J Roddy Walston & The Business @ Mike Roy’s CD Release Party (http://themikeroyshow.bandcamp.com), The Pour House, Raleigh, NC

Long time, no hear. That’s all because of some big happenings that have gone down in our camp lately

The biggest, by a country mile, is that we recently signed to Vagrant Records, home of our friends Murder by Death and the Hold Steady (as well as Paul Westerberg, my Hero of Heroes). We couldn’t be more stoked or more proud. Vagrant will be releasing our next record – more on that below – and helping us pay for a fancy press agent to get us that full page spread in Highlights we so richly deserve. The younger market is key.

But the first step in the plan is making a record, and so we flew out to L.A. the day after Thanksgiving and spent eight days in Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, CA, with Kevin Augunas (whom we recorded with back in May). We did 15 songs in a little over two weeks out there, and I took a few pictures along the way. Here are the best:

These are the vines hanging from the front of Sound City, and Shivaun, who’s managed the studio for the last 18 years. Shivaun would use her smoke breaks to regale me with stories about all the weird stuff that’s happened there over the years. She told me a guy was working his first session there when the L.A. riots rolled up the street and everyone had to barricade themselves in the studio overnight. Two years later, that same guy came back in, and the 6.7 Northridge Earthquake hit eight miles away, nearly collapsing the place. Hopefully he’ll never be back – God clearly doesn’t want him finishing that record.

Just inside the front door, there’s a wall of gold and platinum records that’s neigh unbeatable:

Nirvana “Nevermind”

Fleetwood Mac “Rumors” (as well as “Fleetwood Mac”)

Weezer “Pinkerton”

Tom Petty “Damn the Torpedos” (and “Hard Promises”)

Dio “Holy Diver”

And, my picture of it didn’t turn out, but this too:

Good company.

This is the live room, where we tracked nearly everything. It has the feel of a glorified rehearsal space, replete with giant coke-vision cityscapes on the walls. Throughout L.A., it’s lovingly known as “Sound Shitty,” because, compared to some of the other top-end studios in town, it’s kind of a dump. But that’s intentional: The main room has sounded so good for so long that the owners don’t want to replace anything for fear of altering the acoustics – not cracked and chipping floors, nor stained ceiling tiles. When we recorded at Ocean Way back in May, I might have preferred to eat off the floor because it was probably cleaner than my hands; at Sound City, they have rat traps in the isolation rooms. Shit is real.

[Note the uneven wall along the right-hand side. There are no parallel walls in the room, to minimize echo.]

This is the old Neve mixing board that’s been installed since 1972. I had a heady moment on our first day in the studio, looking down on the board and seeing all the numbers rubbed off these faders with age, and thinking about all the famous hands and records that contributed to that. Then the engineer told me that Stevie Nicks spilled so much cocaine into the board, that she shorted it out.

This is the late-60’s Scully 16-track tape machine we used. It sounds amazing but it was a finicky beast, and it did everything it could to annoy us – like letting the tape go slack every time it was rewound, so that someone would have to walk across the room and re-tighten it by hand before it could be played back. Every. Single. Frickin’. Time. After eight days, I was convinced that Greg, the engineer, was going to be the first man to blow out a rotator cuff making a record.

Billy lays down some Wurlitzer on “I Don’t Wanna Hear It.”

With all that bad mouthing about the live room, the rest of the studio was quite cozy. This is the den, where I spent most of my time when we weren’t recording. The caftans hanging from the ceiling really gave it an opium den vibe.

This is the kitchen, lovingly set up for dinner. We all ate together every night, and those were some of the best times out there. We covered all the good stuff – the L.A. riots, 9/11, the stock market collapse. I think we finally worked our way up to unrequited high school loves by the time we left.

Billy and amps.

My headphone mix.

This is Billy, Kevin (Augunas, our producer) and Rod posing for the cover of Gentleman’s Ennui at a villa in Santa Monica. Our friend Sam Jones was here photographing Pierce Brosnan for Esquire, and he invited us down to check out the scene. After demolishing what was left of the catered spread – with vague permission – we got to meet Pierce for a brief moment. As I shook his hand with my right, I had a handful of mini pretzel sticks in my pocket with my left. He cut such an imposing figure in his designer suit, near-military posture, and proper English accent that Billy and I completely wussed out about telling him that we watched part of “Mama Mia” the first night we were in town.

