500 Days of Night

Radio Silence

2011-03-23T16:31:00.000-07:00

Readers,
I want to thank you all for keeping up with this so far. I've reached the home stretch, the final tours and chapters, and after long consideration I've decided to finish the rest in solitude.

When I am done, I'll be releasing the whole thing in print form via my label Young Tobacco. Expect this to take until the end of the year and possibly beyond.

Meantime, I'll post updates on my progress periodically on this blog. Until then, keep checking back and I look forward to the day I can offer the entire thing to you in physical form.

Sincerely,
J

Winter

2010-07-28T16:08:00.005-07:00

We lost our practice space at the antique store, or rather, we left our practice space due to a disagreement with the owner over use of his PA. (He thought our $25 fee per practice didn't cover use of the new PA used to replace the one his son - our practice space point man - took with him when he skipped town.)

I called around trying to find a cheap or free place we could set up without having the cops called on us every time we turned our amps on. Even in this town, such a deal can be hard to find.

We eventually settled into my uncle Sonny's practice studio, which was a makeshift loft built on top of an old barn in his backyard in Selma, IN. It was a good thirty to forty minute drive for even us locals, so practices were infrequent but usually long with part of the time being spent getting one of our vehicles unstuck from his backyard.

Sonny was (and is) a sheet metal worker with a braided beard and pony tail that hung down to his ass who rode a loud-as-fuck chopper with ape hangers and drank like an alcoholic fish. His two bandmates were called Dink and Peanut and they'd all come over while we practiced to slurp beer and dig pickled sausages out of the jar with a set of dartboard darts.

This was a markedly different environment than our hipster basement beginnings, but somehow it felt more at home. We'd play through our set while my uncle and his chums drank in the corner, hooting between all the breaks, and then we'd set our instruments down and join in on the drinkfest ourselves, sometimes picking up the instruments again only this time with Sonny or Dink or Peanut at the helm of a bass or a six-string. We'd go through a Stevie Ray Vaughn-inspired blues jam with me or James on the drums until we decided we wanted another pickled sausage. Sometimes Eric and Sonny would trade off leads. I was proud. Family proud.

It was starkly cold outside those nights. The ground was covered in drifted snow. And we'd be up in this baseboard heated loft, carpeted in scraps in a no-name town in East Central Indiana with a population of 866, drinking and laughing like the cold world outside didn't exist. It made things seem fun again.

I started writing more non-music stuff. I was doing a regular blog for Purevolume, plus writing for the band Myspace blog. I also started writing Last.fm posts for our band account there. Gus from Chord Magazine gave me Dave Palaitis' (Lifetime) phone number so I called him for an interview. I went out and bought one of those suction cup things that stick to your phone receiver and record conversations like a private eye.

It was an interesting conversation. I found a lot of parallels in their story and ours. Not many people got what they were doing at the time they were around. They were too fast to be that melodic. Too melodic to be that fast. Caught in this weird limbo that constitutes a marketer's worst nightmare. Kind of like how we were too weird for the indie rock crowd, to square for the avant garde crowd. Apples to apples, in a way.

I still found myself nervous talking to other bands. I stuttered and stammered from time to time throughout the interview, knowing that Travis Barker had a title of their album tattooed across his chest.

And then I realized that was Dag Nasty, not Lifetime.

December 5, 2006 "Hand Jive"

2010-07-28T16:08:00.003-07:00

12/05/2006 Pop's - Sauget, IL
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

We had a final show scheduled two days or so after Pop's somewhere in Kansas or possibly Colorado, but we decided it would have raped our coffers financially, so we made the Sauget performance our last for the Smile Empty Soul radio X-fest Jagermeister tour.

We made some decent money, better than usual, but we spent a lot of it on hotel rooms and thus tempering our possible net gain. It was year 6 in Brazil's existence and the odd and almost pleading dynamic of sleeping on a stranger's floor had worn itself extremely thin. Privacy and the freedom to stink up a room for someone else to clean up was worth seventy or so dollars in this day and age.

Sauget during the warm months is desolate enough, but during in December it's nigh on apocalyptic. Most of it's real estate is owned by industry and that that isn't is typically a barren field of gravel or the parking lot of a rundown smoke shop.

(There are 250 full-time residents to accommodate the village's plethora of strip clubs and serve the incoming hoards of working drones populating its factories. It's Ayn Rand's dream monument to a pure free enterprise civilization catering to man's deepest desires to make money, eat meat and fuck.)

Scenic Sauget.

We made our last show count for something. I can't recall a more perfectly played show than what we did at Pop's that night. The crowd had never heard of us before, but by the end of our 35 minutes, they were eating out of my hand. Every swagger, every mic stand trick went off perfectly as if we and our gear were a single organism. Our charm bled into the headliner's set as we chanted them on, warming up the crowd.

It was cathartic and at the same time a relief, as my throat, mind and body were almost shot by this point. I had already called the metal shop where I worked part time to let them know I needed work when I got back home, and I knew I wasn't going to get much time to rest. Clock-in time was 6am.

We left that night to drive back home. I forgot to charge my phone and couldn't call Alison and when we finally arrived 4 hours later than when I estimated we would, she was a bundle of nerves in the quiet, angry way she could be a bundle of nerves.

I slept as much as I could. We got back on a Wednesday and I think I must have committed to working the following Thursday. We had nothing on the books. Nothing planned. For all I could tell, this could have been it for Philosophy touring.

A quick four-month eulogy to a great record unnoticed.

December 3, 2006 "Shock Rock"

2010-07-28T16:08:00.001-07:00

12/03/2006 The Rock - Maplewood, MN
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

More of the same.

A dark bar with an unadventurous beer selection. Another meal of grease and processed meats. Only this time I had the entertainment of a fight between two semi-drunk women sitting across the horseshoe.

Their cacophony rose and fell in five to ten minute intervals, almost petering out entirely before another verbal jab was thrown and the volume rose once again. It was an eerie and lonely fight, played out in front of a laughing bartender, myself and a fat, silent ale-sucker at the far end. It was still early, not quite dark yet.

It never came to blows, which disappointed me. The myth of tour-as-neverending-vacation is easily disproved by that with which we inevitably use as stimuli. The crude and the bass. Misfortune and schadenfreude. If those girls started swinging and clawing, I would have kept eating my fries and steakburger and sipping my High Life like nothing happened. The numb blanket of boredom and world-weariness was thick.

Whatever advantage being flu-drunk was to my stage show was gone by the night of The Rock. The stage was narrow and wide, so I stayed in one place, hugging the mic stand and eating the SM57 that smelled like electronic components, rust and the gingivitis of a hundred other dirty singers before me.

The small crowd gave us all the interest of a mute street urchin with a concertina, tossing us a few token claps between songs like they were tuppence. It was mostly slightly overweight metal fans both male and female. Most of them sat at tables smoking and eating fried things.

