November 1, 2006 "Science vs. Romance"

11/01/2006 House of Blues - Las Vegas, NV
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

The House of Blues in Las Vegas is buried deep in the bowels of the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel, which is the gold-leaf high-rise of Southeast Asian persuasion in the "Nevada gaming area" of downtown.

To say I was surprised to learn this fact is a bit of an understatement, given that most franchise venues of that ilk tended to be housed in a glitzy strip mall superstructure. This one, however, was housed in a glitzy mega-casino, one that I'd seen used as a backdrop in film and one-hour TV dramas involving characters who made more money in a week than I'd made in my lifetime and wore suits that had more style than fifty of my closets.


Big money.

We loaded in early, getting a nice long soundcheck and plenty of time to get our gamefaces on in the lavish, signature House of Blues backstage dressing rooms painted like Mediterranean bungalows, with tile mosaics and upholstered furniture. Because we weren't direct support, we still had the smaller of the two available rooms, but even then, it was still as if we'd lucked upon an ever-elusive free hotel room. Clean, spacious showers and a well-stocked larder and buffet table is usually enough to make a man such as myself forget about being homesick for at least an hour or three.

Spent most of my time walking around the loading docks, listening to our roadie Dan and Aaron Weiss pick around on an acoustic guitar. I'd saunter into the dressing room from time to time to see if the LAN cable was free, then I'd go back out and try to call Alison. mewithoutYou learned they'd scored a European tour and called a band meeting to figure out what kind of breakfast cereal they wanted on their rider.

We played well and could move around, unencumbered by a small stage as at 75% of venues we played. The Las Vegas crowd did what all Las Vegas crowds did when we played, which was to stand still, except for one girl who vocally demonstrated her disapproval in two succinct words as we walked offstage. I had given up on trying to figure out what it would take to get over in that town. I figured we were competing with the likes of Penn and Teller and we'd do just as well to simply enjoy our free tuna steak and cous cous, play our show and get on with our lives.

We learned that, as artists performing in the venue, we could reserve a room upstairs for a deeply discounted rate, which we did, breaking free from our Vegas Strip de riguer of the neon Motel Six and greasy spoon across the highway.

Bryan and I parked our van in a trailer-vehicle lot far, far away and cut through the Bellagio and its associated millionaire European tourists, and those wanting to appear to be millionaire European tourists, on the way back to the hotel. I always like to get a whiff of The Money each time I visited, even though I knew I'd probably never have access to the high-roller tables in the back rooms, much less the shops in the courtyard. But it all looked so nice. It never hurt to have a look, unless one were maybe Buddhist and having problems with that whole "death of desire" thing.

We had a room on the 33rd floor, high enough to look out over the desert through floor-to-ceiling windows. I chose to hang back in the room and enjoy my solitude, for as long as I could enjoy it, while the rest of the crew went downstairs to raise hell. It was the day after Nic's birthday, and he was drunk and on rollerskates.

I put on a bath and propped my laptop up on the sink and listened to Galaktlan, which seemed to be the thing to listen to in a luxury bath in a luxury hotel while trying to burn off the fog of war and tour in my head. It was dark, and somewhere in Estonia, a bedroom laptop artist's ears were itching.

After my bath, I fell asleep, then woke up to learn 1) Nic had been chased by hotel security on his rollerskates, 2) a girl we knew had passed out in the bathroom and had to be wheeled out in a wheelchair, and 3) that our tour manager drank all the five-dollar bottles of water left by room service after a drunken bender. Which I suppose meant it was a better night than our usual Vegas trysts of walking around with no money, collecting escort cards and comp drinks.

I probably made Dan feel a little too bad about the water thing than I should have. Money was still always, always a concern.

October 31, 2006 "Androgynous Noise Hand Permeates"

10/31/2006 Glasshouse - Pomona, CA
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

Halloween last year was a raucous party in Seattle, yarling with good vibes and pozzy dreams of the medium-range future. Halloween this year was a drunken stopover in a tired LA suburb, a sleepy film scout location for scenes involving strip malls and aimless youth.