On the night after we finished recording, we finally had our first proper night off in the city. We spent part of the night at The Dresden, where we threw out a bunch of requests to Marty and Elayne (made famous in Swingers). They didn’t appreciate them very much. I requested “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin, which Marty promptly crumpled up and threw on the floor, saying “We’re a jazz band – we want jazz songs.” So we sent him back “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More” and “Mama’s Little Baby Loves Shortening Bread” which got no response. We ended the night at our friend Bryan’s house in Los Feliz, where this was the view of Hollywood from his back deck.

And again the next morning.

And that was that. There’s no release date on the album just yet, but it’s looking like May or June. You’ll be hearing from us long before then.

In meantime, we’re playing a massive New Year’s Eve Spectacular at the Ottobar tomorrow night, along with the Egg Babies Orchestra, Young Sir Jim and Hollywood, MC’ed by comedian Doug Powell. We’ll be doing some one-offs through February, and then there’ll hopefully be much more news to report for March and beyond.

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars.

Steve

Video for “Used to Did” by J Roddy Walston and The Business. Produced by Ian Corey 2009.

It’s been awhile. Lots of things have happened since we last spoke. Let’s not getting bogged down in he-said-she-said and let’s get right to the tale of the tape.

This is Zach on the balcony of the Driskill Hotel in Austin, TX, at a free happy hour we went to at SXSW last March. He looks rather pensive here, as though he’s just come to the end of a long journey and is pondering what it all might mean. But instead he’s probably just catching his breath from the maniacal pace of our drinking that day, as we tried to cram an entire evening’s worth of drinks into two decidedly happy hours. On this tour, we were all dead broke and relying on our wits for survival – sleeping in a friend’s backyard, making mental maps of where the free buffets with the loosest security were, trying to hang out with the people most likely to buy us dinner, and pouring free Shiner Bocks down our gullets like our intestines were on fire.

This is a lamp we saw for sale at The World’s Most Awesome Flea Market – it’s God-given name – just outside of Louisville, KY. We almost bought it for the merch table, but we realized it’s porcelain days would be numbered in the back of our van. Plus, we were all pretty positive that it was housing at least one Satanic spirit (and Zalamia doesn’t need back-up). But we made out in the end because a kind, shirtless, semi-toothed man took our brief pause here as his opportunity to tell us about the time he beat a Teddy Ruxpin doll to death with a baseball bat after it verbally threatened him. My favorite part was him capping the story by aping himself standing over the obliterated doll, bellowing “Who’s your daddy NOW m*therf*cker!” I’m sure around the same time this happened, KrazyGlue stock went through the roof.
Rod had another priceless exchange with a dealer:

[Rod admiring a bicycle the man has for sale]
Dealer: How much you wanna pay for that?
Rod: Ahhh, only thing I can offer you right now is a handshake, man.
Dealer: How ’bout $75?
Rod: I wish I could. Thanks anyway though. [Starts to walk away]
Dealer: Hey! [Under his breath] Trade you for a gun?

The South is spooky.

This is a side project some friends and I have called Warning Track Power (featuring most of The Egg Babies Orchestra). Back in February, we wrote a song for this past Baltimore Orioles season called “How ‘Bout Dem O’s.” The team picked it up and starting playing it at games, and we enjoyed five seconds of local celebrity in the run-up to Opening Day. We got to play on “Coffee With” with Don Scott and Marty Bass (a personal dream of mine since third grade) and this is us on the field at 7am on Opening Day, doing brief musical spots for the Fox 45 morning show. The O’s subsequent 92 losses rendered most of our optimism comically premature, but hey – there’s always next year.