I didn't really care. I had more important things to worry about, such as my 103-degree temperature. My performance was phoned in, each song a bullet point on an ordered checklist. My goal was to finish. It was fine.

No one's life was going to be changed tonight.

December 2, 2006 "Shake Your Shit"

2010-07-28T16:07:00.007-07:00

12/02/2006 3rd Street Live - Cedar Rapids, IA
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

Sickness hit me like a burlap bag full of pickled ball peen hammers. I woke up in a light-headed fever swim that morning and by afternoon my head and body had exploded into a full-blown rage of aches and shivers that bore down into the very marrow of my bones.

Strangely, the effect on my stage show was positive, I think because it felt merely like another shade of drunk. I tried not to breathe on people, so as not to afflict them with this plague that had overcome me. It was brutal, and one of the worst times to get sick (as I've probably already written many times) is during the loneliness and ennui of a long tour.

Like a sick animal, I sought out the quietest, darkest place in the club I could find in the hopes of blanking out in a silent spell of primitive meditation, or perhaps even just passing away in my sleep. It was impossible. I was cold all the time. It was the middle of the beginning of a Midwestern winter. Pervasive cold that could slice through skin, fat and muscle.

I found a quiet place up in the balcony, but I knew there would be people milling around with domestic beerwater in hand within two hours. The last waning rays of daylight leaked through the windows facing the street and between the sickness, the onset of bleak winter and the neverending distance between my family and I, it was impossible but to hear the black dog scratching at the door.

After the set I told the rest of the band I was about ready to die and went out to the van to sleep while the headliner played. I turned the van on and let it idle, while I pulled three sleeping bags over my shivering body underneath the wooden cave deep in the bowels of the E350.

I laid there in a half-conscious dream, convulsing and moaning in a fetal position. My head was as hot as a flatiron and my lips were dry and felt like iguana skin when I licked them. I screwed my eyes shut tight and saw iridescent geometric shapes behind my eyelids, orbiting in no particular trajectory.

At some point I felt the van move, felt warm bodies in my presence. We stopped, got out at a nameless motel and I threw my sleeping bag onto the nearest bed and hoped that I didn't give anyone else whatever was coursing through my veins.

3rd Street during the Iowa floods of 2008.

December 1, 2006 "(You Don't Know) The First Thing About Blue

2010-07-28T16:07:00.005-07:00

12/01/2006 Level 8 - Evansville, WI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

A freak snowstorm dumped almost two feet of snow on us overnight, stranding our van in a drift for five hours in a hotel parking lot. All we could do was drink gallons of free coffee from the lobby, and soon we were able to urinate our way out.

But we weren't the only ones with big problems en route. Smile's tour bus drove off into a snow-filled ditch and Eddie's already beet-red face was even beetier with rage at the driver for failing to properly navigate a turn that would have kept them out of such a predicament. They were safely at the club when we rolled up, but I assume they had to call one of those giant trucks with 50 wheels and a giant crane they use to pull other broken down giant things.

Level 8 was a roadhouse cut straight from the Patrick Swayze textbook. A wood-paneled grog cave nestled in some trees with a big VFW-style rec hall attached for concerts and pudding wrestling. Chord magazine called after load-in and talked to me about interviewing someone in the band Lifetime. They wanted to do an artist-on-artist series and liked my writing in other rags I'd appeared in.

The bar kitchen fed us more of the greasy pub food we were acclimating to, and that our bodies were frantically trying to detox through pores and orifices. There are only so many chicken tenders and steak fries one can enjoyably eat before feeling like a hundred years of sudden aging has suddenly befouled your skin and sense of well-being.

To make livers worse, we did shots in the back room with Smile Empty Soul and then drank some more before and during the set. A few hundred people showed and we performed another lung-puncturing set like we had trained ourselves to do.

Afterward we hung out on the bus, drinking more, and I remember talking about Incubus but calling them "Inkabus" in my near drunken stupor. I really had never indulged in the "bus party" culture and I don't really know why now, here in Evansville, WI, was the time I chose to dive in. Some girls from the show got on and one, swept up in the MTV moment, flashed her breasts to everyone, but then later nearly collapsed in a heap of shame.

All the bands migrated back to the bar, which had now ushered in karaoke night and was filled with ruddy-faced locals. After some peer prodding, I took the mic for first and last time I'd ever take a karaoke mic and chose Queen's We Will Rock You. Like anytime we ever did a cover, I bumbled through the lyrics Mrs. Stanley Drink My Wine-style, and Eric would later tell me I looked like I snapped right back into my stage skin. A tight horseshoe of band members and drunk barflys wrapped around me and sung along.

Then like all good films with a bar scene, the music slowed down and I slow danced with an old bar hag. She grabbed my ass and I tried to not sway my pelvis too close to hers. Nic had a hag of his own hanging on him, and we danced with our ladies of tanning bed skin and Virginia Slim lips.

November 30, 2006 "The Ballad of TV Violence"

2010-07-28T16:07:00.003-07:00

11/30/2006 Elixur Night Club - Rockford, IL
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

The brutal cold came in so we stopped at a Goodwill somewhere off the main drag in Rockford to buy some more layers of warmth. They had brand new knockoff socks and gloves there so I bought a pair of each of those, too. (Used socks and gloves are something I do not do.)

Then I walked across the parking lot and bought a bigger battery for my Motorola Q, the first non-flip smartphone I'd ever bought, thanks to Songs Publishing. I had joined the thumb army.

The club was partially hidden behind an eroding strip mall development, recognizable only by a hardly legible sign of pink glowing letters. It and its surrounding real estate were on the end of the retail spectrum that just precedes bankruptcy and vacancy. The retail age of Chinese buffets and places that buy gold.

Inside, it was a carnival of carnal decorum. Curtains and musty plush furniture spotted the floor and side walls. Backstage was crammed with broken chairs, tables and what I could only think were stage props for some kind of theater production.

The stage had dancing cages on either side. The lighting design was steeped in decadent reds and depressed blues and I had my doubts that the restrooms hadn't seen various forms of sex used as currency for controlled substances at least a few times.

We played to another inattentive crowd, but this time with a few drunk whoopers up front, doing the drunk dance, fingers pointing like rap stars, drinks held sloppily in the other hand. Still mostly an X-station crowd but I ran in to some girls who had a bit of scene flair. It was getting harder to delineate the tribes sometimes.

I kept by the merch mostly, after we played. There was a short-haired blond girl who spent a lot of time talking to us, telling us about her time as a diesel mechanic in the Army. She was Amazonian, toned and all. And there was something sexual in her energy. She didn't look like a stripper, but more like Tank Girl but without the bald patches in her hair.

We talked and I flirted, and despite the undertones she kept herself almost forcibly aloof. It goes without saying, long days on long tours filled with countless female-less hours takes its toll on even the most pious of males. A side of my brain wanted to see how far I could go with just words while the other side held fast and breathed quiet relief when she walked away and out the door.

