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There’s gonna be a trickle of tour shots on Flickr. Check them out.
Montana was a pretty kick-ass spot; the dudes played in Bozeman and then Billings, and we spent two nights camped out at Uncle Mitch’s house on Lake Ennis. Google it. It’s awesome. There were some huge, gorgeous hills I climbed with Mike and Marlen, an experience that Mike classified as “scensters in the wilderness,” which was punctuated every few seconds by one of us shouting, “Fuck! Ow!” when the prickly pear would pierce our canvass shoes. The view from up top was killer.
The Montana shows were only so-so, but the Filler is a really rad bar and Bozeman a pretty rad town. A lot of funny things happened at the Filler, but I can’t really remember them right now, but will recount them when I do. Some of us may have smoked dope with the 50-year-old bartender in a meat locker. It was a seriously rustic experience.
Mike told the crowd he had cancer; they didn’t think it was funny.
Then we went to Yellowstone, checked out all kinds of bison and elk and what have you, and there are some pretty hilarious pictures from that coming as soon as I get to Houston. I practically touched one. Later that night, My uncle Dave, who lives in Wyoming, told me that I was lucky I didn’t get gored. That’s usually what happens when a tourist tries to play with a Buffalo, he told me. He and Aunt Joanne live in Jackson, Wyoming, and we dropped in on them after Yellowstone on our way to Denver.
The show in Denver was pretty much horrible. The Marquis Theatre is apparently a rock and roll club run by people who have never heard of rock and roll. Taking a piss required a bracelet, as did drinking a beer, as did standing by the bar, as did being with the band. The other crowd sucked and the other bands were bullshit. Denver itself is pretty cool though. We ate delicious fajitias and hung out at a pub across from the Marquis. I drank some kind of local whiskey which was so good I didn’t mind paying the $800 a glass or whatever it was for more, twice. And the weather was gorgeous after we froze our asses off up in the mountains for half a week.
We had lunch with Bryan’s friend Marcus in Kansas City and checked out the Kemper Museum there. I bought a signed copy of Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places there; the show had just come through. The girl who sold it to me as adorable and wanted to know all about what we were doing at her museum. We fell in love.
Then two days in Decatur, Illinois, where the band’s old base player, Will Spent, lives. It was a lot of Grand Theft Auto IV briefly punctuated by a show a goth outreach church called Wake the Dead. I’m not joking about that. Then we drove to Malta Bend, Missouri, which is a town with about 4 people in it, for a show in a kid’s garage dubbed Bister Migstuff. Kids came from all over the area to see the dudes rock out though, and the local bands were pretty decent. I managed to leave Malta Bands with a handful of high-school-aged Myspace friends, probably putting me on some kind of pedophile watch-list.
Ok so after that, we went back to Decatur for a night, then headed to Cleveland, Ohio which may or may not be the greatest town on earth. They fucking love the Jonbenét there, and so the dudes totally slayed. We crashed two nights with their friend night, the drummer from Integrity, played a whole bunch of wii. And also Drew and I and partied until 10:30 in the morning with two adorable but kind of dense girls who I don’t think have ever been out of Ohio. Texted an ex-girlfriend. She ignored me.
What happened after Ohio…. I can’t seem to remember. Oh yeah. Brooklyn. Three nights at the Levee, pretty much, show at the Charleston, which none of you fuckers came to. But this hilarious thing happened. At the Levee, I was standing at the bar waiting to get a drink, and next to me were these two girls. One was really upset, and the other one was consoling her. The whole situation was pretty cute since they were being such a girls. So I was sort of looking at them and I may have had a smile on my face. The girl who was upset is sitting there talking to her a friend, and she happens to notice me looking at her and mid-sentence, without missing a beat, goes, “Fuck off, dude,” and gives me the finger, then goes back to talking to her friend. What? Really?
Recounting it to my friend Amy a second later. “Do you want me to go crash into them?” Yes, yes I do. A minute later: mission accomplished. The chicks left the bar.
I’m getting a little ahead of myself on this one, but it couldn’t wait. I’ll bring you up to speed as far as the narrative goes in the next couple of days, but let me give you some background: we met up with Will Spent, the JB’s old bassist, in Decatur, Illinois, yesterday and he came with us on the road to Missouri. So now, we’re all hanging out in the van before the show, and Will shares with us the following poem dedicated to the kids hanging out in here with us:
Take Care, dont leave me
Weed all day I love my life
Dont Smoke all My Weed
He was also a state track runner, ladies.