In October and November of last year, we went on tour with Murder by Death and William Elliott Whitmore for a month, and my heart and health have never been the same since. One day when we’re all rich and famous, we’ll play touch football on the front lawn in Hyannisport and drink Keystone Light until someone drives a car into the lake. In the meantime, all we have are precious, precious memories. Like these:

I wish I had a better shot of this, but this is an old AirStream trailer out back of the Bottletree in Birmingham that we spent the night in after playing there last October. It has several eerie spirit orbs! Are these the souls of lost rockers of years past?? Hendrix? Cobain? RAY VAUGHN? Mayhaps. The spirits have been known to be attracted to Zalamia’s glowing angel shoes.

This is what came down the street about 30 seconds after we parked the van in New Orleans. I’m pretty sure this was The Official Welcome Wagon.

When we were in New Orleans, we somehow stumbled into a time warp and ended up on the set of Miami Vice, where these guys had just shot a rival dealer and were on their way to the speedboat with the coke they’d just stolen. I’m pretty sure Crocket and Tubbs put an end to their scheme, but I got distracted by some really nice booby beads so I didn’t see what happened.

This is a sign we saw in Ft. Worth, TX advertising…something. Beats me. I took French instead of Spanish because it seemed to me at the time that…OH MY GOD! IS THERE A HUMAN BEING BEHIND THAT THING? I stared at this for like 10 seconds trying to translate it when suddenly the hands moved and I screamed like a woman. Apparently this is someone’s job in the 135 degree Texas heat – human wooden stake. Texas is weird – don’t let anybody tell you different.

Ever wonder how much Kiss you can buy for $150 at Target? This is us on Halloween night in Austin, TX, on the Murder by Death tour. We’re wearing about six rolls of aluminum foil between the four of us – if anyone had turned on a microwave, we all would have pissed ourselves. Billy is the saddest Spaceman ever.

This is Adam from Murder by Death singing Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in Louisville, KY. Zach saw his Meatloaf (err) and raised him “Unchained Melody,” which forced Adam into going all-in with a version of “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince that he sung so hard I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. He literally dragged himself across the stage on his stomach, begging and pleading with the crowd. I think he actually cried. I was moved. Meanwhile, Zalamia was in the middle of a hot sake fit in the bathroom, and let’s just say the toilet seat was definitely getting the worst of it.

This is William Elliott Whitmore, Dagan (from Murder by Death) and Rod yukking it up backstage in Northampton, MA. We were all in the midst of admiring the handiwork of the bands who’ve left their artwork and anatomy lessons on the walls for the rest of us to enjoy. Two of my favorites:

“Anus Punch” This has a real stick-it-to-the-man vibe about it. I picture it symbolizing some secret resistance group, who just really want you to “Punch ‘em in the ass!” Maybe I’m wrong. Whatever it means, this has been the wallpaper on my phone for nine months. It never fails to get me pumped up every time I see it.

“Wizard Bong ‘07.” That’s a four-chambered bong with a set of boobs in the hitter. Sweet.

Here’s Murder by Death’s tour manager/merch guy/driver/wet nurse, Mr. Dixie Earthmover, wearing one of his many hats in Buffalo, NY. (Hats may be the only things Murder by Death does not have for sale on that table.) Dixie used a gentle hand in keeping us in line for the month, kindly turning a blind eye to our habit of tacking on five extra minutes of piano-humping to our already-generous set (which was cutting in to Will Whitmore’s banjo-fingering). He’s also an oddly sensual dancer. (Dixie fronts his own band, Sam Lowry and the Circumstance.)

Lastly, the immortal Wizard Staff. Murder by Death taught us this game on the last off-night of tour after talking it up for an entire month, and we were still completely unprepared for how hard we would fall in love with it. The basics are such: You buy a bunch of cans of beer and once you finish one off, you duct a new one to the top of the old can, thereby assembling a Wizard Staff of beercans over the course of the night. Like so:

The real essence of the game is built around House Rules. These are the ones we played with:

Speaking of #7 – I don’t shotgun beers. I don’t bong ‘em or slam ‘em, and Senior Week ended for me a long time ago. Even when I drink to excess, it’s at a stately pace – a canter, maybe. Billy has a similar mindset, so when he finished #6, I just had to see what was going to go down:

Like an old pro. He made it look so easy, that when it was my turn a few minutes later, I was ready to slam that beer, spit it back up in the sky, and slam my own backwash while I was crushed my beer can with a might crunch. That feeling lasted about three seconds:

Man. That sucks.