November 29, 2006 "Boy Talk"

2010-07-28T16:07:00.001-07:00

11/29/2006 The Pearl Room - Mokena, IL
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

A cold front blew in a blast of cold rain when we hit Mokena. Load in was soggy and we reeked of the smell that happens when moisture touches sweat-stained thrift store clothes that have been slept in for days.

The Pearl Club was a giant room with steel girders and pylons and an enormous stage and sound system that could probably hold almost a thousand people on nights better than this. It was the kind of place where bands like Sevendust and Kittie found receptive audiences and ultra-hospitable dressing rooms.

When we weren't playing, we spent most of the time in the private lounge upstairs, being served by the moderately attractive bartendress. It was a pizza and booze night, another night of shaving days off our lives with jager shots and artery clogging grease. The Pearl Room had showers and some of us took one just because we could.

The audience didn't hate us, but were predictably bored, though sometimes inquisitive. I saw a girl take out her cell phone to try to talk over the music, then walk toward the exit. I jumped off the stage and ran after her, ushering her back in by the elbows like the queen of the cotillion ball. Her nervous laughter and abject fear of leaving her spot ever again for the rest of the set was all the reward I needed.

I was a clown. I didn't care. Not caring wasn't always the nihilistic endeavor it was made out to be. I had learned not to step all over Eric's pedals and not to smash Nic's keys with the mic stand. I didn't hang from the rafters anymore, but I moved in drunken Cab Calloway sashays and made hammish Iggy Pop faces.

Our next two drives were two hours apart. We drove to the next town and ordered up a hotel.

Mokena McMansion.

November 28, 2006 "Girls With Guns"

2010-07-28T16:06:00.008-07:00

11/28/2006 White House 2 - Niles, MI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

Just across the Indiana border and into Michigan, the White House 2 was a sports bar on the side of a wooded state highway. A nondescript building with brand new white siding, it looked like it could have just as easily been a roadside church that housed the holy, the un-made-up, the denim skirted and the sterile smell of a brand new public address system.

The stage was on risers in the corner and patrons sat down at tables while we played. They were rowdy and loud, but seemed somehow welcoming, or at least open to our vibe.

When the headliner came on, a few dozen fans came up to watch and rock out to the hit or two they knew. Considering the Prevost tour bus parked outside and the gold-record pedigree of those playing onstage, it was the midwestern live music experience for bars at its most illustrative.

One of our cousins who lived in South Bend came out to see us. Last I knew, he was still enmeshed in the Apostolic Oneness faith like his family before him, so I was more than a little surprised to see him order a round of drinks for our table.

When we were kids, we would get into arguments about random Bible things and the true meaning of Thanksgiving and over who was the most avid and dedicated holy bookworm. It was the neverending game of esteem-snuffing religio-one-up that kids in my immediate sphere seemed consumed with at the time.

Now we could talk freely about our familial quirks and the blatant cognitive dissonance of our Jesusly upbringing, all with malted beer breath and colorful language that would have brought pointed ultra-pious stares from dour elder faces years ago. It was freeing and refreshing to hear my cousin go on about his dad's ridiculous moral issue with my parents' entertaining the idea of purchasing a vineyard in their retirement. Be ye not drunk with wine, and all that.

Still, it would have been impossible to have a conversation of this nature at any one of our family gatherings. But here in this den of iniquity, in this shelter away from the stifling rays of Heaven, we could finally be real.

November 27, 2006 "I Wasted a Nickel"

2010-07-28T16:06:00.007-07:00

11/27/2006 Monkey Bar - Huntington, WV
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

There was a homeless person crouched next to the dumpster in the back alley of the Monkey Bar. He or perhaps she sat cross-legged, talking to himself, drunk and incoherent and for a split second I saw him as an embodiment of future me, an Vader-Skywalker-esque superimposition, a harbinger of what lay at the end of this dark road. I drowned away the image with my Bose Noise-Canceling headphones.

This is good for taking you somewhere.

Drives weren't long on this tour, which was almost enough to make up for the stonefaced crowds and skeevy club scene. Some shows were within three hours of each other which meant less money on gas and more time to be outside of the van and away from the nerve cloud. It was an orange afternoon when we loaded up the ramp and commandeered a dark unused upper room to make our speakeasy. We filled it with cigar smoke and yeasty burps of High Life. We made an altar out of lighting and parts of furniture we found, and we made a helmet for Nic.

Nic w/ helmet.

We sat smoking thinking drinking in the dark. Faces lit with the pale purple of the light ropes and the low rumble of a soundcheck somewhere far off in the distance, several walls away. The Monkey Bar was an old cavernous building. Probably a grocery store or a department store from back when men parted their hair in the middle and wore Hitler mustaches like it was no big deal.

I smoked cigars onstage with my hat drooped down into my eyes, hair mangled and matte, where I could fully hide in plain view, nipping on the flask, stinging my throat into an eventual dull ache that gave my singing voice the cancerous edge I thought it needed.

At home, I was three breads into my bread book. My latest loaf was the 'poppyseed bloomer,' which was in the British breads section and was notable for its long rising time. In total, it took about ten hours - an initial 8-hour rise, then a punch down, then another 2 hours.

If you haven't baked your own bread, it's hard to describe the primordial satisfaction of eating a steaming warm chunk with honey or butter, having put in the time and fistpower to bring it into being. It's like linking yourself to your peasant ancestors, or at least John Lennon.

November 25, 2006 "Down-Down-Down"

2010-07-28T16:06:00.005-07:00

11/25/2006 The Blue Cat - Bellefontaine, OH
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

Bellefontaine was a small town of 13,000 familiarly centered around a worn limestone Second Empire courthouse, and warmly nestled in the belly of western Ohio, or as I had learned from years of family reunions there, Conservative country.

It was laid out like all the other similarly-sized towns in the region - a half-deserted square whose business population included a handful of banks, lawyers and insurance companies, and a few sleepy restaurants on the brink of fiscal death. Somewhere not far from downtown was a much more vibrant commercial district populated by Super Targets and Chilis' and Jiffy Lubes, split down the middle by a four-lane highway. A city-planning template repeated many cities over, and the veritable fingerprint of modern capitalism.

If there's any doubt as to Bellefontaine's secondary market status, they have Rax.

If I'd grown up here instead of my own hometown, I can say with a relative degree of certainty that my experience would have been much the same. Namely, twelve years of a county school and a Florida vacation.

The Blue Cat was a two-tiered clubbed adorned in alternative rock paraphernalia and Jagermeister shwag. The clientele were scrawny Trenchcoat Mafia types and 23-year-old Iraq veterans with scores of fifty-dollar tattoos and their girlfriends. Visual kei-type girls with black thigh high boots who were almost beautiful in the dark light of the bar but seemed somehow worn out in the honest light of day. I didn't assume they got many guys in dandy vests around these parts much, so I put myself on the offense from the start.

