One Last Quote Post

Hey folks, I'm more or less through my backlog of blog posts, so I think this will be my last. Sad!

The music stops. A car passes us on the right.
Me: What do you think?
Steve: I think that guy's kids had better be on fire.
Me: Mind if I just pick something?
Steve: Sure, just as long as it doesn't suck.

Gene: Here, in case you want to keep in contact with your fiddle player. (he hands me a flier for her band)
Laura: Don't do it! She won't shut up!
Me: She was a talker, wasn't she.
Laura: Jesus, I could have stolen her identity!

Me: I think Amelia likes me.
awkward silence.
Me: I think you like me.
Steve: Your mom likes you.

Steve: That's why I hate you.
Me: Haha! Wait... are you serious?
Steve: No, you're just high, and it's fun to mess with you.

Steve: They say you lose most of your heat through your head. Specifically, on a strip down the middle, more-so in the back.

Steve: You'd think it's a lot of fun visiting new cities and meeting people, but mostly it's just being irritable, lost, and smelly.

Steve: Please don't download porn onto my minivan.

We enter Idaho. 5 minutes later:
Gene: They're just tearing away at that mountain. I wonder what's in there?
Steve: Precious potatoes. My grandpappy worked in a potato mine until it closed.
Gene: Until he died from spud-lung, right?

Steve: Sometimes I wake up in the morning and say to myself 'where the fuck am I?!?' Then I'm pleasantly surprised to find out that it's a couch instead of the van.

Backstory: We're at a grocery store with a fellow couch surfer trying to purchase beer for the pants party in Bismark.
Surfer: This'll be debit.
Cashier: We only do credit. Want me to charge credit on your debit card?
Surfer: Why don't I just use my credit card?
Cashier: Well, you might want to use your debit card for the interest rate. Plus it comes out immediately.
Surfer: ...
Me: I don't see what's so difficult about this. I use my debit card pin with my credit card to make debit purchases on my credit card for tax purposes. Obviously.

Everyone but the cashier thought it was funny.

Last show

So we played our last show on the first. It was a show at the Quays, and we did a shoddy version of recording it, thus the band has come full circle!

Commotion - This was Gene's set, so you can still kind of hear the vocals.
Company -
Bean and Joe - Gene and I keep getting each other's songs in each other's heads. What jerks.
Some Blues Song - I have no idea what this song is called.
Chelsea Hotel - actually played in New York. Whoo!
Carpedium - And now you can't hear lyrics...
It's a Good Thing - If I'd put the mic in the right place, it might be a good thing.
Total Eclipse of the Heart - Turn around one last time, bright eyes.
Karate - And finally, we are most certainly not Jackie Chang in that movie where he pretends to be Jackie Chan and teams up with a Bruce Lee look-alike.
thE32nd - (19), so we didn't quite hit 32.
Happiness - we were pretty happy to be playing this show.
TAoCP2 - This was the worst possible song on the tour to break a bass string. So of course, we did.
Fat Kid Emo Pants - Woah, indeed.

We Talk To a Racist Cop

Steve posted about the great Philladelphia open mic. Well, the adventure continued.

Back outside, a white cop pulls up behind the van parked just outside the venue. Good naturedly, he says, "Texas huh? You guys are lost! You are REALLY LOST!" We have Texas plates you see, as that's where Steve came from. Gene starts chatting with him and explains, "We're in a band on tour."

"Oh? What kind of music?"
"Rock."
"Rock music in the ghetto! I guess this place is coming up."
This amuses me as the area felt like Brooklyn in the sense that it could once have been dangerous, but now it was exactly the kind of place I'd want to spend a Saturday night.

"My niece is on an air force base in Te..."
He stops dead, mid-sentence, turns, and oggles a pair of black girls walking by.
"You know, rookie cops say, 'I could never get into that,' but I guess after you're out here for a while you develop a taste."

"Alright, well, uh, I guess we're going to get going." Gene had caught word of a dance party at another place. We get directions from the officer and head out.

I lost my shoes earlier in the tour, and the place had a no-flip-flops dress code, so we ended up just going out to get a couple of drinks and calling it a night.