The Glasshouse never gave us no nevermind, it seemed. The room was big and vacuous. The crowds vapid. The onstage sound never quite right, as if it were coming from the building next door. It was Chain Reaction times two, and for a slightly older audience.

No one really dressed in costume for the occasion save James, who went in drag. Bender, mwY's tour manager, went as a boxer, and while I'm sure some of the other band members dressed as something, I never really cared to know what because I spent most of the time before and after the show in the labyrinthine backstage area drinking and staring at the wall.


James in a dress. Kinda hot.

2006 was the year of building walls. I didn't wander out into the crowd or hang out at the merchandise area trying to meet fans. Years of experimentation had proved that my time spent out in the lion's den was a disastrous source of anxiety. So I sat and built a wall of drunk. I stayed behind this wall from soundcheck to set time to load-out because it felt safe. It helped me think of one thing at a time.

At the Glasshouse we played and I walked out onto the stage, wrapped in tight fitting black leather and polyester and hair in my eyes. More bricks. New car caviar, four star daydream. Buy me a football team. The crowd was quiet and passive and not nearly as noisome as its size would indicate.

It was easy to get my brain lost in the songs now. I found the place where I could connect the words to bottomless feeling, that actor's reservoir. Body-consciousness had burned itself away like sun on fog.

Yet still, it was not lost on me that few bought merchandise and few sung along and few applauded, and so I kept my bricks in place and made a beeline for the dressing room to resume my position on the couch, sipping more beer, feeling the sonic pulse of the next bands playing outside. Numb to the sudden existence of loud applause to a band more familiar.

The show ended and I walked outside, keeping to myself in the alley and in the haze of half a dozen drinks. I wanted to leave this town and run along to chase the carrot to other locales along the itinerary. Or was it a retreat. A mad dash.

There was a small crowd of people at the end of the alley on the sidewalk adjacent to the main road. They turned to look at me and then became agitated, surrounding me, asking me for autographs and doling out gushing praise.

It took me by surprise and I felt just a bit remorseful that I hadn't made an effort to find these people sooner instead of writing off the entire evening as yet another day away from my two-year-old that I'd never get back.

It was all so exhilarating and confusing all at the same time.

October 30, 2006 "Allison Road"

10/30/2006 Clubhouse - Tempe, AZ
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

It was about this time that we started seriously thinking about running on used veggie oil. Piebald did it. mewithoutYou did it. It could be done. The irony of my prior dealings with our first guitarist was not entirely lost on me. Admittedly, I thought he was certifiably insane for suggesting we buy a bus shell and throw in a new engine and try to run it on french fry juice. But, at least in this one instance, he may have been onto something.

Nic and James started spending a lot of time with Aaron Weiss and his brother, going over the infrastructure and special needs of running a Greasel conversion. Occasionally a guy from Piebald would pipe in, too, though they were touring in a smaller vehicle. One of those shuttle van things with a set of accordion doors.

It still seemed too perfect. We'd already spent hundreds of dollars on our gas for this one run alone, pulling just a van and trailer. mewithoutYou spent half that the first day and paid for no more fuel the rest of the trip. And they were in a charter bus.

So we started scouring the web for more information. Aaron pointed us in the direction of Greasel Conversions (now Golden Fuel Systems) out of Missouri. The site seemed legit, and the copy made it sound like they knew of what they spoke. Our obstacles seemed to be the twelve grand we already owed on our van, plus the cost of a filtration system and the cost of a new vehicle.

Word on the street was that mewithoutYou bought their bus on eBay for $1500. Then they spent another couple thou on the conversion and on gutting and outfitting the interior with beds and a galley. Minus our lack of an extra fifteen thousand dollars, it seemed like something we could maybe possibly potentially pull off.

But free gas has a price, at least if you really want to pay off your investment and do it right. A slew of maintenance issues await an eager greaser upon their conversion.

Giant filters, endearingly called "elephant condoms," needed to be changed regularly, which involved climbing into the guts of the filter system itself and getting covered in oil up to your elbows. Fuel lines needed to be flushed without fail. The veggie oil itself, Aaron explained, actually congealed at a lower temperature than regular diesel, so you had to start the engine in with regular fuel and power down the same way.

