at 5:55 a.m.. I wore headphone-style hearing protection to keep my wits and the integrity of my most valuable asset, but I realized I liked the solitude of not having to hear anything in that shop, ever, and I eventually never took them off.

I didn't have much to say though, and I don't think a lot of my colleagues were all that anxious to hear what an on-again-off-again rocker had to say about anything, since most of the rock guys they knew were local burnouts who played The Water Bowl once or twice a year. They were nice guys but I could see their eyes glaze over when I told them about the "other thing" I did.

To some it was a glaze of disbelief and to others it was the glaze of "you're not living real life." It certainly made for awkward conversation when a publicist from New York would call me while I was up on a ladder in Blackford County to talk about doing editorial for Alternative Press, a magazine you could buy at the supermarket across the street from our employee parking lot. It would seem too surreal, and I would feel like I was coming across like a kid who makes outrageous lies to get attention.

One guy said he picked up the new Brazil CD at Best Buy, which lent a good dose of proof to my burden. But the idea that a guy that sweeps floors at a metal shop behind a Wal-Mart supercenter could have an album available in the electronics mega-mart across the highway was beginning to illustrate a hard truth that was not always apparent to a casual observer.

October 4, 2006 "Rearrange My Face"

2009-11-01T15:59:00.000-08:00

10/04/2006 Northwestern University - Evanston, IL
Other bands: none

Peaceful, idyllic Northwestern University.

No one knew, as far as I could tell, that we were supposed to play in the cafeteria at Northwestern University. Other than the small vocal PA set up in front of the doors near the courtyard, there was really no clue that the student body expected anyone to show up to entertain them over Chik-fil-A and Panda Express.

We played loud in the noontime hour while a handful of bored students sat at the rear tables, texting their other friends who had moved to places where they could more easily talk without the noise.

I was utterly bored and mouthing the words with very little brainconnect so I threw a bottle of water up onto the balcony and stole an unwitting girl's cell phone.

It was a waste of a good Wednesday afternoon, one where I could have been raking leaves or taking Elliot to the Children's Museum, and our performance had all the imagination-capturing of a visiting washing machine repairman. There's something wrong with leaving a venue at 2 in the afternoon.

I had more pressing things to fuss with, as it were. We had an official album release show coming up in a week and I'd made designs to make it an enormous ordeal, taking a cue - probably too heavily - from The Flaming Lips. I bought confetti cannons, champagne poppers, balloons and I was scoping out those giant wobbly air statues that new car dealerships have to announce great savings.

This was going to be huge and I aimed to make it memorable for all involved.

We were invited to play, initially, by a young Indianapolis kid I'd never met. He rented out the old Irving Theater, which sat in one of the many tiny and spotty artist districts in the city, and was another old relic from the days of Tallulah Bankhead and hats that came in boxes.

This kid talked big, especially of his flyering campaign, and I chose to believe him. We made our show part of an Amnesty International benefit for Darfur, which gave us a modicum of more exposure for the show. Our promo shots were on a photo carousel that included Sparta and some other bigger bands.

And what's more, Alison, my wife, planned to come. It had been almost 2 years since she last saw me ply my trade on the stage and saw with her own eyes the reason I was away for so long. It was a chance to captivate her again, to bring her up out of our fast forming rut and feel like she was married to someone unique and special whose ass wasn't glued to an office chair and who considered doing for a living what you love the most honorable thing one can do. I very much looked forward to it.

October 3, 2006 "It Hurts When I Do This"

2009-09-21T16:19:00.010-07:00

10/03/2006 Vintage Vinyl - St. Louis, MO
Other bands: none

It was against our unspoken constitution to cancel for any reason, but under these extenuating circumstances we felt it was what we must do because otherwise we'd be pushing the van back home with an empty gas tank and grumbling distended UNICEF bellies. Hell, I'd played with a broken hand before, so this was kind of a big deal.

So we cancelled our lunch dates at Iowa State on the 5th, the University of Kansas on the 6th and Lake Forest College on the 10th. I'm sure we were sorely missed. And so it was that our largest single cancellation due to financial and mental brinkmanship came to pass. We did keep one date in Evanston, IL, but it was close enough to home to make the drive in an afternoon, so we left it on the itinerary.