Anyway. As the night went on, we were visited by the motel manager and the Albany County police, on account of the folks downstairs who saw fit to complain that we were “entertaining minors” in our room. The manager opened the door on ten people wielding staffs of beer cans taller than him, and was so clearly terrified that he slowly backed away from the door as he was talking, like he’d just delivered pizza to the Manson Family. Twenty minutes later, the cops showed up, and once they verified that we were all of age, they professed their awe and amazement at this Great Game. One of the younger cops couldn’t stop laughing while he was checking ID’s, and the eldest said that in all his years on the force, he’d never seen anyone playing this before. They left us to our fun. Point = us. We rule.

Anyway, we were all feeling victorious by the end of the night, but the true winner was Dagan, who conquered all and rose to a Level 18 Wizard. (He still had two beers to go when this was taken) Truly mystical.

In May, we flew out to L.A. to do some recording. We’ve never toured farther West than Texas, and for some of us, it was our first time on the West Coast. For me, it was not only that, it was my first time in an airplane. Weird. Because we spend so much time riding in the van with our lives in the hands of someone else – someone who probably hasn’t slept right in three weeks – I was able to relax enough to enjoy the whole thing.

From the start, I knew L.A. was going to be a different than the East. This was posted outside all of the elevators in the condo complex we stayed in. This is L.A. in a nutshell – “Just in case you don’t know about what an alarm sounds or looks like, we’re gonna go ahead and explain it to you like you’re brain dead. Then we can all dig on this beet-radicchio smoothie I just paid $13 for.”

But I quickly fell for L.A.’s charms, in no small part because of palm trees.

At least L.A. seems to appreciate what it has – most of the ones in Hollywood were better groomed than the people passing underneath them.

This is Rod, Billy and I at the mixing board of Ocean Way studios, where we did some tracking during our stay. This was easily the nicest studio any of us had been in, with a full complement of runners and engineers, and wall of platinum records that seemed to stretch around the block. (They also had incense burning in the bathroom, probably for “vibe.”) Below is an eerily silent mini-tour of Studio B, ending on the huge photo collage of all the greats who’ve recorded there: Brian Wilson, Frank Sinatra, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones…Wilson Phillips. All the “heavies.”

Here’s some drum mic’ing hi jinx on Day One:

This is the studio apartment we rented in L.A. I like to think we decorated it “Communist Chic.” We didn’t end up miss many creature comforts while we were out there, because our apartment was in a Melrose Place-type complex with a pool and a hot tub, and we only managed to get thrown out of those once a piece.

This is a “Al Pacino” – a street performer that we ran into a couple of times just outside the Hollywood and Highland metro stop in L.A.. From what I could gather, he just hung out there all day long, randomly butting into other performers’ acts, and then doing his level best to blow them off the sidwalk. I never got close enough to figure out whether he was perpetually hammered or semi-retarded, but I felt like he worked for my laugh so hard that it was probably O.K. to give it to him.

The other performers were less appreciative of his talents, and I saw him almost get in a fist-fight with a one-man-band who did not appreciate his impromptu backing vocals. But I instantly loved him. Every time I came out of the station and he wasn’t moonwalking with the Michael Jackson impersonator, or locked in a grapple with a Transformer, or trying to juggle loose change directly behind the knife jugglers, or pelvic thrusting the audio-activated t-shirt girl into the Sweet Hereafter, I was disappointed the whole damn day. You can hear my mind being blown at the :24 mark.

This is the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean. This is from Zuma Beach, which pumped Neil Young up enough that he named a record after it. We did a photoshoot here with Matt Wignall, with a bunch of surfboards, cowboy boots and Coors Original cans everywhere. We ended up not being able to stay here long enough to watch the sun actually set, instead darting back up the canyon to hit a seafood stand, where I had my 17th shrimp burrito of the trip. I was cosmically repaid the next night when we ran into Matthew McConaughey at an after-party at the El Rey, and as he was leaving, Billy and I watched him do two enormous bong hits in the front seat of his van with the doors wide open and the dome light on. Maybe I wasn’t cosmically repaid in full but I’ll take it.

