Day 1:
The S.S. Poo ran remarkably well, cruising at 70-75 all the way down highway 5. I discovered that the cow horns on the roof made a fantastic shadow when the sun was behind us. After a little confusion about directions, we found the club and loaded our stuff in. There was no-one there, nor did I expect anyone, as we had only been allowed to play at the last minute, and were lucky to have anything at all that night.
The guy who set up the show demanded that I give him my ID as security in order to use the microphones. I stared at him, stunned for too long, and he said "what? Hasn't anyone ever asked for ID before?" In ten years, I've never had someone worry that the band would steal the microphone from the stage, but L.A. is full of crazy people. We played for four enthusiastic people, and then retired to pizza and the merchandise table. I missed it, but the second band apparently wouldn't stop telling fag jokes, so Rion called them on it. They got off stage and the little twitchy one (it's always the short one who wants to start the fights) came up and they argued for a while. I tried to eat my pizza while I pondered how long it had been since I'd actually been in a fight. Nothing came of it, so we went to a friend of Mike's house in Hollywood. He lived in view of the sign in the hills, and a few blocks from the Christian science celebrity center. He had a few playboy videos. I never thought I would actually see a video with naked women dancing around in between ice and bonfires. Ha ha ha. What a perfect thing for L.A.
Day 2:
Doug marvelled at saguaro Cacti. It turned out that we were playing in a place called the Nile, a giant warehouse with speaker stacks that would satisfy Metallica. The first band was so loud that they were impossible to comprehend. We had them turn down the system, and things went pretty well. There were a lot of people there, somewhere around 150-200. Sam the Butcher and Jedi 5 were great. The first band drove over their own empty beer bottles on the way out and blew out a few of their tires. I think Rion and Doug tried to chase them down, but I don't know what happened to them.
Day 3:
No show, so we lounged around at Will's house. I wandered around the ASU campus looking for things to steal, working pay phones, and coke machines that looked promising. I should have hit them all up that day, since security was so light, but I just never got around to it. We watched Flesh Gordon that night. It never ceases to amaze me what things are put on film. Someone has to sit down and come up with a strange idea, then they have to spend all the time and money to make a movie virtually no-one will ever see. A lot like putting out a punk record, only involving 100 times the money.
Day 4:
Unfortunately, the show in Tucson isn't all-ages. I had sort of suspected that on Friday, but there wasn't anything to be done about it by the time we got there. The place was as bar-like as a bar could possibly get. It had pool tables in the upstairs, and the bands played in a dark basement with raw-brick walls and floor. We got our first and probably last write up in a weekly newspaper. That itself was really exciting. They also had somebody do a careful reproduction of the pig from our "Everybody wants to be a cop" poster on the white board in front of the bar. I checked out the greyhound station a few times to make phone calls. Greyhound stations are always a good reflection of the underbelly of the town you're in. This one was no exception, and now I know where to score heroin in Tucson.
One of the guys from Jedi 5 lived in Tucson, and had kindly offered to let us stay at his place. I judged that it was going to be a late night there, and promptly went to bed in the van. Just as well probably, because everyone else got kept up with a heated discussion between him and his friends about "how many bitches they'd gotten to 'lay down.'" They even claimed that one guy was "padding his stats" because he slept with girls that anyone could get into bed. I would have been furious at the time, but now it's all so pathetic it's just plain funny. Just saying "padding your stats" can now get any one of us bunched up with giggles. What losers!
I woke up to some bald, droid-looking kid who asked me for a second of my time wincingly, as if I was about to hit him with a bat. (I was in my underwear and peering out of the van door at the time) He blurted out something about needing to get 1000 people to take a survey on his personal appearance and politeness. I told him to go away, but then had second thoughts and pointed him in the direction of the even less awake and coherent Mike. People join strange cults.
Day 5:
We passed Moral Crux on the road, but they were too slow for us, so we exchanged notes and went on our way. We tried to rip off some coke machines and had some small luck, even with a candy machine at one rest stop. Doug was excited to go to Mexico, but seemed significantly less so when he finally saw it. Ciudad Juarez is a dramatic contrast to El Paso. Ugly adobe huts are scattered randomly across roadless dirt hills on the other side of the river. You can see why the industrial decay of El Paso seems like the garden of Eden in comparison. Depressing.