The Vintage Vinyl instore was interesting in that it was a place we'd visited on our first foray into the self-booking world of 2001, when we were poor(er) and full of naive unformed fire, scoping out soup kitchens and where every direction on the compass was a movie. It was a Someday venue, one whose marquee was always emblazoned with the names of artists we aspired to be categorized alongside while dealing with the grinding reality of playing basements and musty corners of skate parks.

We earned our ticket five years since. Getting access to the Back Door. When the employees moved the records so we could perform. If nothing else, this was another moment to gauge our progress. Still no large sums of money, still no reliable coalescing force. But we were playing Vintage Vinyl goddammit and that was something.

Like Swiss clockwork, Tim and his wife Sam were at the show. Kids were showing up in new and unfamiliar Brazil shirts and I realized that our label had finally followed through with at least a few posters and promotional schwag giveaways. The shirts weren't bad either. Nothing award-winning, but better than most of the designs we'd come up with on our own, save for the Eric Rose line.

We hit the road for home after grabbing a bite to eat. It was only seven hours. We probably made it in six at that time of night.

October 2, 2006 "Cha Cha Chee Boom"

2009-09-21T16:19:00.009-07:00

10/02/2006 Wichita State University - Wichita, KS
Other bands: none

Two days to get from Denver to Wichita, and for once I don't remember what we did. I'm sure we burnt most of the daylight stretched out in bench seats or on the homemade bunk. Or in the drivers seat, or the passenger seat reading magazines or switching out a neverending rotation of albums. Watched endless horizons of brush and hill terrain, spotty farms, and one-stoplight towns with a Dairy Queen, a Subway and a granary. Played sudoku. Almost solved crossword puzzles. Listened to burnt CDs. Text messaged people back home. Watched DVDs from the library. Bought snacks at remote outpost gas stations at sunset. A prairie sunset in the fall is the most majestic thing.

I'm sure we got a motel room at 3am on the outskirts of some town where the hotel prices never break fifty bucks. And I'm sure we all humped our suitcases and sleeping bags up metal and concrete stairs and threw our personal effects where we always threw our personal effects in such motel rooms. James and Philip always slept on the floor. I always slept on a bed. So did Eric. Someone always slept out in the van.

I'm sure we woke up less than an hour before checkout and shaved and showered and coffeed and unplugged our phones and laptops, calling for multiple extensions on our checkout time. We called extensions almost every time we got a room and no one ever charged us for the extra time.

We probably stopped at Denny's or a McDonalds and got breakfast, stealing a USA Today to keep ourselves aware. And we probably stopped at the gas station with the lowest price on the block, even though they were all within three cents of each other, hoping it would cumulatively save us ten or fifteen dollars at the end of the month.

Wichita was no different than Utah or any of the other lunch stop whistle stop shows we endured. Loaded in through a side door into a student center lounge. Sat up gear on a stage riser. No posters or promotion that we could see. Maybe a mention in the student paper the day of the show.

It was maddening. It all seemed so avoidable. But we played anyway, even though we were told twice to turn down. It was too bright and we seemed too loud. I felt intrusive. Part of me just wanted to let these kids study.

There were a couple of kids that hung around to see us, dressed in their finest vintage threads. One was a girl with enormous breasts, dressed with the intent of making you aware of the fact that she had enormous breasts. It would have been more of a distraction if I hadn't been so tired. Eye candy, but the sugar rush only lasted as long as a three-minute song.

Wichita State University - Rhatigan Student Center.

The pile of postcards sits stacked neatly next to the typewriter. They are all from Mandalay and they all have the same lagoon scene and they all say “We whisper here” on the back in brittle handwritten script. It began with one, and now I receive sometimes two or three in a single drop. I tell myself I will run them up to the shut-in like a good neighbor, but each day brings a new struggle and a new opportunity to forget. Ten postcards from Mandalay borders excessive, and it seems that the shut-in upstairs keeps strange company.

September 30, 2006 "Bleary Eyed Duty"

2009-09-21T16:19:00.007-07:00

09/30/2006 Marquis Theater - Denver, CO
Other bands: The Velveteen

Crawling melancholy was close to besting me again when we hit Denver. We were actually playing a real show this time in a real venue with a real band, but I was more or less consumed with a sad version of ennui from our slow fade back to invisibility on the highway.

The Marquis Theater was a great club with nice lights and good sound, close to downtown with an easy load in. Scored some drink tickets and used them quickly. Our set went as planned, but the audience stayed back twenty feet while we played. The lights shone in my eyes, destroying my night vision so I couldn't get a good gauge on crowd reaction. I was trying earnestly not to care, an effort which was getting easier with time but was not always successful, especially when coming off a week of playing unadvertised lunch breaks in college student centers.