Adding these extra steps, as any developer of new technology knows, increases the odds for problems exponentially, not to mention the enormous increase in price by going from normal van maintenance costs to the costs of maintaining a roadworthy bus. Lose a tire and you'll have to do some magic sweet talk to convince AAA to come save your ass in time to make your next show.

Then there are the grease recon missions. There was even a burgeoning code of ethics and protocol on how to procure your next fill-up. (Approach the eatery manager personally, ask politely, hope that he/she had to pay to have it removed anyway, clean up your mess.)

Conventional wisdom amongst fuel freetards is that asian restaurants have the best grease. Fast food joints and American diners are at the low end of the totem pole in terms of quality and might very well fuck up your fuel filters before their time. How convenient it would be to pull up to any one of the millions of Denny's in the middle of the night and hook the hose up to the grease trap and suck it dry. But no. You're only asking for a world of hurt and smoke.

Because of this dramatic reduction in choices, alongside the slow increase in popularity of veggie driving, free fuel isn't as easy to find as it may initially be presented by the converted. In some regions, I've heard, some restaurant chains were actually drafting up contracts with firms that would pay them for their grease so they could filter it at a plant and then resell it. A veritable market inversion.

My hidden angst was that we may do well in the beginning, but to stay in the game long enough to recoup our investment plus make all the work worth our while could potentially be a game of diminishing returns. And we'd already played that game for a long, long time.

The Clubhouse was full and Arizona was a hit-or-miss place that seemed to tilt to the hit more often than the miss. The buses and vans were parked along the side on an access road and a makeshift lawnchair commons was set up amongst the road cases and elephant condoms.

I spoke with Max for the first time face to face. Merely said hi and a few niceties but nothing of much substance. He was nice and seemed in a daze, but so did every headlining artist coming off a bus I'd ever spoken to in my career thus far.

Our performance stayed consistent with our calcifying attitudes - tough and resilient and amped on the fumes of beer, pot and Axe body spray. We stopped considering ourselves a support act and started carving out our own 45 minute reality that just happened to share the same stage as three other bands.

Each day was a new chance to build a foxhole. To dig in.

October 28, 2006 "Those Who Are From the Sun Return To the Sun"

10/28/06 Diamond Ballroom - Oklahoma City, OK
Other bands: mewithoutYou, Piebald, Say Anything

Wade was my best pal in middle school and most of high school. Two oddballs we were that shared the same abstract sense of humor and an inability to focus despite our inherent smarts. Both of us were kicked out of our seventh-grade advanced placement program for poor performance and behavioral issues.

We'd draw the weirdest shit all over our homework assignments and then almost hyperventilate ourselves laughing over it until the teacher sent one of us to the other side of the classroom or out in the hall for drawing a legume-shaped car. In the cafeteria, we'd stack five hamburgers under one bun and eat it and roll apples and giant disintegrating brownie balls across the floor until Miss Davis, a rotund matriarch with a chip on her shoulder and a sour countenance not unlike the anus judge on The Wall, sent one of us to the principal's office.

Wade was my old middle school smokin' bud whenever I'd find a half-full pack of squares on the side of the road. I rode my bike to school all the time, which was a seven mile haul over back country roads and you wouldn't believe some of the things people threw out, including half full packs of perfectly good Camel Lights. We'd hike down to the river and light up like a couple o' cool dudes in high tops and jean jackets and Zack Morris hair.

Overnighters were a blast because we'd would rent the shittiest sci-fi movies of the day for Friday, and then indulge in tennis racket mayhem to Metallica and Nuclear Assault the following Saturday morning after sugar-frosted Diabetes Bombs.

Once my parents busted us with some ripped out pages of Letters to Penthouse that a kid named Joe Barnhouse gave me. Through this contraband, I discovered a thing such as a threesome did exist.

In high school, Wade was the first kid listening to Faith No More and Pearl Jam before either had become worn out and tired airwave fodder. So I became a fan too, mostly of FNM and not so much Pearl Jam because Pearl Jam didn't have enough metal guitars like FNM did. And their name sounded gay.