I spent much of my time climbing on the guard rail in front of the stage, singing and trying not to let my guard down. We had a heckler whom I singled out for ridicule as best I could, but it turned out he was just a loud drunk regardless of who was playing. It was much easier to let fly this combative nature, and slightly harder to control. Along with a major van accident, an arrest for battery from the stage was an occurrence of which I was beginning to feel was only a matter of time.

I sat at the bar later, drinking with a man who I assumed ran the place. He wore tinted round John Lennon glasses and had a carefully groomed goatee. He might have been my age, but his incessant voice sounded calloused from years of late nights drinking and smoking and snorting rails. He wouldn't stop talking about some sort of text message marketing plan he came up with that would revolutionize the world, so I kept studying his face while he talked and let all his words melt into one continuous buzzing of sound during which I would occasionally feign agreement, understanding and wonder.

All I wanted to do was go to the dark sanctuary of a motel and sleep.

November 24, 2006 "97' Bonnie & Clyde"

2010-07-28T16:06:00.003-07:00

11/24/2006 The Ritz - Warren, MI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, local

Picking back up in that dark, claustrophobic van and putting frozen miles between my baby boy and I never ceased to form a granite cyst in the pit of my stomach. It usually lasted about 48 hours, sometimes less depending on how much alcohol I was able to get my hands on and how soon.

Some destinations were easier on the soul than others, but driving north to the rust belt apocalypse of Detroit at the onset of winter was like setting the controls for Conrad's heart of darkness.

The Ritz was on a span of off-highway, surrounded by derelict parking lots overrun with cracks, and like every date on this tour, we arrived in the cold and bleak corpse light of dusk.

There was a feeble humor in naming this club The Ritz. Unlike the Piccadilly hotel, its dark and smoky interior reeked of fried things. Dated sports and music memorabilia clung to the walls, overseeing crowds of pre-diabetic Americans swilling High Life and playing video poker.

We had an interview no-show, which suited us just fine. It was more time to drink. More time to count the merch one more time to give our existence the facade of purpose. More time to sit silently in the stale cigar smoke over a half-pound greasy bar burger evaluating our lives.

Action Reaction was no longer with us. The opening band was a local group of young kids who looked like they were plucked out of 1969 and spat out onto our stage. They wore hip-hugging jeans and black heeled boots. The drummer played an enormous tank of a kit and the longhaired singer carried the mic stand around the stage like a dance partner. For their age, they played a hell of a convincing rage of garage rock. They were the kind of band that could not have really existed anywhere else than Detroit.

It was strange. I felt like those kids must have looked down on us, and I secretly believed they had a right. They were doing something real, something with muscle, sweat and balls.

I wondered how my life would have been different if I'd had the brazen confidence of that 17-year-old singer when I was that age.

The Place in the Middle

2010-07-28T16:06:00.001-07:00

Mr. Theodius Husher wrote one other book before he died, though it was not nearly as popular as Wriothesley’s Guide. In it, he described the mathematics of dreams. Trying to discover the precise relationship between dream time and waking time, he devised a formula roughly placing dream chronology at roughly thirty-three percent faster than normal time. Whether his theorem has ever been scientifically proven is still being debated, but it was the last book he ever wrote and didn’t live to see it published. (This was carried forward by his son, Usher.)

At any rate, there is a section of the book describing the phenomena of lucid dreams. He writes, “when in a lucid state, the dreamer finally realizes the material of his reality, he gains a significant amount of control over the experiences and direction of his episode. This control can produce feelings of euphoria, fear, or an urge to criminality. I myself have experienced all three on different occasions, although paranoia is the one most prevalent.” The book was called The Living Will.

* * *

The Maudlin stings going down and then wraps my limbs in warm numbness. The music of Long's Second fades in and out with Oscar's appearance, visiting as he wishes, taking care that I want for nothing so that I can continue carving this new book out of the ether. Food, drink and clean clothing are taken for granted, as they are always prepared and always available. Oscar makes sure I sleep, he makes sure I eat and he makes sure I write.

The one thing I cannot ever do is leave the apartment.

Three nights ago I tried. I wanted to walk in the chill night air and break my mind free from its present enclosure, if for only an hour or two. He stood in front of the door.

"Where are you going?" he smiled.

"I would like a short walk. Some fresh air."

"You have everything you need here."

I scratched my head and looked around the room.

"Just for a minute. Down the sidewalk and back.

He stared hard and smiled without his eyes, exposing his long lower teeth pressed firmly against his uppers, gray gums having receded long ago.

He said again, slower, "You have everything you need here." He paused before saying that last word, then exhaled it hard so that I could smell his stale breath blackened by cigarettes.

Upon looking into his deep set eyes, I realized he was right. Nothing from the outside could ever be allowed to corrupt the flow.

He faded in and out again with the music as the night crept along, the clock in clicking cadence with the ever-working typewriter.

The night will fall,
And I will call,
So never fear...

November 21, 2006 "William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park and Escapes Unscathed"

2010-07-28T16:01:00.007-07:00

11/21/2006 Newport Music Hall - Columbus, OH
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

Photo by Joe Major.

It is called America's Longest Continually Running Rock Club and it's where I saw my first and last ever performance of the afro'd duo of Omar Rodriguez and Cedric Bixler and the rest of The Mars Volta during a long uneventful and introspective summer in which I tried to find a stage persona of my own. I figured it would do me some good to at least see these people to whom we'd been diligently compared by every music rag and mouth-breathing scenester in the western hemisphere.

The first five minutes were an acrobatic homage to the early days of At the Drive In, with Bixler having carnal relations with the microphone stand, culminating in a headstand and signature twenty-foot microphone toss. It was impressive, yet not quite enough to fuel my enthusiasm throughout the rest of a meandering fractal set. I left as quietly as I came, an anonymous student of the stage in a nondescript white van parked blocks away.

Fast forward a few years, and me of '03 would find that I'd perfected an awkward yet comfortable mix of David Bowie, Robert Plant and Doc from Back to the Future. As unorthodox of a composite as it was, it felt nice. It was a warm pair of broken-in shoes into which I stepped every night.

I smoked cigars with Bella and Jason in the green room of the music hall. I had a simmering safe-crush on Bella, which is an innocent variant on an already innocent feeling-set that never results in any sort of embarrassing or life-altering mistakes, but merely insists on making us take quick furtive glances at the object of our safe-affection and, on occasion, imagine the feeling of a secret, quick kiss. She was cute and fashionable and seemed to have remarkable taste.

The hall was half full of fans of the X-fest set. Passive rock radio listeners mixed with the true breed of baggy-panted nu-metallers. There was a pair of girls in the dead center of the crowd who made constant eye contact and smiles, and later at the merch table one pulled her breast out for me to sign. She went into greater detail via Myspace e-mail to the band's account later about how she would have preferred the evening to have played out in her bed. I played the passive flirting game, but in my head I was visualizing much more than secret and furtive kisses. I never saw her again.

