| If You're Going to San Francisccooooo |
[Jun. 18th, 2004|02:00 pm] |
The show last night actually turned out to be quite excellent, we had a great time, and the rest of the band besides Jeph and I got completely shitfaced on free alcohol. Then on the way out of town we pulled over for Jamie to puke. And then five minutes later we pulled over for Andre to puke. Then we stopped for gas about 10 minutes later and Matt puked. Punk fucking rock! Jeph and I did the 5 hour drive through the mountains to San Francisco, at one point we went downhill for FOURTY MILES. Fourty fucking miles, a downgrade the whole time, I'd never seen anything like it. I put on Phantom Planet "California" as soon as I saw the "Welcome To California" sign and Jeph and I screamed the song as loud as we could, half to piss off the sleeping drunks in the back and half because we were ecstatic to have finally made it to the true west coast. We were completely delirious with exhaustion for the last two hours of the drive, but we somehow made it into the city and found where we were going.
This is my favorite city on the planet. We've been so lucky on this tour to go through such awesome places - Nashville, Austin, Vegas - all fucking excellent places that I love to be in. We're staying with Jamies old high school buddy Dave and his girlfriend Jess in their amazing San Fran apartment. Matt and I just Pantened it up hardcore in their dope shower. Fuuck yea - girlie hair care products make my long hippie hair happy. Now we're going to go explore this amazing city and hopefully find some amazing food. I just talked to my mom for the first time in two weeks, and we had a really pleasant conversation for once and she told me I should splurge and find some good food and gelato here, so I'm gonna go do that. Hell yes California! |
|
|
| nevada is nothing |
[Jun. 17th, 2004|10:20 pm] |
|
We just drove through the most desolate, dead, depressing ghost towns I've ever seen.. but also through some of the most amazing landscapes ever - shit I never knew existed. Now we're at a club/bar/coffee joint in Fallon, NV called jive-n-java, which is really all there is out here, but the people are really nice and the drinks are FREE, so it could be a lot worse. Played with a cool, really chill, indie rock band called Minmae, from Oregon and met some crazy locals, it's good times. Next Jeph and I are doing the overnight drive to our friends place in San Francisco! (!!) Hell fucking yeah. |
|
|
| Don't Mess With Texas |
[Jun. 13th, 2004|01:49 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Saves The Day - Through Being Cool | ] |
I'll admit it, I slept through all of Alabama, Lousiana and a bit of Texas as well. Jeph says we were driving through a tropical storm all night, which explains it - I sleep like a baby when it's raining. Awesome, excellent, delicious sleep! We arrived at our friend Jens apartment in Austin at about 1:30 in the afternoon, and we all showered up and basked in her amazing air conditioning. I think we broke her shower though.. the water shut off on Matt Browne half way through his conditioning phase... poor kid. Jens friend Priscilla came over, and they both gabbed about lingerie with us for a while because they work at Victorias Secret. There are some seeerrious females in Austin Texas, let me tell you. Wooooo. We decided to go pick up beer and go back to crash and drink at Priscillas, I insisted on getting some stuff called "Lone Star" because it was supposedly the official beer of Texas, and I like to try everything once. It was terrible - everyone yelled at me for picking it out, haha. But it served its purpose, and we had an awesome chill night of swimming illegally in a nearby apartment complex's pool, watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force and just hanging out in beautiful Austin. Fucking killer city, we all enjoyed it thouroughly.
We're waking up at 7am the next morning to start on our long way to the next show in Clovis, New Mexico. We'll see how that goes. |
|
|
| Bien Venidos a Miami |
[Jun. 12th, 2004|01:47 pm] |
The show in Miami was pretty rad, all the kids there were really nice and dug us. It was a day show, so we left at about 6pm for Jeph & Jamies parents place back north in Tampa. We stopped, showered, ate and got back on the road early the next morning for Pensacola, FL. Florida is fucking huge, it took us all day to get up to Pensacola, and there was pretty much nothing good to see on the way there. We played at The End of the Line Cafe, which is a cool DIY art space/vegan restaurant/internet cafe. Bunches of anarchist kids riding bikes around and shit, but it was chill. We opened the 3 band show, and two excellent hardcore bands from Lousiana played after us - The Burning Issue and Someday Carolina. We usually don't do too well with hardcore, but the crowd that showed up was there was mostly for us, and the guys in the other bands we're cool, so it was a good night overall. Now we're leaving to get on the road to Austin, TX where we're staying with yet another friend for the night. I've never been to Texas! Wooo! |
|
|
| B.G.E. |
[Jun. 11th, 2004|01:36 pm] |
At the Pompano show we met a girl named Stephanie, a sweet naive lovely 17 year old girl who actually let us stay in her Aunts house, which she was taking care of for the summer. The boys all behaved themselves though, and we had a fucking blast just drinking and hanging out watching T.V. with her. The next day we had off, so went to get Hank's tailpipe fixed, so he would stop spewing toxic fumes in our back seat.
I'll make an unrelated note here that we ate at a terrible, terrible chinese buffet, and I've sworn to at least go and look at the food at buffets before I decide to sit down and start eating it from now on.