And that was kind of the year that was. 2010 has loads to live up to, but I’ve got a feeling it’s up to the task. Keep your eyes peeled.

Some quick ones:

Zalamia giving it back to the Finger Lakes.

Zach, crushed by the weight of it all, One-Eyed Jack’s, New Orleans

Zach at the Gateway to the West, St. Louis.

“Tell me you don’t want to go to heaven.” – Rod

This is a father-and-son set of mariachi outfits we saw at a thrift store on Melrose. I’ve never wanted a child, a chimp, or a midget girlfriend more in my life.

The game room at the Broxton Highway Citgo, somewhere in Georgia.

Thank you, West Virginia.

Our Moment of Zen. (Kudos to our friends Ryan and Cherie for getting us into Disneyland for free.)

But despite all our adventures over the year, this is the most amazing thing that happened to us. This is Lilian Rose Westphal, Zach and Greta’s daughter, born on August 25th of this year. Thankfully, for Greta’s sake, she did not come out flailing with spurs and a moustache (though she does have an amazing head of hair). I just can’t wait for their first father-daughter headbang.

Alright. That’s enough out of me. Keep it real.

Steve

This Saturday, we kick off of an eight-day run of extended awesomeness with our friends Ponderosa. The dates have changed a bit – Philly and Milledgeville are out, but Chicago and Lexington are in. Here’s the updated itinerary:

Sat 9/19 – Athens, GA @ Tasty World
Sun 9/20 – Nashville, TN @ Exit/In (with the Bridges as well)
Mon 9/21 – Lexington, KY @ The Green Lantern
Tues 9/22 – Chicago, IL @ Schuba’s
Thurs 9/24 – Brooklyn, NY @ Matchless
Fri 9/25 – New York, NY @ Piano’s
Sat 9/26 – Washington, D.C. @ The Red and the Black

This is like a Biblical prophesy – think of it as Manifest Destiny in shit-kickers.

See you there.

Steve

J Roddy Walston and the Business Daytrotter Session

hey good people of the rock world.
we come with good tidings of winter joy.
as the northeast is sleeping under a tranquil blanket of snow
we want you to be warmed by the power of live music and tape.
daytrotter has posted our session from september late.
be blessed with four free downloads.
im going out(unreleased)
full growing man(unreleased)
rock and roll the 2nd(hail mega boys)
and used to did(hail mega boys)
download them suckers.
and leave a comment let sean and all the daytrotter boys know you love what they do.

also we are playing two double headers this month
hoboken march 13th at maxwells
nyc march 14th at bowery ballroom

baltimore march 28th ottobar
baltimore march 29th recher theatre (with the holdsteady)

let’s keep it to strange to sleep

j roddy

Only eight days ’til tour starts! We’re losing our minds about this one because we’re headed out with Murder by Death and William Elliott Whitmore for four-and-a-half freaking weeks of awesomeness that we probably just don’t deserve. (But we’re sure as hell going anyway!) We just added a kick-off date at Snug Harbor in Charlotte, NC on next Wednesday evening, the 22nd. I think that means we are officially hitting everywhere between Austin, Texas and Burlington, Vermont, and several places even our GPS can’t find. No matter where you live on this side of the Mississippi, we’re playing within 100 miles of you – put on your driving gloves and let’s make a night of it, shall we?

In the meantime, we’ve got some good stuff happening for us while we’re still sitting at home, yelling out all the answers to Jeopardy! before everyone can read the question. For starters, we have officially declared war on flabby triceps – Paste Magazine just named “Stop Rip and Roll” it’s 1 Fist Pump Anthem of 2008, and “Go For It” made number 19 on the same list. AWESOME! We’re the only band represented twice – now there’s no excuse for coming out and keeping your hands to yourself…b’lee dat!