We left for home that night for a small Thanksgiving break, where I would once again return to the land of the living. Where people lived and worked during daylight hours and where I had less and less grist for the conversation mill, as a result of my world having grown exponentially less conventional over the years, where my peers were buying houses and Baby Gap clothing while I was holding myself over the ever-widening chasm of nightclubs and minimum wage manual labor.

November 19, 2006 "No Parking (On the Dance Floor)"

2010-07-28T16:01:00.005-07:00

11/19/2006 Bogart's - Cincinnati, OH
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

Load-in at Bogarts. Photo by Joe Major.

A list of things I like in Cincinnati:

-The abandoned subway.
-Cracked out old German neighborhoods.
-The view from across the river.
-Venetian Gothic churches in the hills.
-The Afghan Whigs.
-Homecooked breakfast at anarchist collective households in the fall of 2000.
-Over the Rhine concerts at the Taft Theater in December.
-Gilbery Gnarley (G-N-A-R-L-E-Y).
-King's Island.
-The Shoney's with the cicada problem.
-Broken washing machines at Sudsy Malone's.
-Giant motorcycles on Short Vine at 1am.
-Cheese on chili.
-Lesbian dives with steel plate dance floors.
-A guy named Tawd.
-A girl named Amy.
-A guy named John.
-Another guy named John.
-The band Koan.
-The band Miasma.
-What I've heard of The National.
-Ivory soap.
-The old black man in Corryville in green tweed with a cane that says cryptic things like "Birds of a feather...flock together," then calls my friends by name and knows their birthplace despite having never met them.
-Pat, the rambling rose of the Queen City who makes an appearance at every underground rock show and remembers band members' names years after the fact despite her septegenarian age bracket.
-This poster.
-Not breaking the driver side mirror off on the headliner's tourbus.
-Annie Oakley.
-Sarah Jay.
-WKRP.
-Raymond Babbitt.
-Aloysius Snuffleupagus' grandmother.
-I-275.
-Bogart's when I'm playing at Bogart's, but not when I'm a patron of Bogart's.

November 18, 2006 "No One Can Make Me Play Along with This"

2010-07-28T16:01:00.003-07:00

11/18/2006 Scene Metropolis - Lansing, MI
Other bands: locals

The Scene Metropolis was a small art gallery, a filler date to keep us busy and making money while the headliners took a day to do something important. It was cold and dark and the people of Lansing all seemed to be shuttering themselves in from the freezing November temps.

We ate our fast food and drank our secret booze in a back room, sitting on the floor amid a pile of amps and guitars.

Loneliness was coupled with the omniscient cold air. Warm companionship was, in theory, a phone call away. Except it wasn't. There was always work. There was always sleep. I made what friends I could but on the road it was always single-serving-style, people who always wanted to talk about records and band gossip and things I was already sick of, and then we'd be off and never see them again. Or see them the following year, and to them no time had passed but to us it was an uncomfortable game of place-the-face-as-face-as-you-can-before-the-message-board-posts-about-how-you're-an-arrogant-asshole-start-appearing.

I shied away from the girls. Only gave them as much attention as needed to try to get them to buy an album. I flirted at times, but it was always with a goal in mind, a goal that did not involve clothes strewn on an apartment floor and a profound feeling of remorse the next day. Given our penchant for holing up in hotel rooms on this run, that situation would rarely present itself as an opportunity to be denied.

We played on a small stage along the wall, through the kind of PA we had cut our teeth on. Small Peavey mains held aloft on spindly stems and connected to a single beer cooler-shaped amp.

A thin horseshoe of people arced around us as we played. It was fun being up that close again, being able to touch people and look into their eyes without having to leap across a six-foot gulf to the barricades. It was hard to tell if these were "our" people or not, if they had come specifically to see us or had just stopped in for something to do that night. It was somehow locked in my brain that a show of true appreciation could only involve heartfelt singalongs and lilty dances and pileups of the first order. It rarely occurred to me that other people might enjoy live music the same way I might, which was to stand idly back in the shadows. We were never really a crowd-participation band, so I don't know what I was ever expecting.

November 17, 2006 "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show"

2010-07-28T16:01:00.001-07:00

11/17/2006 The Machine Shop - Flint, MI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

Another dark night in cold Flint.

I'm not sure I'd ever been there when it was warm. It was always a cold place like Gary. Full of lonely cold spots of empty time and space, often illustrated in the lonesome Ed Hopper glow of a decrepit fast food joint on the side of a derelict industrial highway devoid of any neighbors save the barbed wire-topped fences and cracked pavement and graffitied dumpsters adorning the surrounding real estate.

The bass player for Smile Empty Soul was an amateur graffiti artist and tagged the side of the club in an area where the owners paid no mind to its appearance. He was a living cultural document typical of the era and genre, clad in Addidas and upscale dreadlocks, fancy tattoos. Played his bass low and bent over at the waist during the choruses. An overtly nice guy, and one of the first to offer any sort of social olive branch.

The inside of the club was steel tread plate and fencing, black paint and a real motorcycle hung on the far wall. Stickers of bands I had never heard of with purposefully misspelled names and evil-looking fonts crusted the mirrors and urinals of the restrooms and the smell of cheap beer and bar food saturated the carpets and the clothing of anyone who entered.

This was the shrine of a tribe that had grown into their adult responsibilities with weathered faces and yet retained the wildness of their youth under their hats and long sleeved shirts to be revealed on the weekends at places like The Machine Shop.

There was one old guy in particular who was dressed and groomed identical to Ozzy Osbourne. The resemblance was striking, down to the dark glasses with circle lenses and pewter occult jewelry he wore on his fingers and wrists. He gave out copies of an enormous compendium on the life of Ozzy Osbourne he had written that chronicled the rise and fame of the metal statesman but written in Hessian lexicon and hyperbole so thick it was almost laughable.

It was easy to poke fun at this unabashed idol-worship, but it was hard not to admire the painstaking attention this guy gave to detail. At times it read like a manifesto, other times like a brochure. The book stayed in our van, and at times I spent hours poring over the itemized list of every single show Ozzy had performed in his life, chronicled by this man who thought of him as a god.

It ended up stuffed behind a workshop table at the glass and aluminum shop where I worked on my breaks from tour, and it's possible that it still lives there as I write this. To this day, I still wish I had it.

The audience waited patiently while we played, having never heard of us before and probably have never heard us since. I played to a front row that consisted of union-welder-sized hulks with facial hair and shaved heads, and while it's likely they never liked our music, at times it seemed like they appreciated our sense of combativeness and swagger.

November 16, 2006 "I Know You Know You Know I Know"

2010-07-28T16:00:00.003-07:00

11/16/2006 The Intersection - Grand Rapids, MI
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

Photo by Joe Major.

It gets so cold up in the hand in the middle of November. It's like a permanent ache.