We needed a place to stay, and stuff to do the rest of that day and night before our show in Miami the next day, so once again Steph let us intrude and we partied with her. I already miss her, she totally mommed it up and took care of us lonely losers, but at the same time hung out like she was one of the guys. Oh.. and she was gorgeous the whole time on the side. :) |
|
|
| West Palm Beach |
[Jun. 9th, 2004|01:35 pm] |
|
We played at a bar tonight... bar shows are still weird for me, considering I'm not really supposed to be in them yet, but whatever. Show was not great, but good enough for a wednesday night. Played with Fallen From The Sky, our friends from south florida. Stayed with Ryan from FFTS who graciously had us stay at his place and cooked us pancakes in the morning. Crucial. |
|
|
| I hope you get where you're going, and are happy when you do |
[Jun. 7th, 2004|04:56 am] |
|
Two days of rest and relaxation at Jeph and Jamies parents place in Palm Harbor, FL. The standard Florida deal, you know - hot tub, pool, amazing meals prepared 5 times a day by an awesome mom, and a bunch of song writing. :) Yeeehaww. No documentation necessary. |
|
|
| Then came spring, the great time of travelling |
[Jun. 6th, 2004|03:37 am] |
Nashville is a place I can't wait to get back to.
We made a miserable overnight drive, starting from Richmond at 10pm where the only sleep I had was gotten sitting upright in the front seat of the van... in a noisy rest area... under a bright light... with everyone else snoring. :)
I took a stroll through the rest area at about 6:30 A.M. Most of the trucks that had been there when we pulled over had already hit the road, and I-64 was apparently riding too smooth for anyone else to pull over, so I got to explore the well trimmed shrubbery and the foreign vending machines with no distraction. You know vending machines in different parts of the country are filled with different things? It's a thrill to find my beloved Cherry 7UP where I'm accustomed to seeing only the basic Pepsi products. It's the little things, you know?
We rolled through glorious downtown Nashville, gawking at the beautiful country girls and becoming increasingly aware of how much our outfits sucked compared to the radical cowboy getups we saw all over town. Then we rolled out of glorious downtown Nashville, and into a section of the city that was so dead it almost seemed like a Connecticut city. Ghetto. The club we played was located next to "The Worlds Largest Bookstore"... which happened to be painted purple, covered with neon and filled with videos. Quite the bookstore, eh? There was really nothing memorable about that club.
Jamie and I spent the majority of the day bar-hopping (though none of the bartenders would cut me any slack) and watching some true down south COUNTRY music. Not the radio bullshit, this was the real deal. He must have been 60 years old, he played his guitar like it was an extension of his body, and he crooned. A crooner he was... and long gone are the days of the crooner. I watched him on stage, sing about long lost loves, sing of his travels and his troubles. I thought about myself, and how all I've ever wanted to do was play music, and I could tell by looking at him that he had been playing music since he was a child, and he'd never ever thought twice about it. He was going to drop dead with that guitar in his hands someday. Through everything he had ever done in his long life, no matter how low he might have gone, he still had that music. It made me happy to feel that no matter how fucked up things get, no matter how many girls come in, rip apart and leave my life, no matter WHAT happens, I'll always have my music, and not everyone in this life has something that can't be taken away from them. Music is love, and love is all you need.
The show paled in comparison... discussing it is uneccessary. |
|
|
| He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life |
[Jun. 5th, 2004|03:03 am] |
Ronald Reagan died today. We were playing at a club called The Nancy Raygun. Their website has a big picture of Nancy Raygun with some lasers and such... tres punk rock. Either way, the show sucked and we got no respect from the scenester assholes who value style over substance, and that's just fine with me. Nancy had a good kitchen though, and bands ate for half price, so thoughtful of her.
The Fist City, Richmond Virginia... overall was a letdown. The most interesting establishment we found was a Little Cesar's pizza joint, a site not seen in our part of the country in many years. They had $5.00 large pizzas - imagine that. What a silly little thing to make a poor boy happy.
It's also notable that we were delighted paying $1.79 for gas. DELIGHTED. That's just fucked up right there, we shouldn't even be using gasoline anymore... whatever happened to "Mr. Fusion" anyhow?
I'm not going back to Richmond anytime soon. |
|
|
| and this was really the way my whole road experience began |
[Jun. 4th, 2004|12:53 am] |
After being both intensely Mom-ed and Grandmom-ed at home (no, the intensity of the mom-ing does not decrease, even though I'm 19 now) myself and my five friends piled into Hank, our 1994 Dodge Ram, and set out towards our first stop in East Meadow Long Island. Two months of living in a van during the summer doesn't seem like a popular idea of a fun time, but for us it's a fun time and a career at the same time.
It's not neccessary to talk about how the show went tonight, but we can just say that we started out on neither the right nor wrong foot, but that we stumbled. It's quite a strange tone to be set for tour.
Tonight's thank you list includes the band Patent Pending for getting us a show and letting us get drunk at their house afterwards, and of course to The Fad for being rad people, and smoking pot out of a crack pipe with me.
God save rock n' roll. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
xethanx's journal