Lots of neat things about the place we played in El Paso: It was an arcade, complete with air hockey, the woman who was running things looked a lot like Christina from Soda Pop Fuck You, and they had a record store that bought lots of our stuff. Which was good, since nobody else did. We played with Moral Crux and some Christian band from Denver. They had a song called "score goals not drugs," and a clever lyric booklet that did a very good job of ripping off the first suicidal tendencies album cover, but they played way too long. I asked the booker what their deal was, and she said that they'd been first a straight edge band, then vegan straight edge, and then Christian. Doug said "Oh! You mean they're an addictive personality band?"
We all got in a big fight at the pizza place about returning unsatisfactory food. Finally, Mike went and got our flat root beer replaced with some other flat root beer. Another heavy philosophical question unerringly put to rest by the gods hate kansas debate team.
Day 6:
We drove through an uninhabited area of New Mexico towards Amarillo. The S.S. Poo started acting up a little bit, as if the alien force fields were doing bad things to our carburetor. We stopped at a space museum near an air force base, and wandered around the garden of missiles and rocket boosters that they kept outside. My favorite was a rocket sled that they strapped a man into and then accelerated to a few times the speed of sound before stopping it suddenly. Only in the 50's would that sort of experiment seem scientifically sound. Sort of similar to the time my brother and I tied his pet rat to a tonka truck and put a rocket engine in the back. The rat was fine, as was the man in the preceding test. The key difference is that we were 10 and 7, and the rat wasn't a Colonel in the United states air force.
In Roswell itself, we stopped long enough for me to buy picks and for Doug to get in an argument with the Ufo store guy. He left enraged, "I hate it when people lie to my face. I'd like to hear about all the 'lost time' he's had after a bottle of whiskey."
We played in Amarillo with a band called Shoegazer. I was immediately distrustful because they had an expensive van, but they turned out to be really nice. We had been discussing the silliness of the word "Gay" in the van: as in "dude, that cow is so GAY," or "look at all those GAY mountains." So I expanded a bit on the theme before one of our songs, "What are you saying, really, when you use the word 'Gay' as an insult, besides the fact that you're a complete moron? I mean, when I say that Doug's hat is gay, what do I mean? That it's happy? That it's attracted to other hats of the same sex?" At this point, a really evil looking guy, bald with a goatee and demons tattooed on his neck, leans up to my face and says "you say FAGGOT boy!" I was a little tense already, and I just lost all concentration at that point. Rion and I were both so furious that we could barely make it through the song that had already started. As it went on, and I watched the tough, prison gang-type guy dancing with a more and more flamboyant style, I began to think I had evaluated the situation completely incorrectly. After we were done, he came up and gave me a hug and made it clear he had just been fucking with us. It may be difficult to translate in print, but it all made sense in person, and I felt like a fool. No problems though, we all went over to Carl's house (that was his name) and hung out with his two dogs, death metal and Russian Literature collection. In front of his house were two of the 20,000 bizarre street signs that a local eccentric millionaire had put up. One said "Communist" and the other had a picture of a camel and said "Hump." Others said things like "A Blonde," or "Engine of destruction." My girlfriend took pictures of some that said things like "Cats are not to be trusted, this is no joke."
I tried to sleep in the van, but it began to snow, and around 5 in the morning, I had to crawl among the sleeping bodies and dogs. I was overjoyed to go to sleep directly on the metal grate of the heater, and when I woke up, no one would believe that it had snowed.
Day 7:
In Oklahoma City, some man in a new pickup spins around in the parking lot of the club and pulls up next to me. He looks at me in the discomforting manner of a serial killer who's looking for love. "Do you know Jesus Christ?" He asks, "Because he just told me to come over here and tell you he loves you." I just say "fuck." And roll my eyes and keep walking, but so many good retorts come to me later, as they always do…"Oh yeah, I play poker with him and Satan every Thursday!"