We arrived at The Intersection in the sallow light of afternoon, biding our time by hanging Brazil posters all over the venue. When we weren't drinking, we kept ourselves busy with our own marketing. Our secret goal was to make ourselves look like a bigger deal than the headliner.

Wireless internet was a comforting blanket, a thin tether to the outside world. It was my lifeline home, but was unfortunately rarely used as such. We were both busy. Alison was still working at the home for troubled kids and my topsy turvy hours didn't help to make the communication any easier.

The set went on and went off without a hitch, a solid reality now as opposed to a rare and fleeting occasion for celebration. James best friend was a drum machine and a pair of ear buds. Aaron knew how to beat the shit out of his guitar without beating the shit out of his guitar.

We bought a hotel room almost every night now. Pleading with strangers for floorspace on which to sleep was becoming a burdensome humiliation in this day and age. Now that we were making three-hundred a night plus buyouts and merchandise, we could more or less afford it. Especially if we didn't think about the money we already owed.

We piled in the same room, seven or sometimes eight of us, like illegal immigrants. And in a sense, in the world of hotel rules, we were illegal, squatting in a room that was only paid for for two people. We piled on the beds, on the floor. Seven or eight showers, piles of wet towels. We always sent only two guys in to get the room and parked the van off the side in the shadows. They were to ask for a room in the back, under the pretense of wanting peace and quiet away from the road, but really so that we could sit outside the room and drink and smoke and talk on our cell phones before coming back inside the rapidly deteriorating atmosphere of the room.

When we left, the rooms were always rich with the must of seven grown men and our perennially dirty laundry. And while we always had to sneak past the desk clerk the night before, we could always hit the complimentary breakfasts and walk out proudly the next morning with the knowledge that there had been a shift change and the new person was none the wiser. This was our game and we never lost, not for seven years.

The one good thing about this run was the close proximity of all the dates. Over the years we'd been trained to do marathon drives for weeks at a time, and now we had the luxury of driving no more than two to four hours for most of these shows. It was a godsend to be out of the van and away from the radiating anxiety we were all emitting.

But it was also more time to think, more time to brood. More time to ask silent questions.

November 11, 2006 "Burnin' Whiskey"

2010-07-28T16:00:00.001-07:00

11/15/2006 Headliner's - Toledo, OH
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

There was an early set on our stage in Toledo. Some runner-up from American Idol or some such. The singer was a short dark-skinned girl decked out in designer club gear. Her backup band all had the impeccable gear of musicians-for-hire. They played a forgettable blend of funk and pop rock, but doing so flawlessly in the way that only professional hired gun musicians do. And there was no one there.

Pricey gear, a bus and all the hair and makeup in the world and it gets you less than four people watching from the back while passively sipping watery beers. This was the sour reality of paid advertising, inflated SoundScam numbers and arithmetically impossible merchandise receipts playing out in front of our eyes. Smoke and mirrors.

This thing didn't adhere the rules of any other game in life, and it was clearer to me by the day that all the hard work and vintage gear and smart clothes didn't mean shit unless your cosmic axes were in line and your circadian rhythms were shored up with your diurnal cycles and then multiplied by the square root of today's powerball numbers and your chakra was full up of feng shui. And you could chase it and chase it your whole life and the best you may ever get is free drinks and a view of the country from the bench seat of a van.

This was not a future. This was a sure path to nihilism and a bathtub full of blood.

It was cold. In these Rust Belt towns, where winter was bleak and the light was dim and rancid, blood ran slow in the veins and muscles worked at half speed, tight and unbending. Ohio went to war with Michigan in the early 1800s for this territory and won.

At the back of Headliners was a bar where we would all cash in our drink tickets first thing, then go hit the pool tables, a game we were all terrible at. There was an even bigger room next door, presumably where big radio acts would play. It served as a gear-staging area on shows like tonight.

I really couldn't complain these days about the integrity of our set. James' timing was spot on. Aaron never broke anymore strings or pedals. We flew in, played the set like machines, and flew off. Made our way back to the bar and to our cell phones to keep ourselves sane from the dull crush of ennui. The twenty-three hours and fifteen minutes a day we weren't doing anything.

November 14, 2006 "Now In This Hush"

2010-07-28T15:59:00.004-07:00

11/14/2006 The Chameleon - Lancaster, PA
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

This may have been the time when James threw the burrito at the police car, or it may have been the time before. This is a period of my life where everything blurs together in a haze of bourbon fumes and 14 hour sleep binges. I no longer really drove, giving up my six-year reign as bucket seat king to James and Bryan. I spent most of the drives laying in the first bench, napping myself into a headache or trying in vain to keep my writing up but ultimately getting distracted by exotic dancers on billboards and giant butter jesuses.

I remember doing the merch count-in and count-out like The Chameleon required, and I remember finding the Ministry icon that I had spraypainted in the mens' room over a year before. I half-heartedly checked up on these territorial pissings every time we played a club we had played before at least once. I had failed to nurture it into a Shepard Fairey-styled phenom during the Hostage years and was now merely enjoying the small satisfaction unknown graffiti artists must get when they see a train car pass by years later with their work still intact. A gentle, secret reminder that one still lives.

I also remember playing a joke on our management team already sensitive to Nic's court-ordered therapy debacle and an earlier incident where Philip had unknowingly locked lips with a married woman in a club restroom and whose husband called our agent and threatened to press charges.

We spent the hours after our set in the balcony with Chooch, Coheed's now ex-tour manager, drunk-texting our assistant manager and playing like one of us had been picked up again and needed money to post bail.

A round of phone calls later, our team realized they had been had and nothing came of it except a reminder of the aforementioned events and the admonishment to 'be careful.'

Mindless diversions.

All else I can remember is the taste of crisp fall and an imagined and romanticized-in-hindsight pumpkin spice aroma of these small rowhouse towns, the passing foliage turning a rich and sad hue of red and brown and the mulled wine melancholy of the latter-day Mercury Rev records of which I listened constantly.

The ache of the Unknown bit harder during these times, the vague notion that somewhere hidden in the second story of a two-hundred year-old home, in rooms covered in posters and kitsch, in sleepy hill hamlets and depot towns of the flat midlands, in the rainy lofts of the eastern cities and the hazy beaches of the west, was the yin that would somehow bring about my final quiescence.

The doctor asked him what he was afraid of
Just what was he running from?
And he said it’s not a fear of success nor of closeness
But of going through life feeling numb
That’s why I love the unknown
I love the unknown
He said he loves the unknown
That’s why I love the unknown
I love the unknown
He said he loves the unknown

-Clem Snide/Eef Barzelay

November 13 "Sermon On Competition, Part 2"

2010-07-28T15:59:00.003-07:00

11/13/2006 Mercury Lounge - New York City
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction, local

I ate warm Indian food with our agent Nikki on a cold, rainy night in a tiny basement restaurant across the street from the Mercury Lounge. We were full of conversation and big dreams and I ate steaming na'an until my gut hung over my belt loops.