I volunteered to get the van after our set to pull it into the alley for load out. It was the weekend so I lost our convenient space a block down within minutes. I drove around the block several times looking for another spot and eventually spread out into other streets looking for a spot as long as two vehicles so I could park. I was morbidly tired and I wanted to sleep. I just wanted a place I could pull in, text somebody a location, then crash out on a bench.

But I couldn't find anything. Denver's young were out in droves. So I pulled back in the alley behind the club and turned on the hazards. I laid down in the first bench and fell asleep until a hammy fist beat against the driver window.

"Hey! Move your fuckin' van."

I sat up and looked around, saw a kid with a cowboy hat, tight jeans and a giant belt buckle standing next to the van. His giant truck idled directly behind our van. His face looked stretched over a bone structure that was too big to accommodate the dermal real estate available to cover it. He was tanned, possibly from days spent out corralling cattle, but more likely from a Sunquest tanning bed, giving the illusion that he did so spend his time corralling future Angus burgers out on the plains.

"That's right. Wake the fuck up and move your fuckin' van, asshole."

I took my time. Didn't speak. Didn't look. Set the key in the ignition at my own speed.

"I will kick your fucking ass, you fucking faggot!"

At that moment he was every stereotype of alpha-male egoism that had been seared into my brain since toddlerhood. He was the rotted underbelly of white, Christian America. A territorial pisser. The embodiment of national exceptionalism and wanton assholishness parading as patriotism and rugged independence. I wanted to smash his face with the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle. Gut it until his teeth fell out like Chiclets smeared with blood. Till his face was a gurgling mess of meat and bubbling humors. So that pretty young thing sitting in the passenger seat of his dually would run screaming in horror once the ER staff had patched him up. At that moment, and for reasons not entirely related to the 200lb sack of meat at my window, my ever-internalized and vaporish unease kernelized into a fine point and I truly, truly hated someone.

I drove off. I wasn't tired anymore. I drove, even though I passed spots that were now open. I had to keep moving or I would suffocate under shaking vitriol.

A fan gave me a copy of his first book, once I found a place to park outside the club. It was called The Bible of Animal Feet, a collection of surrealist poetry. He told me he loved the record in a typewritten note and hoped that we would play Denver again. New faces each time. Where were the old ones?

...do not confuse Pangea with a hostile gold-mining town.
-A PASSAGE FROM THE BIBLE OF ANIMAL FEET
(Thanks in advance to Chris.)

September 29, 2006 "Indiana"

2009-09-21T16:19:00.005-07:00

09/29/2006 University of Utah - Salt Lake City, UT
Other bands: Crimson Night Festival

After trying to milk as many sales as possible from the SUU crowd - and I think we sold six of our new album - we jumped back on the highway to make Salt Lake City in time for the Crimson Night Festival at the University of Utah.

This was an annual underclassman mixer where the university played babysitter to a thousand hypersexual teens and early-twenty-somethings all eager for free food, free t-shirts and, if they were lucky, a free trip around the bases before the sun came up.

They'd roped off a classroom in a hallway behind the auditorium for our green room and filled with with boxes of pizza and water. Not bad, except I was sick of pizza. Our PA was a tiny four-channel amp at the side of the stage powering a single mic with an on/off switch. We already knew what kind of show this was going to be and we steeled ourselves to commit an hour to brazen self-flagellation.

And we were not disappointed.

At first there were a few hundred kids watching us on the enormous riser stage. Five minutes (or less) after our amps had hit their screeching highs, the number thinned to 100, then 50, until maybe five were left by the time we finished our set. Roving hordes of red-shirted post-teens would head east through the main corridor that our stage faced, then west, stopping only long enough to make the sort of comments kids make when they are flying high on the energy of their peers and have lasered in on an easy target. The band of spastic outsiders playing songs they'd never heard before.

I walked through the throngs moving gear. It always felt like a hundred eyes were on me. Kids saying to each other, backhandedly, "there goes that shitty, shitty band." I don't know if I'd always been that paranoid or if it was a symptom of my growing anxiousness.

We weren't paid, but the university offered us a room at the student center hotel, which we begrudgingly took after realizing it would take us almost an entire day to get to Denver. We could sleep, though for two hours.