Graduation was literally the last day I ever saw Wade. I didn't hear from him again until just under a month before October 28, 2006, when he saw that we were playing Oklahoma city - the place he'd been living since high school - and said he'd come out to the show.

He never made it out, but I kept my eye open. I had a half-pack of road cigs, some porn and the Game Over album just in case. (Not really.)

The Diamond Ballroom sat off a gravel road on the outskirts of town, one part cowboy dance hall, one part airplane hangar. An enormous quonset hut-style construction that had likely looked the same since boot-scooters of the late 40s shuffled across the hardwood floors in rhinestone neckstrings while Patsy Cline knockoffs sang weepy Ray Price shuffle ballads.

Pictures lined the venue the length of a football field, signed and air-brushed faces of pomaded white men in embroidered suits and dainty country belles. This was the kind of place my Grandad might have place forty years earlier. Hell, he might have actually played this very joint.

Say Anything was giving some sort of pre-show exclusive meet and greet to a herd of fans who won the opportunity in a radio contest. There was a table with refreshments set up off to the side and I grabbed a handful with no thought.

I spent most of my time waiting backstage, drinking and smoking cigars and waiting for my old pal to show up. Onstage I kept looking out into the crowd to see if I could discern some sort of age-progressed version of him. But there were too many people and not enough lights.

He e-mailed me later that something had come up with one of his kids. I told him we'd probably be through again some time, but that was three and a half years ago and I still haven't seen him since high school.


Stranded in Hell, Ring Satan's bell! Bus 23! Never change!

October 27, 2006 "A Shit-Ass Scene For Nature Boy"

10/27/2006 Jaunita's - Little Rock, AR
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

Juanita's was the "other place" in Little Rock n Roll aside from Vino's, and barring any diseased punk collectives in basements of condemned houses on the bad side of town.

Not sure if it was dumb luck that both happened to have above average restaurants attached, but at each one we ate well, though moreso at Juanita's because at Vino's they usually gave us two pies and some beer, both of which were good, but gone fast.

El (La?) Juanita had an exquisite fajita buffet set up that reminded me of Warped Tour if it were inside a 500-cap rock venue. Members from multiple bands lined up with paper plates to load up, all except for Aaron Weiss who made himself scarce alot and would then appear in the shadows to scavenge for scraps. Sometimes I thought of Jonny when I looked at Aaron.

I sat at a table with Greg from mwY, who, if I haven't said it before, was quite possibly the nicest and most endearing of the odiferous bunch. The drummer Ricky seemed to have a bit of a chip on his shoulder at all times, but maybe he was still upset that he lost his cymbals at the Indianapolis show I booked for them four years ago. Greg was a straight-up dude though, and I always thought he meant what he said. You don't come by guys like that on the touring circuit very often.

Everybody was better as socializing with other bands than I. In practice it always terrified me. I always assumed, usually incorrectly, that no one liked us and saw overtures of well-meaning compliments as superficial niceties that veiled inward umbrage. Perhaps it's because I knew how brutal we were with our criticism outside the range of non-Brazil ears. Our in-van banter could sometimes peel the stickers off a 4x8 trailer.

I once again riled Say Anything's tour manager with my confetti cannon explosions. I'd already been doing it the whole run, yet Little Rock was the first time he happened to notice. The cannon, about the size of a bowling pin, put up enough confetti to cover the stage in a thin layer of sparkling plastic and I always shot one off at the end of Strange Days 'round when Eric started his gigantic Tony Iommi guitar god solo. Piebald didn't seem to care and Aaron Weiss picked it up and sprinkled it out on the crowd during the mewithoutYou set. For all I could tell, Max and company could care less themselves.

But for Say Anything's TM, disrespectful was the word used as answer to my CO2 driven grand finale, so I put away the remaining cannons for another time. Even though I had perfected my trajectory.

Our repertoire of voices increased by one that day also. On arrival, James jumped out to secure a parking space in front of the venue, while another car simultaneously tried to take the spot. James refused to budge and let the New Jersey flow until the guy in the car rolled down his window and said something about getting a pistol in a tiny helium-pitched voice.

And we latched on, in the way we did with such things. For the next six months, we'd taunt each other with microscopic voices that said "I'm gonna get my pistol."