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.
I promise.
So, get this. After the Chico gig, we drove through the night (again) to get to Portland to meet up with a friend of the band’s and also just to take it easy for a little while before heading to the show in Richland. I was stoked to check out Portland because I’d never been to these hip Pacific Northwestern cities before, and it was cool to check the place out. But in decided to spend our three free hours there, we skipped checking our Crater Lake and, more signifiicantly, that giant rock from the Goonies. So then we drove for hours more into Richland, WA (the show here is in a Chinese Restaurant called Ray’s Golden Lion) one to discover… we have the wrong fucking day.
The show is fucking tomorrow. We could have stayed in Portland. Or even in Chico for that matter. And seen Crater Lake. And gone to the Goonies rock. We could have all done those things. Instead, we went to Taco Bell and then Walgreens, then got kinda toasted in a motel room and watched four hours on The First 48 on A&E. Where’s the glamor? Where??
Ok, so some other thing’s also happened. First off, I’ll tell you that if ever find yourself in Yreka, CA at about 4 in the morning and you need to take a number two, you’re going to have a problem. There’s one public toilet about in all of town at about that time – a Shell station – and I sat by the door in the freezing cold morning air for like 35 minutes this morning waiting for a trucker who snatched the key like seconds before I could to finish washing his boots. I had to go so bad. Oh my god. Just thinking about now is painful.
The reason I was so backed up was because I had been the only one awake/sober after the Chico show, and drove from across a great swath of Northern California including Shasta National Forest, Shasta Lake Recreation Area, the Shasta River, Mt. Shasta City, and Mt Shasta itself – a huge area – almost all of it with nowhere to really stop. I’ll say though that even in the dark it was breathtakingly beautiful. Not as beautiful as Oregon was in the daylight though. The elevation was about 4000 feet, and boreal mountaintops were hidden by fog just as the sun was rising. It was one of the most amazing sites I’ve ever seen. And then Drew took over the driving and I passed the fuck out.
Also, Bryan has sustained an injury so disgusting that having experienced firsthand, I have to share you out and ruin whatever snack you’re eating while you’re reading this. I guess there’s something about the shape of his bass that makes it so he’s constantly scratching himself up against it. So, after seven or eight days of sustained damage, the thing has turned into a giant disgusting cyst. We went to Walgreens to figure out what he should use to treat it and ended up leaving with antibiotic cream, band-aids, and an ace bandage. But Brian decided to take matters into his own hands. He was determined to pop the fucking thing, and so he and Drew, the Jonbenet’s drummer, headed into the bathroom to do just that.
They were in there for about 20 minutes. Mike, his girlfriend Marlen and I tried not pay attention to the horrible screaming coming from behind the door. And then, after something of a crescendo, mike emerged, explaining that when the thing popped, it squirted straight up into the air, almost the ceiling. I then got a clipse of Bryan turning on the shower, blood running down his entire arm. It was the most disgusting thing I think I have ever witnessed. Ever. And I share it with you, my dear readers. I was so sick that I couldn’t bring myself to take a picture. And if I had, I probably wouldn’t have the guts to ever actually look at it again. Tomorrow we’re making jackass go to the fucking doctor.
I want to apologize for how quickly these posts are written and for the lack of links. I’ll do better on that front in the future. But now it’s bedtime! So Peace!
If anyone ever says to you, “Chico, California sucks,” motherfucker is lying. I didn’t have high hopes for the place – Id never heard of it before AND getting there from Escondido way down in SoCal meant skipping leisure stops in San Francisco and at Yosemite National Park. But the tours the tour and we drove 14 hours thru the night to get there for a gig at a house show. Chico is the home of Chico State, and plenty of the kids there came out to crowd into a basement to hear the Jonbenet rock their dicks off. The gig was great, the kids were awesome and the town is pretty, you might consider dropping in on future roadtrips. I snapped some pictures with the digital specifically for the blog, dude singing in this shot is Mike Murland. Stand up guy. Bryan Schutmaat, who many of you know, is playing bass in the background.
The drive was pretty wild. We left Escondido at around 11:15pm last night after the Killer Pizza from Mars gig and drove all the way up I-5 thru LA, thru the Angeles National Forest, past Bakersfield and Fresno, switched highways in Sacramento and arrived in Chico by like 11 in the morning. That stretch thru the National Forest was amazing. Even though it was the middle of the night, the moon was bright enough to see the hills pretty clearly, and it was gorgeous. I hope to come thru during the day sometime.
