Tour Diary: Day 4: Fists and Faceplants
Ok, I’m like a week behind and so much hilarious shit has happened it’s hard to remember it all. But I’m going to try to catch up, day by day. Also, I’m not proofreading. Remember how we rushed out of Portland to make it 225 miles away to Richland in time to play a show that turned out to be the next day? Yeah, we were all pretty bummed about that. We also had a whole day to fill wandering around what the locals refer to as the “Tri-Cities Area”, though I have no fucking clue what the other two cities are. 1 But people must have come from far and wide to check out the show, because it was pretty full when the dudes rocked Ray’s Golden Lion (“Chinese and American Food”) when the show finally happened.
So this wasn’t exactly the ideal crowd. There were a couple of hardcore Jonbenet fans who drove hours to see the guys play (a pretty common phenomenon even in the most isolated places that draw the smallest crowds), but mostly it was local hardcore kids and and three conspicuously drunk idiots. There were four bands and the dudes were up next to last and we discovered pretty quickly that we didn’t really want to spend too much time watching the other guys play. The drummer for one of the other bands, decked out in several layers of sleevless cottom shirts, long hair dangled strategically out from under a sleaveless red hoodie, explained the concept of his bands to video to us. Loosely recreated:
So we filmed it at this abandoned jail because like, the “plot” or whatever of the video is that [name of singer] is like the head of a conspiracy against us and we’re all getting thrown in jail one by one. And then, you know, it cuts to us all playing but there’s no live footage though because [name of former guitarist] quit before we could film it, which sucked. I mean, people should finish what they start, but whatever, he’s happy now and doing well so that’s good.
Not six seconds before, Mike, the Jonbenet’s singer, the band’s ideological leader, had just finished saying how much he hated these kinds of performative videos. I Am the Ocean’s drummer conceded, “Yeah, you know, it’s kind of weird, but these days you’ve got to be marketable.”
We made fun of them for the next three days.
But that wasn’t even the high point of our Richland, Wash. experience. When the guys started playing, some of the kids in crowd targeted the bunch of drunk idiots at the front with their hardcore dancing. It wasn’t long before I a dude in board shorts and a hawaiian-style shirt got punched in the face. His nose bloodied, the dude appealed to Mike, who told the crowd stop being so lame. Mike asked the crowd to move up and fill in the space where the hardcore dancing was happening, and his girlfriend Marlen, who’s on the road with us too, doing all the merch, was the first to get there.
The dancing didn’t stop though, and when Marlen get bumped by one of kids responsible for the earlier bloody nose, Mike used the mic stand like a pole vault to launch himself from stage and jumpkick the guy in the head, all without a break in the singing. Then there was some pushing and shoving. Dann, the Jonbenet’s guitarist, hit his delay peddle to keep the music going so he could put down the guitar, stepped up imposingly to the edge of the stage like he was ready to fucking kill somebody. The bouncers got involved. After the song, Mike told he crowd that hardcore dancing was lame and kept people who don’t want to get punched from being able to enjoy the show.
Bryan, who was playing bass, somehow managed to miss the entire episode. Afterwords, he was pissed at Mike for being a dick to the crowd.
After the show, people came by the merch table to tell Mike that they had either appreciate what he’d said or they thought he was asshole. One kid came to apologize.
“Hey man, I’m really about what happened,” the dude told Mike. “I’m here every weekend, and this is just what we do.”
Mike kind of cocked his head to the side, and I started to worry that he was going to say something that would make me uncomfortable. But then it turned out he was just confused.
“Wait, didn’t I kick you in the head,” Mike asked the kid. The kid just looked at him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Did you?”
I pointed out that the dude had blood on his arm. There was a pause. Then the kid apologized again. Peace was made.
The last band played. They sucked: all heavy glottal screaming over intense double-bass-drum beats, and we mostly stood outside assessing the state of the evening. When a girl asked Dann if he was to cool Richland, he said, “In about an hour, we will be,” adding, “We’re from a thriving metropolis.”
The girl told her friend to ask Dann a question. “Ask him something and he’ll reply with something mean.”
“Where are you from,” the girl asked.
“You already asked him that,” the other girl said.
“That’s your problem. You don’t listen,” Dann said.
Finally the show and our two days in Richland were coming to a close. We were loading the gear into the trailer and everybody else was standing outside the venue. The hardcore kids started fucking with the guy who’s nose they’d busted earlier. The guy shouted some shit at them and then crossed the huge parking lot to wait for his ride. Mike and Marlen went over to him to see if he was going to manage to get himself home or if he was going to stay there all night and get beaten up. He told them he was waiting on his ride. And then said he wasn’t worried about those other guys.
It’s alright, you know. I’m not mad cause I know one day they’re going to grow up and have retarded kids. You know, they’re kids’ll come out like this [flails arms against his chest], because that’s just how they are.
Sometimes, it can be comforting to take the long view.
- For whatever reason, I’ve been pretty down to hit some golf balls and also to find a gun range and unload some glocks or whatever, but I couldn’t find anywhere to do either in the amount of time we had alotted to dicking around. So we ended up just kind of hanging around in a park by whatever river runs thru this area, (snake river, maybe?) tromping around on some sand dunes that abutted the edge of a sprawling subdivision, and then heading to the venue to drink beer. It wasn’t the most exciting day in the world, but the prairie was gorgeous and it was probably pretty close to the authentic Tri-Cities experience. ↩