It was typical of our damn luck. When we needed a room the most, we couldn't afford one and when we got one handed to us, we couldn't stay in it for very long.

September 29, 2006 "Lord Accept Our True Devotion"

2009-09-21T16:19:00.003-07:00

09/29/2006 Southern Utah University - Cedar City, UT
Other bands: none

The distance from where I sit at my desk to the door that contains the mail slot is less than five feet. The distance from the mail slot to the floor is about four feet, or eye level if you’re sitting down. I inched the chair over to the door until my face was nearly even with the brass shutter and let loose my breath. For no reason in particular, I felt a feeling of general unease.

I took hold of the tarnished brass plate and slowly pulled it up. As I did, the thundering sound of a hundred stampeding wingtips and Oxfords charging up the stairs as if from a fire jarred me to drop it again. Like the roar of an elevated train, with no human sounds of breathing or conversing, the feet pounded their way up the stairs like the world’s most silent mob, causing the chain on my deadbolt to swing irritably and the bottles of Maudlin to clink Morse code-like in the fracas.

Then it ended.

The familiar eerie quiet settled over the building while I sat still with a heart beating like an over-worked typewriter. Everything was still. The bottles of Maudlin stood wetly at attention. The deadbolt returned to being dead. I peered out the mail slot and saw the going-up staircase banister. The going-down staircase disappeared into diffuse light and shadow down below. There were no scuffmarks on the walls to indicate a boisterously polite throng passing through. No sounds from came upstairs. It was complete silence except for the ringing of blood coursing through the vessels in my ears.

* * *

Cedar City. Beautiful views, but the beer sucks.

Our venue was the far end of a soccer field, where programing board people had set up a small stage of risers and a cheap PA. These shows seemed increasingly like afterthoughts, as if the person at our label responsible for booking them made the requisite "I need a quick favor" phone calls at the last minute, and the university people told them they'd "see what they could do."

We had a campus radio interview with a girl DJ who'd never heard of our band. We did some flyering around the quad area like we did at Warped Tour, except this time it was tarnished against a noticeable backdrop of fatigue.

Our noise attracted a few dozen temporary gawkers, but we sold very little merch. Driving the mountain states is brutal on the gas gauge, and even more so on the cashbox when you're not making money. It seemed like we should have been farther along than this.

Nikki secured us an opening spot after this run with a band called Smile Empty Soul, as her first official booking for our band. SES were a radio rock, post-grunge band in the vein of Nickelback or Sevendust who had a minor hit about drugs or some girls ass in the early part of this decade. Not really our cup of tea, but the money was good and we rationalized it by thinking that we'd never tried to tap into that audience before and goddammit we might as well try.

We hadn't struck gold anywhere else.

September 27, 2006 "(Well) Dusted (For the Millennium)"

2009-09-21T16:19:00.001-07:00

09/27/2006 Club Congress - Tuscon, AZ
Other bands: Authority Zero, SKITN, Last Act of Defiance

Hotel Congress. Est. 1919.

Stayed the night outside Phoenix with a friend of Phillips. She lived in an apartment complex off a main thoroughfare surrounded by pawn shops and gas stations, which were surrounded by desert. Nothing fancy, and probably not much more than half a grand in rent. Bathtub ring and burn holes in the carpet included free.

The landlord was verifiably batshit crazy. Some breed of paranoid old lady who probably believed what she read in the National Enquirer and kept a thousand glass figurines in her rarely-visited-by-outsiders-except-the-minister living room.

We parked our van across half a dozen spaces like we always did and camped out for the night. Next morning, she marched up to whomever was in the van at the time and demanded they move it out of the parking lot. So we did. We let it idle in the parking lot across the street until the rest of the band was ready to come down. Then we circled it back around to the apartment to pick up the rest of the gang. She came marching back out as we pulled away to head to Tuscon, launching daggers from her eye sockets and mouthing something unintelligible as we drove away.

We parked there again later that night. Phillips friend explained to her that we were friends from out of town and that we were staying at her place for two nights but the lady wouldn't have it. She followed us from the van to the apartment, ranting the whole way in her shrill and warbled menopausal voice, calling our host "young lady," while we toted our suitcases and sleeping bags up the stairs. Most of us ignored her. James allowed himself a shouting match. Quite a site to behold - crazy vs. New Jersey.

I noticed a worried look on Phillip's friend's face. She was, after all, the one who to lived there. She would probably suffer some serious blowback for as long as she continued to do so.