Higher and ridiculously higher.

October 26, 2006 "Corporate Deathburger"

10/26/2006 Emo's - Austin, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, and Piebald

I discovered a system of viaducts and tunnels underneath Austin that I'd never noticed before, so I did what I always do'd when my ass ached from a long van ride and my brain ached from stale company. I went walking.

The tunnels weren't like some labyrinthine Gaston Leroux wet dream nor were they like the lost Cincinnati subway system, derelict and decadently rotting, but it did have an air of secrecy and lostness, and I felt like I had stumbled upon something forgotten even if it was a place where every train kid west of the Mississippi came to huff aerosol during SXSW.



I walked and walked and walked underneath the beer-soaked party town of Austin, squatting down under low archways, hugging the abutments at the spots where the water was high. I found a spot on a rock next to a bridge and sat and existed.

People overhead went to weekend grilled dinners and to drink booze in sports-themed bars, gilded in jewelry and expensive leather digs. Their cars and voices floated overhead like a television in the next room. Every now and then another grifter would saunter by in my underworld.

In the tunnel, I was neither happy nor sad. Neither hot nor cold. Neither rich nor poor. I just was.

We played on the big stage at Emo's, graduating finally from the tiny triangular one inside. We were still the first of four bands, which meant our backline was the first of four layers of amplifiers and bass rigs, thereby likely giving us even less room than if we had played on the small stage anyway.

There were probably 400-500 people at the show. Most of them there to see mewithoutYou and Say Anything. Piebald's draw was similar to ours except that they had been around much longer. They seemed like indie rock godfathers when I saw them on tour six years prior.

It was still daylight when we performed and I stood on the arms of more kids in front who chose to cross them and remain motionless. I still hadn't looked back after having discovered the thrill of pushing buttons. Even when the kid looked back at me like I was the biggest piece of shit he'd ever met, I pressed his arm harder.

We drove back to Eric's aunt's house outside town for another night of decent food and hot showers.

October 25, 2006 "Piney Woods Money Mama"

10/25/2006 The Door - Dallas, TX
Other bands: Say Anything, mewithoutYou, Piebald

One thing I can say about the screaming high colonic is that rather than signifying a mental implosion, it initiated the final breaking off of a thirty-year ice floe. Or put another way, an accelerator was mashed to the floor of my brain and my injectors were knocking off stone-cold black deposits of old-think like a stock car on Carb Day.

I was transfigured again.

The day started with sleep paralysis. We rolled into town well before dawn to stay with some Texas friends, a group of girls with crushes on all of us. I was in the passenger seat, vaguely aware that we were stopping in a parking lot. When the engine went off, I realized I couldn't open my eyes. Couldn't move my hands. Could barely breathe.

I felt like I was drowning. I could say, for dramatic effect, it was because of my fragile state of mind that I was trapped in my corpse-like body. But to be truthful, sleep paralysis happens a lot when you sleep sitting up. And I had been, for the past few drives. It was scary as hell, and I was kind of afraid to go back to sleep thereafter.

The Door filled up with another gaggle of the girl-jeans-for-Christ crowd. In these Bible Belt shows, the direct support act was getting more love than the headliner. I wondered what Aaron did with his money, because it seemed like he wore the same clothes and ate tossed food. Story was, he gave it away. Which must have been a lot, because I have good reason to assume their nightly guarantees were more than we were making per week, not to mention long lines at the merch table.

The merch table. Our merch table.

Our lonely merch table.

Kids still weren't biting in droves. Five to ten shirts a night was still the average, and on a tour like this I was usually too embarrassed to provide our management or label with accurate sales figures, and instead chose to say something vaguely positive like "we sold more than last night!" On rare occasion, I inflated the numbers. Lots of bands did that, even when it was numerically impossible for them to have done so.

$1500 worth of merch sold to a crowd of thirty, you say?

It used to bother me. But now I didn't care. Not about anything. The sole purpose of my existence out here was as a conductor of energy. In a manner of speaking, I was killing my self.

And it felt good.

The rest of the year and beyond saw the finest shows we had ever played.