There’s gonna be a trickle of tour shots on Flickr. Check them out.

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I put some of the road shots from my digital camera on Flickr. I should have used it more. 40 rolls of film still sitting on my dresser. And I still have to fill you on the events of the final week.

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I read too much into it and over-react.

We proceed to have a power struggle;

Nobody gets anything they want. 

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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. 

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wetnurse (http://www. myspace. com/wetnursenyc)
the jonbenet (http://www. myspace. com/thejonbenet)
welcome home (http://www. myspace. com/welcomearewelcomehome)
pollution (http://www. myspace. com/pollutionpollutionpollution)

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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.

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The whole band is involved in the creation of this post because it’s pretty much taken the combined mental power of all six of us to recall the events that already seem like they happened 25 years ago. This is what we’ve got. We peeled out of Richland as fast as we possibly could¹ and Mike drove through most of the night. Headed to Blackfoot, Idaho and then Billings, Montana, our route took us 550 miles, down through northeastern Oregon and across all kinds of Idaho potato farms and whatnot. I fell asleep almost as soon as we hit the road. Mike apparently drove all night.

When I woke up a few hours later, it was light out and Bryan had just slammed the driver’s side door and was getting situated behind the wheel. I’d obviously been asleep for a while. I told Bryan I could take over for him if he was tired. He just stared at me thru the rear view mirror like I’d just called him a fag or something.

“Dude. We’ve been at this rest stop for like four hours. I just woke up,” he said².

“Oh.” I went back to sleep. I woke up again later a couple of times when Bryan pulled off the highway to take pictures of things. Once, still in Oregon, there were clouds hugging the tops of rolling green mountains. I figured it would be a good picture for Schutmaat to take, rolled over and went back to sleep. Sucker. None of us really remember much else about this drive, so I guess that means not much happened. We went thru a couple Indian reservations and passed a bunch of Indian casinos; I wanted to stop, no one else cared.

Blackfoot, Id. is a really cute little town. It was gorgeous when we got in, the sun was just starting to set and Bryan and I decided to spend some times taking advantage of the golden hour light. After we were compelled to take the same picture like 15 times before we even got out of sight of the venue, we decided to part ways. I went right, he went left. I took a couple of rolls back in the neighborhood behind Main Street, lots of trees and houses, and I’m looking forward to seeing the work.

I stopped at what looked like a mid-nineteenth-century church house, bathed in golden light, little kids playing tag in the churchyard. I stopped to take the picture. I was using my Hasselblad, which shoots from about wasit-level, and it took a good two or three minutes of wandering around to find the angle and whatnot I wanted to shoot. As I was about to take it, I noticed thru the viewfinder that there was a woman standing on the sidewalk giving me an icy stare. I looked up.

“You’re not videotaping the children, are you,” she shouted across the street to me in a heavy, easily-mockable drawl.

“No,” I shouted back, in a tone that I hoped would convey mild disgust.

“Because I don’t want you videotaping our children,” she added, as if there was some kind of additional explanation necessary.

“Okay,” I shouted back, and looked back down into the camera. I was there for maybe another half a minute. I took the frame, refocused and changed my position slightly, and then took another. The woman didn’t move the whole time, she just stood there in that one spot, giving me her icy glare. I’ll blow it up and post it when I get the picture back. That woman was dead certain that I was a pervert. Clearly, I wasn’t there because of the beautiful light on the beautiful old buildings in the town, but because I wanted wank footage of kids running around in the dirt. I can only imagine the “close-call” story she’s telling all the other church ladies. What an idiot.

Anyway, I walked back to the venue (Tony’s Family Billiards - an alcohol-free establishment in what turned out to be an alcohol-free town) to share the hilarity with the dudes. They were all still in the van so I climbed, already saying something along the lines of, “Hey, guess what this woman…” but they were all, “Ssh! Shut up!” I asked what was going on.

Someone explained that they had been sitting there in the van, minding their own business when two girls, probably around 15 or 16, came out of the house in front of us, holding hands. They started making out, and then started dry humping. Then, an older woman they described as “The Mom” came out, but the girls didn’t stop. The Mom was like, you know. Watching.

“What?”

“Yeah, dude. It was so fucking crazy. They just went back inside. Look.”

The door of the place was open. We sat there in silence for like 10 minutes. Then the girls came out. They were holding hands. They were kissing. They got into a pickup that was parked in the driveway. Then “The Mom” came out and got into the drivers seat. The girls slid out of site in the cab. “The Mom” just sat there smoking. We speculated about what was going on in the cab. I asked if maybe we should call child protective services? Then we decided that everybody involved in whatever sexually deviant thing was happening in front of us seemed pretty happy with the arrangement.