I talked to our new agent Nikki for the first time outside of the Hotel Congress, which housed Club Congress. She was a Colorado transplant now living in Brooklyn and she sounded tough. We sealed the deal and she was ready to hop on board to start selling our shows to whomever would buy. She told us we should stay in the hotel, and I thought someday. But not today.

Our performance at Club Congress was stellar, full of swagger and joyous bile, and most likely inadvertently so. We had, I thought, a drunk heckler and heckling had by now become a psychological trigger. Where it once used to eviscerate me psychologically, it now energized me. Flipped a berzerker switch.

And now I could actually notice a tangible difference between the crowds entrance when we started and when we ended. We were keeping them interested.

September 27, 2006 "100% of Nothing"

2009-09-21T16:18:00.007-07:00

09/27/2006 Arizona State University - Phoenix, AZ
Other bands: none

I've probably said it before. Arizona is hot. Even in late September.

We rolled into the quad area in the middle of the lunch hour. I could feel the sun attacking my forehead skin like a blowdryer on plastic wrap. It was almost dizzying and I tried not to move much at first on account of wearing too many clothes.

We found a small half-built stage in front of what looked like an administration building, facing a student center commons area. A medium-sized rock inched its way down my esophagus and nestled in my stomach when I realized we'd be selling ourselves to a roaming organism of text-occupied nineteen-year-olds in the middle of their workday. We'd be a thirty-second novelty at best. Cannon fodder for restless and uncreative hecklers at worst.

The stage was fortunately tented when all was said and done. We had a single contact from the university, a girl who we rarely saw. She either worked for the school radio station or the programming board. The stagehands were anonymous and unspoken. We set up right alongside the credit card hawkers and poster sellers.

So we swallowed hard and cranked the amps and squinted the sun out of our eyes. I was becoming much more the hardened entertainer, saying all the introductory lines and pleases and thank yous, sometimes in earnest, sometimes without a shred of sincerity depending on how I gauged the crowd. Stage manners were to be employed no matter what the cost.

An older man came up to the side of the stage and did an old man dance to our set. One part Ian Curtis, one part Freedom Rock. And when one person comes up close amid a sparse horseshoe of onlookers like this man did, it's hard to not think you're being made fun of. So I jumped on his back from the stage.

I rode him around the front like a horse until he dropped me on the concrete. Turns out he just enjoyed the music.

No hard feelings.

September 25, 2006 "Brats in Battalions"

2009-09-21T16:18:00.005-07:00

9/25/2006 University of Southern California - Fullerton, CA
Other bands: none

It did me well to think about waking up on a daily basis in a Mission Viejo house like this one, shuffling out to that private veranda with a French press in one hand and a laptop in the other. Clothing optional.

I never had too much of a problem with my Indiana backyard, other than the typical ennui one usually associates with one's hometown. I had a half-built fence on mine. Plus an overgrown garden. A fire pit with a few empty beer bottles scattered around it. A decaying plastic tugboat full of play sand. A fence separating my yard from my neighbor's yard and trampoline. I watched it fill up with snow in the winter, get tunneled by moles in the summer. A state of mind.

My backyard was an old comfortable shoe. Home in solitude, an ever-so-slight embarrassment in the presence of company. It's where I could sit in a plastic chair in front of a fire, drinking beer in the middle of the night to try to take the edge off the burning "whats next" questions that ate away my days off the road.

Everyone is beautiful in California and every backyard is too. Even the derelict alleys and HIV-infected denizens of skid row have cinematic charm. You've seen it all before. Probably paid $8.50 to sit in a darkened theater to do so. Johnny's neighborhood was the E.T. neighborhood, was the Mulholland Drive neighborhood, was the L.A. Story neighborhood, was the Shopgirl neighborhood.

Backyards. A state of mind. But I digress.

The label had set up a bunch of collegiate shows moving forward that offered no pay, not much stage time, yet the golden opportunity to hawk our merchandise to roving herds of students during their lunch hours. It became obvious that we were playing the role of street busker, only without a collections hat or sandwich board and with much louder instruments.

Three or four guys from Immortal made the drive to see us perform, which was something. It used to surprise me how often LA people, most of whom we'd see once or twice a year, would shirk coming to shows on the basis of the length of the drive. Maybe I just got used to driving an hour to Indianapolis or two hours to Cincinnati to see anything halfway good.