Secondly, on our Myspace page (link at the top), you’ll see that the good folks at Baltimore’s Red Star KGB guerilla film crew came out and shot our homecoming show at the Ottobar last month, and we’ve got some tasty clips from that posted in “Sounds like” section. The fellas did an incredible job – I live with Zach for months at a time, and now even I’m frightened of him, thanks to their extreme close-ups. Does he really do that every night? Ye Gads! We’ve got the entire set filmed so maybe, if we get an injection of gumption, this will end up on a DVD in the future…?

The Red Star fellas are also hard at work shining up a video we shot for “Used to Did,” that should be available here real soon. Its gonna be something else – we’re talking green screens, spurs, death-defying hair flips and even a few Baltimore landmarks. It’ll be epic.

Lastly, we’ll have two dazzling new t-shirt designs on this tour, courtesy of B-more design house Squidfire, as well as some spiffy buttons and a new, honest-to-God repressing of “Hail Mega Boys.” We’ve been selling copies carved by our own toil and shaped by our own eight hands for the last few tours, but it was time to let the Big Boys do a proper version of it. If you’ve bought the album in the last year, the artwork is virtually unchanged. If you haven’t bought the album in a year or you downloaded it, then you’re just seriously missing out on the best artwork mankind has ever concieved, thanks to our friend Alex Fine.

Check out the tour dates and come on out and say hi. Or knit us some scarves because it is sure to be COLD in Michigan in late-November.

Over and out…

Steve

We’ve got brand new shirts and a new edition of Hail Megaboys with awesome new cover art by Alex Fine.

Check them out in the gimmickwear.com.

We’re back in the Motherland – Bodymore, Murdaland – resting, relaxing and making some headway on a new record. (Which, if all goes according to plan, we hope to have out by the end of this year.) In the meantime, we’re hitting the road again in the Spring and we’ll be bringing loads of new stuff with us – songs, t-shirts, album art, possibly LPs…its a brave new world!
In honor of fresh starts, I wanted to clean out the pipes a bit with some pictures left over from our summer tours.
Dig it:

This is how our days on tour usually start. Well, actually, this is more like noon-ish – after we’ve eaten, after we’ve B.S.ed about the night before, after my “Dad Rock” mix has been turned off for the second time (no love for The Coug’?) and after the thirty hours of sleep we’ve gotten over the last week has caught up to some of us. Here we see Billy in the conventional posture, lounging in his beat-off shorts, wrapped in a stranger’s bath towel, while Zach’s taste leans toward the avant-garde. Naps are awesome!

Here’s Billy eating a Louisville Hot Brown. If any one meal has the potential to bring about the end of the human race, it’s probably this. From what I can recall, this local dish is comprised of a slice of white bread, melted Cheddar cheese, sliced turkey and bacon, more cheese, another slice of white bread topped with a tomato, slathered with a final, all-encompassing layer of cheese. It should come with a complimentary set of defibrillators. Billy is just clowning in this shot, but Rod ate his entire sandwich, to everyone’s horror.
But it did get us thinking: If we ever run into legal problems using “The Business,” say hello to “J Roddy Walston and Hot Brown.”

These are our friends Jeff and Tim from Chattanooga. Jeff, “Uncle Ding Dong Sauce,” had a memorable turn as Mr. T at a Halloween show we played in Chatty last year (chronicled in an earlier post). Since then, Jeff’s been hard at work with his band, Double Dick Slick, yet still found time to begin writing a solo concept album about 9/11. Some sample lyrics:

Pray for our troops America
Never forget 9/11
That’s when three-thousand people all went up to Heaven
Or Hell if they did not live right

and…

It’s just a honky-tonkin’, love-makin’, boot-scootin’, rooting-tootin’, ass-kickin’, 9/11
Marvelous Heart

I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’d wager Jeff is the first person to have used “9/11″ as an adjective.

Here’s Zach’s Muppet ‘Stache (Also known as “The Shalit.”) He just recently trimmed it for the first time since March, and it’s gorgeous. He recieved the ultimate validation on the last tour – up there with the time a homeless dude high-fived Billy in Knoxville because he thought he was homeless too – when a dude in full hunting camos came into a gas station while we were in line, and was stopped dead in his tracks by the mere sight of Zach. All he could do was blurt out “DAMN!” and shake his head. WE’RE FOR REAL!