In the morning, Gene gets up to feed the meter. We head downstairs to meet him, and I start bitching about something or another, as I often do when I'm hungry. He starts to take off. Steve starts yelling, "whoah whoah whoah!" I look over and see that Steve's only half in the van. I chime in, "Whoah whoah whoah! You're running over Steve!" Nobody was hurt, so I can say in retrospect that Steve had the funniest terrified expression on his face. We picked up a couple of cheesesteaks to make it all good. On the way, Steve was navigating.

Steve: Turn right here on Syndor.
Gene: It's pronounced Snydor.
Steve: Ah, well, you say potato, I say fuck you.
Me: (Laughing for 5 minutes)

Cleveland and Pittsburgh

Day 2 in Cleveland represented for me everything that's great about this tour. I woke up at noon in the Akron house, and spent the next six hours hanging out on the porch with everyone and their dogs drinking coffee and beer. Gene made a great dinner for everyone, and we all hit on the cute girl. We rocked extra hard at a really fun open mic night in Cleveland, and stayed pretty late. Finally we headed home, unwound, and called it a night around 4.

Well, there was a bit of a misadventure. Gene is a tortured sleeper, so between two nights of no sleep, a couple of beers, and a couple of joints, he passed out in the van on the way home. I take a sleeping-dogs-lie approach to that dude when he finally gets some sleep, so we just left him in the van. Around 3:30 our friend George got up to go to work, came back in, and said, "Gene's sleeping in the street." I thought that meant he grabbed a sleeping bag and was sleeping in the grass beside the van or something, but nope. He'd left the door open, walked around the van, and passed out in the street. Luckily he woke up enough that he could walk himself back to the house as he's a very large man. Nobody got hurt, so now it's hilarious.

Day 2 in Pittsburg was fun in a laid back way. We slept in, got the local famous sandwich, checked out a museum, Gene cooked dinner, and we hung out with our couch surfing hostess. She's into roller derby, and she and her friend were describing how they don't bruise any more, super hero style. We played an open mic at a bar with a great vibe, except for the longest time we were the only non-employees there. Gene and I joined the host for a while on some of his songs. He's a pretty soulful dude, and I'm a hack rock drummer. I was cracking him up. It was fun and ridiculous.

Super Secret Practice Session

July 31, a day of rest and practice before our final show on August 1.

Here's some stuff we recorded while jamming:

Something in Between - Where do you get off calling Gene a crazy super-villain, huh?
Catch Me - Complete with Steve trying to frantically play along with his computerized synths.

More to come.

Philly "Jus Words"

We stopped in Philadelphia again on the way back to NYC and found ourselves another open mic.

We called them up, and they said they were happy to have our band play. When we got there, we discovered it was more of an open forum/poetry jam called "Jus Words." There was even a house band providing backing music for a few spoken word and sung pieces.

When we got there, the host was discussing race relations and the recent arrest of a Harvard professor with the the audience (a huge crowd by the way, over 100 people there).

Also, it turned out we were three of the maybe six white people in the room. We felt somewhat out of our element. Gene began panicking, insisting that we would not be welcome and that even if we were allowed to play we'd be booed off the stage.

The bartender assured us that they'd love us and that this open mic was all about doing your own thing and being accepted for that. In our case, our own thing is weird rock music, so we'd be accepted for that. (I later talked to a few other people there who expressed their happiness at seeing a rock band there. One said that he much preferred punk to the normal hip hop and R&B normally played at that event.) Others came over and told us that we were welcome to play rock and expressed great interest in hearing us play.

Still, Gene needed a drink to steel his nerves. Dave ordered the bartenders specialty. She told him it was called "a piece of ass." She then poured two shots of 151 rum, another shot of hard liquor (I forget what), and some sour mix into a glass and passed it to Gene.

We eventually hauled our equipment up to the stage (they had a band, but no guitar) and set up.

We then received the best intro we've ever gotten and went on to play:
TAoCP2 - It was quite well received.
We were only allotted two songs, so I passed the mic to a still-nervous Gene, who cracked this joke to loosen up the crowd. If you listen closely, you'll notice two people laughing. That would be Dave and myself. Awkward...
We then played:
thE32nd - Holy carp! This is the most enthusiastic crowd ever!

Two more days worth of bootlegs are forthcoming. I'll post them when I finish them.