We performed in the heat of midday, the sun blistering my forehead. Hundreds of students hiked across the quad from one building to the next, usually pausing for thirty seconds to watch us, nod (or roll eyes), then walk on. We were still high off the Chain Reaction show and burnt through the set on fire until I jumped off the stage and ran and jumped in a fountain 50 yards away, twisting my ankle.

The Immortals were humbled and awed. Thankfully so. I never felt like we awed anyone at Fearless, ever. Not with our live show, anyway.

We talked strategy for a bit while I dried out and hobbled to a grassy knoll where we sat and ate label-funded burritos. The free-meal routine was just that by now. Routine. Eat what you can get for free. Nod and say your "mm-hmms" at the right place while they recite a bunch of metrics and drop a bunch of names to get everyone excited. Then get in the van and slowly realize you'll be lucky if just 20% of what gets said gets done.

We shot some video with Isaac and Jason, mostly of me harassing students and faculty with my accordion. We did manage to sell a surprising amount of CDs, giving both us and the label hope that this next week wouldn't be the grueling test of the limits of patience and sanity that it would actually become.

Most of this was shot at this show and the Chain Reaction show. I'm peeing on Chain Reaction at 2:24.

September 24, 2006 "Mr. Totally"

2009-09-21T16:18:00.003-07:00

09/24/2006 Soma - San Diego, CA
Other bands: Mutemath, Shiny Toy Guns

Soma.

Now and again, as always, luck would take a sideways glance in our direction and we'd find ourselves on an actual stage worthy of 6 years of work and in front of crowd that, though still not ours, satiated at least briefly, a band's universal and desperate need for attention.

We pulled into the SOMA loading docks, the only van amidst a caravan of buses, still a complete unknown. The place looked like it was carved out of a relatively new movie megaplex. Covered with flyers, but still carpeted and not yet dingy enough to feel like a true musical swingers lair.

Both Mutemath and Shiny Toy Guns were bands that had thus far remained outside the ping of my radar, yet were building enough simmer to attract pricey tour budgets and stage plots with, admittedly, pretty amazing lights and fog. Indie cred be damned, I would have given my left leg to have a bus with enough room to lay longways in without having to be six inches from another members foot.

The bands were nice (unlike the house manager who told Bryan our mix sounded like shit) but aloof as the five of us were scooted onto stage for a quick soundcheck. I say "five" because Nic caught a plane home to participate in a lengthy bout of court ordered therapy due to an arrest a few months earlier. He was popped by the local 5-0 leaving a local bar and apparently blew just enough to get him a night in the drunk tank.

This stressed me out more than it should have - one, because it meant he would be leaving the tour at some point and thereby throwing our fragile (in my head) existence into tumult, and two, because for all Nic's quiet, pensive genius, I sometimes worried about his excesses, even though they were really no more excessive than any of the rest of us. I could not escape being a protective brother.

So we spent the few days off at Johnny's parents rearranging our setlist to primarily include songs with the least amount of piano and to make sure I could play and sing on the songs that we did play.

I won't say I pulled it off magnificently, but the diminishment of our life show was marginal at best. Nailed the break in The Vapours but gave up singing during the break in Breathe entirely. Regardless, the crowd of several hundred stood and stared, motionless, politely clapping at the end of each tune. I played to the front, escaping my binding nerves as I was increasingly able to do, even thought the front was a wall of text-messaging girls and their coiffed boyfriends.

And we sold no merch. Despite the lines out the door. Despite the nearly sold-out 1000-cap venue and the draw of the other bands. We were invisible, an inconvenience on the way to ninety minutes with the nu-prog rock darling of the fiscal quarter, which wasn't us.

September 23, 2006 "Death of a Gremmie"

2009-09-21T16:18:00.001-07:00

09/23/2006 Chain Reaction - Anaheim, CA
Other bands: Lola Ray

So we stayed a long day at Johnny's house, meeting his mother and grandmother Lola Ray, for whom the band was named. She was a charming old Filipino lady that shuffled around the house making sure the rice cooker was always full and steaming for us growing boys.

We were back West for the first time since resigning and therefore had all sorts of meeting and greeting to endure. It was always a fascinating thing to do, meeting these folk and seeing their digs, but it usually always led to us being late for load in. The first person we met was Isaac who came out with our first load of CDs.