We played to a dark room half-full but full of energy. It was so easy now to lose myself in the music. It was a gang mentality that we enjoyed. Tough guys in rumpled, stinking suits. I burned through two Jack and Cokes during the set, still working on destroying my voice to get the dry shot-out sound I was looking for.

We met Smile Empty Soul's management team who was there to talk shop and blow smoke. It was a sore spot for the headliners, as they blamed their management for the relative underpopulation of these shows and the general mishandling of their sophomore release.

Going from half-platinum to selling twenty thousand copies must have been a trip. The latter was still as many as we'd sold of Hostage. The word trickling back in from the home office was that we'd sold around four thousand copies of Philosophy at present. We were living the same predicament but on a much smaller scale.

The arithmetic potentials of a gold record did not escape me. Five-hundred thousand units moved equals airplay equals publishing equals royalties. Our ten seconds of Zentropa brought us a couple hundred apiece when it aired on mTV Road Rules most times, and when Hostage sales were at their zenith, we took in a few mechanical royalty checks that paid off a decent chunk of debt or at least kept our payments on time before petering off into nothing. Multiply those numbers by the variables and odds in a 500,000-record scenario and someone somewhere could be making a decent living, if only for a few years.

I read an interview with the drummer from the radio rock band Fuel once in a dentist's office. At their apex, they were all making as much as a family doctor or lawyer. It was all riding the wave of their two or so hits, so it didn't last. But at least they could keep up with all their peers who had chosen the straight path.

I always thought if it were me, I'd have used the time and money to let my wife quit her job getting pushed around by trouble teens and get my child off WIC while I built another dream. The next dream. The most honorable thing a person can do with their life, I thought, is to make a living doing what they love to do. This was the golden carrot on a string, always just a marketing campaign away.

It explains with certain clarity why there are some of us who never outgrow the dream. The fifty-year-old longhair working as a part-time guitar teacher. The thirty-year-old hipster who rooms and tours with kids ten years younger. It's an all-or-none proposition with no room for the lukewarm. A spiraling vortex where each ticket sale, each magazine review, entices us further out onto the perimeter, tossing more and more bits of ourselves into the volcano as a sacrifice. All to fulfill some sort of deep-seated validation rooted somewhere in childhood.

This is selling your soul for rock and roll.

November 12, 2006 "Big Big Big Big Big"

2010-07-28T15:59:00.001-07:00

11/12/2006 Fletcher's - Baltimore, MD
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, Action Reaction

The memories I have of these days are dark.

Not of spiraling, death saturated darkness but the silent salt of melancholy one senses when the shadows get longer, the light gets oranger and the air gets crisper with the onset of autumn. It wraps you in a cold blanket of somber romance and inserts into your brain a certain kind of yearning for something intangible. With fall comes the great sadness. The sweet impending doom.

These feelings are intensified being out on the road, alone with your thoughts, alone in a crowd of seven. The late mornings and overcast days make for a neverending dusk and the cold wetness creeps into every facet of life. Shops and restaurants seem empty and dark. Streets seem deserted, even when they are crowded. Wind cuts like knives and the rain stings like freezing lasers. The rest of the world seems holed away with its family and the rest of us are left wandering the lonely streets of ambition.

This day, I found myself in an office-lit falafel restaurant somewhere in a retail district of Laurel. It was about 5 in the evening. Shops were closed, people were going to warm homes. We walked up and down the streets looking for diversions and found none except a warm Borders with coffee and Internet we couldn't really afford. Six years ago I spent time in a Laurel bodybag, toted around by an undertaker who moonlit as a band manager and concert promoter. Seemed like happier days, when I didn't have to pay attention to the ledger books. Days when I didn't have to think of a wife and a 2-year-old.

The falafel and hummus was unnecessarily good. The restaurant was empty. The street the club was on smelled like baking bread. The smell was breathtaking.

Fletcher's was an upstairs venue coated in steel plate. I think we had one fan there, and I remember this because he came up to me and asked a question about my Purevolume blog.

The folks at Purevolume had asked me to do a regular blog series of life on the road. I might have posted in it about a dozen times, but I remember them all being good. No filler, as this one has from time to time. (Ha.)

Our DC contacts were another life ago. There was no more time for body bags or free dinners. We laid out cash for a cheap room, something we found ourselves doing more of these days. The imposition of bivouacing on someone's floor was beginning to take a psychological toll, at least on me. I loved couch-living for much of my twenties but I was beginning to hate feeling like a beggar this late in life.

November 11, 2006 "The Man in the Moon Is a Lady"

2010-07-28T15:58:00.000-07:00

11/11/2006 Great Slates - Cambridge, MD
Other bands: Action Reaction, Smile Empty Soul

Great Slates - a veritable smorgasbord of ways to wile away your late 30s and descent into early middle age.

Part of the allure of this trip was the opportunity to see the small hidden and unwashed parts of the country that rarely, if ever, make news other than the occasional human-skin-collector or two-headed kitten.

The state of Maryland passively intrigued me with its very un-Wyoming-like shape and the invasive Chesapeake Bay that ripped the state in twain. I'd never been to the Eastern Shore, just its hot and crowded stomach sack of Baltimore and D.C.

Scratch that.

We did take 13 down the rat tail to Virginia once, through an up and down life-size sine wave highway that dipped under the bay then spit us back out on a crag, repeating this action for miles. I remember it being dramatic, probably far more dramatic than it actually was. The ocean roared against the rocks and to this born landlocker it seemed we were driving on the very edge of civilization itself.

Great Slates was a strip mall tavern, long and cavernous with wood paneling and rows of pool tables. It was a grown-up Chuck E. Cheese with enough square footage and wherewithal to libate several hundred Marylanders. It reminded me of the kinds of places Nic and I used to work cigarette promotions in for extra cash.

In those days we were the people who walked around with clipboards on busy nights, asking people for their drivers licenses and giving out free cigarettes. It was a shitty job, but paid decently considering the work, and because they were usually staffed through local modeling agencies, our co-workers were more often than not very cute, although very dumb.

And in true Newby fashion, Nic and I came up with names for all of them. Midge. Thumbelina. Rolling Papers. It was our way of making sense of the world, as all children do.

The stage at Great Slates was in the middle of the room, with a large area of tables cleared away in the front. We were reminded once again that the hospitality was not for our benefit, but not before we had swiped a few handfuls of strawberries and cheese cubes. It seemed our place was in the van, parked out in back with the heater on and the engine running in the cold East Coast drizzle.

Action Reaction joined the tour and where before they were just another name in a long list of forgettable indie bands on an itinerary, I suddenly realized not only their singer was the former frontman of Further Seems Forever, but their keyboardist was a girl named Bella who had the unique distinction of having slept in my loft six years prior when I lived in the old church. (To be fair, there were two of her bandmates up there, too, and everyone remained clothed.)