We're playing in a huge movie theater, something I've always wanted to do. One of the other bands, a Mormon ska band of all things, marches in and says "well, we're clearly the biggest thing happening, so we'll play last." I can't believe someone can say something like that un-selfconsciously. Whatever, we played second or third, and it went really really well. People are too nice to us in OKC. We stayed at a house with lots of nice people, one of whom designs parts for air force jets. We played board games and watched them pound beer cans on their heads until five in the morning. I think that our decay into sickness began here. Everyone we met was fantastic, and a small young woman named Kessa could have had more alcohol than any four of us and still kept on going. Ouch.
Day 8:
Joplin Missouri. We went to (in a moment of low blood sugar weakness) what was probably one of the fanciest restaurants in town. The waitress had an perfect ability to mangle the word "pesto" and the food was really awful. We get what we deserve. My last few experiences with skate park shows have been disasters, so it was great that this was so different. Things went really well, and I had lots of fun dodging the microphone as people in the pit smashed it at me. I've had all of my misconceived perceptions about the rural south-center of the country re-affirmed in good ways. The people out here are less bigoted than they seem to be in California. The dancing is less violent and more fun than it is in California. The kids are more well-read and more inquisitive than in California. It reminds me that the real hick-towns in this country start in and radiate out from L.A. and San Jose. There are probably lots of idiots out here too, but at least they don't look like punk rockers.
Day 9:
We played in an enormous warehouse of a space called Gee Coffee in the suburbs of Kansas City. Actually in the state of kansas, and I still don't have a good explanation for why the gods hate kansas. They turned on smoke machines before we played to the point that I had to squint through the rock-star lights to see if there was anyone watching us. Rion began to feel sick, and I didn't feel too great either.
We were despairing of finding a place to stay when a girl offered to let us crash at her house. We thought, judging by her age, that she would be taking us to her parent's house, but she actually lived out in Kansas City proper, in a row of punk houses. We went to a local diner and malt place, where she seemed to be everyone's little sister. She marched behind the counter and made us fries while we talked about bands with the guys who worked there. It seemed to be sort of the hang out spot for the neighborhood. A bunch of other kids came by, including one who the soda jerk referred to as "forest punk," rolling his eyes and looking annoyed. Back at the house, all seemed cool as we watched a movie and turned in at the early hour of 2 am. It was not to be..around 3 or 4 in the morning, the party returned. Some kid began vomiting with such force that I thought he was just joking. He was bellowing and smashing around in between making incredible "bleargh!" noises. He kept it up until 8 in the morning, when I found him passed out on the floor of the bathroom when I got up to take a leak. The rest of his friends were playing a game that seemed to involve throwing bowling balls at the floor. At least that's what it sounded like, and I'd been lucky and weaseled myself a private room. At 10, everyone was up, and the puke kid was having a natural light for breakfast. It was a nice reminder of how I don't want to ever lead my life. They all made disparaging comments about the guy who was setting up the next show, and we set off.
Day 10:
I and Doug and Rion are all really sick. But Lincoln Nebraska is a great place. I love the open, low feel of midwestern towns. The people there are fantastic as well, Matt and Ben and Michelle. Rion gets fired up about some kickboxing video game, which Mike teases him about constantly. Little does Mike know but he will be sucked into nerd-dom soon, courtesy of a nintendo and the "zelda" game. One of the bands, "boy caught" is really noteworthy. I'm getting too sick to care about much though, and fry up some theraflu in the kitchen of the hall.
In the morning, someone brings over muffins for everyone, and I take apart the carburetor of the poo. It runs a little better. We go down to some coffee place in a bohemian section of Lincoln for breakfast. This is one of the fantastic things about Lincoln, that it can have a bohemian section. The day before, we'd seen the rodeo get out of the civic center, and today we were checking our email from a café. I really like this town.
Day 11:
Rion is too sick to sing, but plays guitar anyway. We play in the back of a half pipe in grand Island Nebraska. It's frozen outside and there are fragments of cars in the ice outside. I try to catch some pictures of rollerbladers falling down in particularly amusing ways on the halfpipe. Despite Rion's lack of vocals, the show goes really well.