He was a gangly kid who gave us the lowdown on everyone we'd met in the offices. There was Jason who came from Victory Records, Daniel who came from Universal and Happy who owned the joint and made his money pimping nu-metal in the 90s when it was actually nu. Except Happy was never there. He was always off somewhere exotic honing his photography skills.

So we listened to our new CD in Johnny's upstairs loft. It was a bittersweet joy to finally hear it in the final version after all that we had been through to bring it into this world. The label had even taken so long to send payment that Tarbox was threatening to file suit. I can't say it was a comfortable place to be, and in fact more than a little embarrassing.

But payment did finally come from the turnip, and our CD was released fully packaged with gleamy glossy retail sheen. We each took a copy and unwrapped it. Felt its matte booklet. We'd never had anything other than straight, traditional glossy.

We stuck it in the player and during the verse of You Never Know it skipped. We put in another CD. It also skipped. We all took turns with all the rest we'd opened. They all skipped.

The strangest thing was, when we went to the Immortal Entertainment offices - which were in a Santa Monica Boulevard high rise with a huge wrought iron Immortal logo, behind a gilded receptionist desk, down a marble hallway, and through doorways slung in platinum records - and played it for them, they didn't hear it.

We pushed it a little bit, but I think we were through fighting battles on this record. It was out. I hoped that maybe each person that bought it and heard it would think that they had the only malfunctioning copy and would excuse it.

I've discovered the amount of times a band can play a shitty venue before finally deciding to mop it up, and that amount is five.

The vibe of the Chain Reaction had changed much since the first time I'd been there. Geographically it was the same. The stage was in the same place. The floor layout was the same. I had been there when it was shoulder-to-shoulder with industry trying to see what some were calling the next fill-in-the-blank band. Us. And I had been there two years later when no one gave a shit.

And we were here again, still silently hoping for the high of that first time, and knowing that we weren't going to get it. I won't attempt to wax a poetic cliche about Southern California being the proverbial boulevard of broken dreams, but there is something to be said for the enormous amounts of money and attention floating around the area looking for something to be aimed at and channeled into without rhyme or reason maybe just because the singer has two different colored eyes or the guitar player talks up a half-made up story about living on the street. The potentialities of it all make people do strange things. Perhaps the strangest of all is the compulsion to ignore the odds.

I drained a 40 in the car of Tazy Phyllipz who ran an indie show responsible for breaking No Doubt and Sublime. He put a microphone in my face and conducted an interview while I tried to keep up with the questions as best I could in a haze of Mickeys.

Blaze was there again. Hung out with us in the dressing room while Nic and I drained a bottle of cheap wine that turned our mouths purple. He said he was worried about our drinking. I told him we were fine. It was the only thing I could find that would place the buffer between a thousand sets of eyes and a soul. It was like dancing in a room walled with a 2 way mirror. I knew they were there but I didn't care because I couldn't really see them.

I wanted to burn through those bodies like napalm. The Chain Reaction was a place where I'd felt most disconcerted, the most let down in the history of all our touring. It was usually the first place we would play in the region and would set the tone for the rest of our stay. I couldn't connect with those kids because they were all rich Orange County punks with more money and better skin. We were flyover trash disconnected from any sort of scene at home or abroad.

But this time we had our armor. I had my suit on. We tore through a set like it was a snakish religious experience. I threw myself to the crowd time and again. Stood defiantly at the front of the stage, arms raised with imaginary foam fists attached to my hands, pulling out reaction from their bodies like it was hardened mutagenic tar.

At the end of Strange Days I pulled the entire front row onstage and crawled through their legs, lifting them up on my shoulders. Falling down into a pile.

Lindsey texted Blaze to ask how we were.

"It's the best I've ever seen them."

It was the last time we'd ever play Chain Reaction, and in my head, we burned the fucker down.

September 20, 2006 "Mushmouth Shoutin"

2009-09-21T16:17:00.008-07:00

09/20/2006 Meridien - Houston, TX
Other bands: Lola Ray

Me, at Meridien. Wait, no. That's Edgar Winter, a different albino.

It was four or five hours to Houston. We normally didn't have to be at clubs until 5 or 6, which meant we could sleep long in San Antonio. Then we had two blank days to get ourselves from eastern Texas to Orange County, California.

Meridien was a big multi-tiered complex with a small room for small shows like ours and a big room for big shows with bands like AFI or My Morning Jacket. It was well-kept and seemed fairly new, and seemed to be put together by someone who had been in the concert promotion game for quite some time.