They were seasoned performers with technical chops. The singer took the stage like he had done it a thousand times. The drummer played those complicated Latin beats that confuse the hell out of lesser men with their three-against-two and bell-of-the-cymbal time keeping.

For white kids, they played a soulful mix of psychedelic pub pop all while wearing sharp-looking clothes and looking cute. The lines of age and alcohol hadn't yet cut into their supple, flushed faces and their eyes had yet to reflect the dim patina of spent expectations and tired wisdom.

They were a young ideal bunch, signed to Equal Vision Records rather than a smarmy major, and unknowingly were our anchor to the indie world in this new realm of sweat-and-cocaine tourbus rock and roll.

Our bands' affinities for cerebral concepts and challenging bits of songcraft alienated us from a crowd that devoured easily-remembered hooks with their easily-pissed draft beer. We found ourselves competing for the same tiny market share of the Smile Empty Soul audience and failing comically.

November 10, 2006 "Hangover Blues"

2010-07-28T15:52:00.000-07:00

11/10/2006 Blue Cat's - Knoxville, TN
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul, locals

The elegant courtyard of the late Blue Cat's. Deceptively charming despite the tepid butt rock within.

As if on an itinerary, we had thus checked off almost every facet of mid-level rockdom a sane person could fathom within a six-year career arc.

We put in our early years in the grimy DIY basements of college towns. Check. Put in our year ballin' with Hollywood Hills management. Check. Our two years with the indie label crowd. Check. And now, as if to say "we've tried everything else," our path led through the stenchy bogs of radio rock and Girls Gone Wild girls (and the men who love them).

Check.

I always hate to talk down about the bands we spent time on the road with, and aside from Eddy I do admit that the members of SES were for the most part kinder and less standoffish than most of their punk rock counterparts, but their music wasn't my cup of Schlitz.

They had three hits in '03 that propped their debut album sales up over half a mil. I only recognized one, the "I do it for the druuuuugs" song, but it was easy to see why this band had gone over so well on the airwaves and the festival circuit. Finely polished tunes of loud-quiet-loud and that recognizably curled diction of post-grunge. They were the kind of band that would do in a pinch if Nickelback weren't around.

But like I said, they were nice guys and in private we'd both lament our mirrored situation - they, wishing for more cred, and us, wishing for more sales. Occasionally, certain members of our fanbase would make it known they were baffled at this odd pairing, and some refused to come. But I considered it their problem, even though it was actually still our problem.

It was an interesting scene. And my ego had been pummeled enough over recent years that I couldn't bring myself to look down upon it. They all had a right to have fun in their own way.

Skinny kids in baggy pants with huge wallet chains. Giant older dudes with sausage fingers and tribal tattoos who looked like Kerry King. Quasi-goth-raver-numetal chicks with thigh high boots and boobs pushed up into the pornosphere with a Hot Topic corset. Their larger female counterparts with corpse makeup and homemade cornrows. Reps from Jack Daniels and Jagermeister and the local X station always haunting the back of the room.

The previous night we outsold the headliner in merch. There was a momentary jubilant and simultaneously terrifying feeling of 'what if we had finally found our niche' followed by 'and what if this is it' that was quickly doused by our second nights sales, which had fallen back down to somewhere between sustenance and ignoreful. It was an anomaly and nothing more.

We knew we weren't going to win any souls on this run.

The nihilism made us dig deeper. They always say it's surprising what a man will do when he doesn't have anything to lose.

Blue Cat's was an enormous hall, very classy and elegantly decadent as most theaters-turned-rock clubs are. I spent most of the pre-show rituals up in the dark prep room, lit only by a few strings of Christmas lights. I lost track of how many comp Bud Lights I drank.

The doors opened, the masses trickled in, and we let loose our sortie. The last thing I remember is speaking German to an Austrian kid to whom I was trying to sell a t-shirt.

November 9, 2006 "I'm Your Torpedo"

2010-07-15T19:52:00.000-07:00

11/09/2006 The Handlebar - Greenville, SC
Other bands: Smile Empty Soul

We had one day to sleep in our own beds and then do the Super Duty Shuffle out to the Carolina's, bastion of lazy-tongued political prunes and blistering humidity.

It's worth saying again we were a new band by then. It seemed such a fluid change at the time, but it was the closure of a marked paradigm shift, a change only noticeable and delineated to historians such as myself, ex post facto. Five and a half years of molting and eating away at our stale cocoon and we had finally ditched our opaque exo-carcass to reveal the steaming fresh meat inside.

We'd all sunk deeply into new characters that we'd created, some by chance and others, like mine, through months of careful deliberation and casual social experimentation.

Nic was an enigmatic chain smoker onstage, always surrounded by a Camel cloud and smugly pressing the buttons of his S90 through squinted eyes, never speaking. James had turned into the Pleistocene era, always existing in a sheen of sweat and beard hair, eyes hidden in black greasy locks. Eric and Aaron had formed their own two-man guitar god pantheon, believably channeling the power and noise of five years of the 70s through their playing and their command of the stage on either respective sidek having learned to emote through their electronics.

Our clothes grew to our skin and we slept in them most of the time.

This change came with a notable sense of peace and Tao onstage, this time consistent and not like it was before, when the stage zen came and went as fickley as it pleased and was dependent upon externals like sleep and hydration and what kind of imagined vibe we received from the populace once the doors were opened. Those days were gone. We had carved out a new universe and new mechanisms for energy exchange and we would never be the same. Six years after Brazil formed, we were finally Brazil.

But this exultant and diamond-honed sense of purpose came with a shadow. It was a feeling like our ship had left just as we'd learned how to sail. There was one thing that helped us forget: Drink tickets.

The Handlebar was a big hall-type place attached to a restaurant. The stage was big and we enjoyed lots of attention from the house sound team. It was the level of touring we liked. Anymore, it seemed like the DIY places didn't care - band bills were churned through like fast food hamburgers, 8 bands on a bill, each playing 20 minute sets. Bands who didn't care about much other than yelling into a microphone because it was fun. At the bigger venues, the staff had jobs to do. It felt really un-DIY to say, but it was the God honest truth in a lot of places.

This tour would be a real eye-opener in a lot of ways. In the first, we met Eddy.

Eddy was Smile Empty Soul's tour manager. He wasn't akin to the kind of tour managers we were used to - ex-youth crew guys with baby faces and expensive designer tattoos. Eddy's face was a roadmap of The Lifestyle, chiseled and ruddy with a 150-proof complexion and a matching voice of gravel. Faded Venice Beach-style tattoos and a chiseled jaw, lines under his eyes, both of which appeared to have...seen things.

Looking at Eddy was like getting a glimpse into the murky backstage of an X-fest long after the dealers have arrived. He seemed the embodiment of rock's dark underbelly.

We met Eddy for the first time behind the soundboard and the first and only thing he said was, "There's one dressing room and it's ours."