Maybe this is why the church lady was so worried that I was a pervert. Maybe this repressed town was overrun with people acting out of extreme sexual frustration. Who knows! The little lesbians came to the show and even though though they played pool and groped each other most of the time, they each bought a tshirt.

The opening band was local: high school kids who played in their underwear. There were only about 20 people, but they were a good 20, super into the music. I took like 4 rolls of film by the time the Jonbenet was done playing, and then the merch table got so mobbed it took two of us to get everybody the shit they wanted. It was a pretty great show even though there was nothing to drink.

Then this amazing thing happened. This little kid with a mohawk went and picked up Dann’s guitar. He was so small, the guitar so big, that he had to sit on one knee and rest the guitar on the other to play it. But he knew how to rock. His dad got on the drums. Dann picked up the bass. And the little dude led a little encore.

Rupe’s the local’s favorite spot, was right across the street, and Bryan and I went there when the show was over for dinner. It was the most wholesome burger place I’d ever seen. The entire place seemed to be staffed by high school kids, and the booths full of families finishing dinner. We were sitting at the counter finishing up when the little dude from before came in to get a milkshake. He said the band was awesome. He told us about his equipment (stratocaster with full stacks modified for his mic). He told us he was eleven. Then he said he had to go; his dad was waiting for him. I ran back to the van to get him a CD. While I was there, I noticed that the young ladies who demonstrated such a deep bond for eachother before the show were back at in in the front seat of a different car parked in the same location.

What a town.

Everyone was in the van, the trailer was loaded And if that’s all that had happened, it would still have made for a pretty funny story. But as it happened, there is a whole other chapter.

Rupe’s closed before the rest of the dudes could get anything to eat. They were hungry, but everything in Blackfoot was dark for the night. We had to find food for everybody elsewhere, and about 30 minutes later, we were pulling into a Denny’s parking lot in Idaho Falls.

Our waiter was a very friendly guy who we’ll call Jeff³. He said hello, took our drink orders, brought us our drinks. And then he made the very clever observation that we were “not from around here.” We told him that, in fact, he was correct. He then deduced that we were most likely a band. The dudes said they were. Jeff got really excited. He wanted to know where we were from what kind of music they play, where the tour was going. He told us about family members of his that were musicians. He said he wanted to buy a CD for his brother. He had all kinds of things to share with us. Mike went to the van to get him an LP which they would all sign, plus a CD for Jeff’s brother.

A few minutes later, Jeff came over again. He said that the customers in another booth were wondering what band we were, and wanted to know if it was okay to say hello. Mike said it was, and a few seconds later, a guy with gauges in his ears, a orange t-shirt and big black raver pants was at our table asking us a lot of the same questions. He had never heard of the Jonbenet, but he wanted to buy a CD.

A few minutes after that, we heard very familiar music playing in the kitchen. We mentioned it to Jeff and he said, “Yeah, we’d play it out here but we’d get in trouble.”

Then, not long after that, a waitress came over to buy the CD for her son. “It sounds like something he’d like,” she explained as the dudes took turns signing the liner notes. And then the kid from the other table came back with his placement and made everyone sign it – including me.

The Jonbenet rocked the shit out of the Idaho Falls Denny’s just by showing up.

But Alas, the experience was bittersweet. We can’t remember how this happened, but as Jeff was clearing our plates (he worked through his break so as not to have to give our table to a different server) he commented that he lived in a rough neighborhood. In fact, thought Jeff, we would be surprised about how rough Idaho Falls actually was; beneath the surface of this deeply Mormon town was an undercurrent of crime and violence. Jeff told us that people get shot on his street all the time.

This was sort of an unexpected turn in the conversation, but Mike wanted to relate. Not knowing what to say, Mike turned to the anti-Meth posters that are as common in this part of the country as road signs or gas stations for conversational guidance.

“I understand there’s a real meth problem out here,” Mike said. Jeff instantly became somber.

“It touches everyone,” he said, standing by our booth with the remains of or grand slam breakfasts on the dirty plates in his hands. “Doctors, judges, businessmen, everyone. I was hooked on meth for eight years. I lost my business, my wife, my kids, everything. But I’m turning it around. I’m working at Denny’s and I’ve been clean for more than two years.”

He nodded and smiled at us. Then he stood there. I think we kind of looked at him without saying a word for what must have been five full seconds. Mike finally said something.

“I’m glad you cleaned up. It’s a hard thing to.”

Jeff acknowledged that it was, then took our shit to the kitchen.

“Hey, Mike,” Dann said after a minute of the group of us all staring blankly at each other. “Next time we’re in a place with a meth problem, don’t bring it up to strangers.”

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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. 

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I promise.

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