I spent all my time in the dressing room watching Nic fashion a helmet and gloves out of aluminum foil. I tried to stay out of the main rooms in all the clubs we visited as much as possible because it still affected my nerves too much. I could toggle the alter-ego switch better if I stayed in the green rooms.

The show went well but without much audience participation (primarily because there wasn't much of an audience to participate). But there were four girls who came to see Lola Ray and became Brazil fans by the end of the concert. They were young college-types, eager to let us sleep on their floor and we obliged.

We left late the next morning, heading west on I-10 after a fast food breakfast and piss break. If we were smart we would have all been obsessive coupon clippers and Subway Sub Club card carriers. If we were even smarter, we would have signed up for a frequent-lodger program with a hotel chain. But we didn't because fame was always right around the corner and it seemed like a lot of work for something that we'd expense a major label for anyway at some point.

We saw Texas scrub once again turn to New Mexico and Arizona desert. Arizona desert turn into California desert, and then into California's version of paradise. Two and a half days seems like time enough to get from the middle of the US to the left coast. But unless you are driving in round the clock shifts, it is not.

Cash was again a scarce commodity, especially since we weren't making any money for two straight days, so we slept in the van at a rest stop on a deserted desert highway. It was high adventure camping - some of the guys opened up the trailer and used it as a shelter - but I worried about scorpions and coyotes and the fact that desert highways seemed like places where a senseless massacre by a rogue trucker would most likely take place.

That "movie" feeling of automotive desert crossing had lost some of its potency over the years but it was still there. I could still feel a tangible change the closer we came to Southern California, as if the smell of money wafted through the air the minute we passed Indio.

We arrived at Johnny's parents' house in Mission Viejo in the middle of the night. It was an upscale place in a cul-de-sac in the hilly outskirts of Los Angeles County, and a home that might fetch $400,000 in Indiana, but in California would probably sell for upwards of three quarters of a mil.

In the tradition of true Filipino hospitality, an enormous spread of food was left out on the table for us to devour at 4am.

September 19, 2006 "My Freeholies Ain’t Free Anymore"

2009-09-21T16:17:00.007-07:00

09/19/2006 The Sanctuary - San Antonio
Other bands: Lola Ray

Bloom, a woman of terrible genius and fashion sense, founded a summer camp, with her seventh husband, for young and exceptionally gifted writers. Bloom’s portion of the book was actually ghost written by her fourth husband at the time, owing to her obligations with a certain brand of 120 proof rye whiskey. It was her third husband who offered to publish the guide, and her thirteenth who signed on to ensure its publicity. When the Guide became somewhat of a success, her first and second husbands demanded a share of the royalties, her fifth and six husbands publicized a smear campaign against her, calling her an opportunistic windbag, while husbands eight through twelve tried, rather successfully after a time, to convince the others to form a rugby team and forget about the whole affair.

* * *

Two-day hauls across four states are usually regarded as a big ordeal by common folk, but for us half-dozen uncommon brethren it was just another interlude of gas station culture and ever-increasing familiarity of barns between mile markers.

I used look at tour itineraries of bands I liked and imagine myself following an atlas in my head playing second tambourine or perhaps singing backup doo-wops. Playing the basements and bowling alley rec rooms of the indie world. It all seemed like great fun. I would look at the itinerary one week, and then again two weeks later in awe that someone could be out having an adventure that long while I suffered quietly behind a school desk.

Then I started to do it, and it was great fun. The Unknown beckoned like a spectral hand, and for a few years it was great. But now I'd reached a point where ends of The Unknown were starting to seem like the ends of the highways in Pleasantville. Full of promise, but ultimately leading to the beginning of the shop half of an unromantic sound stage. Veil off. Magic drained.

All the times we played Houston and Dallas, and each time as if it were the first, in a new club, in front of a new handful of people. San Antonio actually had traction. The people in the audience were ours, and it caught me off guard. The Sanctuary was still a dive, and there weren't as many people there as had been for the Emery tour, but there was a small crowd and the ratio worked in our favor.

We all drank in the attached bar afterward, scoring free drinks from a gay Asian man that Nic befriended, and then drove to a gated community where lived a girl who moonlighted as a band manager for a local modern rock band. Most of her family was out of town so I was able to sleep in a bed for the first time in days.

Two days of bench-sleeping wiped me out and I crashed in some kids bedroom and slept black sleep for at least ten hours.