This is Billy with a beef blanket he bought at a truck stop in North Carolina. He said it tasted like burnt cardboard. On the way to this truck stop, we passed a smoldering three-car pile-up on the interstate and overheard two truckers discussing it in line for the bathroom. “I hear three people got killed,” the first one said. The second one thought it over for a moment. “Yup,” he finally said. “That’s a good one!”

Truckers!

Here’s a portrait Billy did of himself on an Etch-a-Sketch. Well, he says it’s not supposed to be him, but I think it’s awfully coincidental that he gave him black hair.
Either way, I think we can all agree, the man is a wizard with a small knob.

(Ouch.)

Speaking of tasteless, here’s Rod.

This is Zach, killing himself. He’s about to dig into a triple order of Waffle House hashbrowns, “All-The-Way” (minus “Capped”) style. For the layperson, thats an entire platter of hashbrowns covered in chili, cheese, diced ham, tomatos, onions and jalapeno peppers – hold the mushrooms. The first time he ordered it, the waitress flinched. Zach can literally eat anything – I’ve seen him eat three McDonald’s quarter-pounders with cheese in less than five minutes at 10 a.m., and I’ve unfortunately been in a van with him for several hours after he’s chased two gas station kosher dogs with some leftover beef jerky and a bag of pork rinds. His stomach is a compost heap.

(P.S. – In this picture, Zach is wearing his beloved “deer shirt” that we bought for him on tour last summer, and which was stolen from him after a show in Chattanooga in September. He has been virtually inconsolable since he lost it, so if the person who took it would like to cleanse their soul of its misdeeds, drop us a line.)

This is the Most Bad-Ass Game Of Jenga Ever Played, pitting Young Master Gordon against what appears to be meth personified.
When the Jenga tower finally falls, it’s always pretty exciting.

This is Billy and Zach playing video poker in Shreveport, Louisiana. The people we met here were great, but everything else about the place creeped me out, from the crumbling, moss-covered shacks along the main drag (with cars out front), to the apartment complex across the street from the club that looked like a prison with bars on every window. Plus there were dudes walking down the street who I’m sure had more than one machete on them at all times.
But even a town stocked with would-be cannibals can offer intrepid travelers a silver lining, and Shreveport’s is most definitely “The Inquisitor,” a weekly paper that basically compiles the mug shots of everyone who was arrested in Bossier County over the previous week. I knew it was going to be good from the cover:

That’s the kind of syntactic goodness that grammar lessons rob you of. I wish more newspapers might could write like this.
Then there’s this guy:

“Edward Mouton – He’s got one up on Justice.”

(I’m probably going to hell for that.)

Lastly, this is the backstage bathroom stall at the Star Bar in Atlanta. Not like I’m keeping a running tally or anything, but this is hands down my favorite bathroom in the world. (Solely in an aesthetic sense – I don’t fancy doing my business behind a Bud Light beaded curtain). The entire stall wall – well below where the picture ends – is covered in hand-written graffiti left there by bands who’ve played there over the years. Most just scribble the band name or motto if they’ve got one (i.e. – “Party On It”). But I like the ones that write about the drives (“Ten hours here and boy do we have to poop!”), the shows (“Here on the day The King died – 8/16/2002 1977″), and the towns they traveled from (“Who the f*** lives in Macon?”).
I like it because it all makes me feel like I’m part of a larger fabric, made up of other people who just have to do dumb shit like drive ten hours to play to a dozen people, and then wake up on a stranger’s floor the next morning and do it all over again – not because it’s always easy and not because it’s always fun, but because its the only thing they can think to do with themselves.

Keep your eyes peeled for them dates.
See you soon,

Steve

Here’s our man J Roddy on the cover of this morning’s perezhilton.com, playing the role of “lovable street urchin” with his good bud Jennifer Garner in Central Park over the weekend. One commenter questioned whether he was actually Sean Lennon, while another noted his striking resemblance to Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings).

Heck, why don’t you pay a visit and leave your own comment? Check it – http://perezhilton.com/?p=7820#respond