Anyway, We hit the mall (I needed to get a pillow) and Taco Bell, tried to find a Wal-Mart and then headed to the gig. The dudes who were having the show were real friendly, and we got to chill out for a while before things got going. We watched Manchester United beat Chelsea in double overtime and then I took a long nap in the van until the dudes went on at like 9.
It was a good gig, the the kids in the crowd were all really positive, and a bunch of them had heard the guys play before three or four years ago the last time they came thru. There were two other bands that played, including one whose name I have written down but can’t find at the moment from Davis, CA, who not only rock but also have a pretty foxy singer name Erica. Before there last song, she warned the crowd that since the band has nothing recorded and no myspace page, that “This is it, some pretty crucial rock and roll.” And it was. I have a shot of her screaming into the mic in my Hasselblad as we speak.
So now we’re headed to Richman, WA, which is like 10,000 miles from here. So we’re going to be driving thru the night again which is only a bummer because when we drive at night we can’t see the sights. Though, driving thru the Angeles National Forest last night, the moon was bright enough that I could see the hills pretty clearly, and it was amazing.
We didn’t hang out long after the show was over. The kids were cool and everything, and this retardedly adorable dog named Stanley turned up (video below), but we left to make it to the next show in Richland, WA by way of Portland, OR.
I guess I should say that day one for me is really day six for The Jonbenet, the band I’m on tour with, but we’re just gonna go ahead and call it day one. I left my apartment this morning at 5, got into LAX 12 hours later, met up with a guy from Houston named Jason who drove me out to Escondido to meet up with the band. My flight was freezing cold and I was locked into the window seat and couldn’t get out to hunt down a blanket. It was like being a prisoner on some kind of flying ice chamber of death. It was horrible.
Also, another note: Los Angeles is huge. There was nothing but mountains and desert and tiny little towns for hours and then all of a sudden, there was was LA. grids of houses and buildings extending to the horizon in every direction. No other city on earth can match this one in terms of sprawl. It’s amazing.
Escondido is either a southern suburb of LA or a northern suburb of San Diego and it took us about two hours to get there from the airport. Get this though: Jason had french friend from Del Taco waiting for me in the car. Can you believe that? The guy’s a real class act. He proved it again later when we stopped in San Clamente for soft serve from stand by the highway called Burger Stop. (Note to Californians: if you’re ever in San Clamente, it’s worth checking out. 24 flavors of soft serve, and also the home of the “Chile-Dog”.) The first lick of my ice cream sent it plummeting earthward, my camera breaking it’s fall. So bullshit. The nice lady behind the counter was nice enough to give me a new cone.
The gig was at a space and sci-fi themed pizza joint called Killer Pizza from Mars and the place looked like it hadn’t changed since it first opened in, if i had to guess, 1993. The dudes there were crazy hospital though. They feed and watered us, and let us hang around long after closing shooting hoops on their old school arcade thing. Three local bands played, and I took pictures of some of the funniest looking people. It was good. The kids at the show were all in high school and they seemed to dig the Jonbenet guys the best, and they unloaded a bunch of merch.
We’re in the van now, driving along the Pacific Ocean. Can’t see it because it’s totally black, but I know that it’s there. Kind of awesome. We’re heading 9 hours up north, straight thru the night, to Chico, which, we were told buy the guys at Killer Pizza, is the point of origin for much of California’s medicinal marijuana crop. It’s by a massive state park called Bidwell, so I’m hoping we get to hang out there for at least a little while to capture the scenery.
So that’s the deal so far. Sorry this is a rushed post, I’m dying to get some sleep, so future ones will hopefully be a little more thoughtfully crafted. And there’s so much hilarious shit that’s happened that I’m leaving out, so I’ll try to be more on top of it for the sake of posterity starting tomorrow. And, obviously, there will be pictures and things and I’ll introduce you to the dudes as time goes on. K? Later.
I dropped a cool $300 at B&H today on these 45 rolls of film and a tripod. In about an hour, I’m flying to LA to meet up with a guy named Mike. Mike is going to drive me about 100 miles south to Escondido, where I’m going to meet up with The Jonbenet, the band I’m going to be touring with for the next three weeks. It’s gonna be killer. And I don’t mean to get myself in over my head here, but I’m going to try and do a post every couple of days from the road. Talk to you then.