Things are looking grim for a place to stay, until I bamboozle a girl into asking her mom if we can stay. They have moved down from lake of the woods Minnesota because the mother met some guy on the internet. Apparently, they brought their television with them, the most mammoth tv I've ever seen in my life. They had to knock some walls out to get it inside. I am confused about a lot of things; how they got the money to buy a TV that probably costs as much as many houses in this neighborhood, how they persuaded their internet buddy to knock down walls for it, all sorts of questions about what on earth he was thinking. And another thing, why there were a pair of mourning doves in the basement with us. We took the girl to high school while it was still dark and began the marathon drive to colorado Springs.
Day 12:
The drive to Colorado Springs just wasn't worth it. First completely lame booked show of the tour. And of course the crazy drunk with the accordion at 3 in the morning has a handgun. Forget it.
Day 13:
Got out of Colorado Springs as fast as we could. We went to the garden of the gods and walked around. It's sort of sick in that it's all paved up and the biggest rock has a enormous plaque bolted to it announcing who gave it to the city of Colorado Springs. As if you can own or give away something like that. Up in Denver, the kids doing the show take us off to the red rock ampitheatre. It's stunning. Standing on the stage, the slope of the rocks and seats makes you feel as if you're off balance. The Denver area glittered beneath us, and the rocky mountains climb up into the night sky on the other side. We climbed onto an observation platform that required scaling a rock chimney and then edging across a pair of metal beams, suspended face down over open space. I don't like heights.
We played with a bunch of bands, but "Orgy for Satan" really stood out. Ha. More heavy metal than anyone would ever need.
Day 14:
We drove up through some mountains to Laramie Wyoming. The road got a little small and icy for a while, but nothing bad. Laramie feels like a real frontier town. The hose we were playing at was next to the railroad yards, and trains come through constantly. It is cold and dry there, and I walked around in the powdery snow for a while, remembering living in northern New York. We ate at a Chinese restaurant in Laramie. It makes you wonder though, how someone could decide to pick up and emigrate from China to Laramie of all places.
Apparently, we played at a house across the street from the bar where Matthew Shepard got picked up before he was killed. That was spooky. The house was divided up between the living room and garage, with the idea that the living room would be a place to come relax while the show was going. Oddly though, some guy kept coming in and turning the volume of his twisted home videos up to the point that it was louder than a live band. They had 3 televisions in a row along the wall, two to show the strange video of visual non sequiturs, the other for the video games. Mike and Rion sat and intently worked on playing some game with a bunch of fairies.
Day 15:
Luckily, the van started after a hassle, and we made it out to interstate 80. There is no reason that that road should remain open in the winter. It was clearly a nice day for Wyoming, the sky was clear, it was 20 degrees out, the wind was only around 40 miles an hour. But the road was solid ice, and drifting snow kept us from ever really seeing where the road really was. And the truckers! The truckers are insane! I felt as if I was on the freeway of death. Literally every twenty miles there was a truck on the side of the road. They weren't just off the road, they were rolled, crushed or completely torn apart. One of them was still in flames. But the truckers still drove 60-70 miles an hour, especially the tanker trucks.
We played at a house in Logan Utah. We were set up at the junction of two rooms, and there were kids just standing, crammed together in the right hand room, and in the left hand, they had the craziest pit of the whole tour, jumping off couches and slamming into the walls. There were two or three kids there with huge heads of hair. They looked sort of like those troll dolls that you put on the end of a pencil. Especially if the troll dolls had been designed to look like Hanson. Hard to believe that most of these people are mormons.
Day 16:
We drove to Salt Lake City, and then up to the mountains to go snowboarding for half a day. That was really fun. The show at salt lake city was stupid, there was no-one there, and the first band even left after they were done. We stayed with Nick of Juke fame and his wife and their pig. It was my first experience with a pot-bellied pig. It was neat and all, but it was NOISY. It never shuts up, it's always grunting, unless you pick it up, in which case it squeals as if it's a stuck pig. Apparently they can reach 120 decibels. I don't think this band is even that loud. Nick calls the mormons "Mo's," I like that.
Day 17:
I drove my shift and got out of the car and almost fainted. The rest of the 12 hours home sucked, but at least the weather was bad. I had to go straight to the emergency room when I got home. I guess I just had a virus, but I slept the rest of the week. Straight to the emergency room. It's so Motley Crue.
