October 3, 2006 "It Hurts When I Do This"

10/03/2006 Vintage Vinyl - St. Louis, MO
Other bands: none


It was against our unspoken constitution to cancel for any reason, but under these extenuating circumstances we felt it was what we must do because otherwise we'd be pushing the van back home with an empty gas tank and grumbling distended UNICEF bellies. Hell, I'd played with a broken hand before, so this was kind of a big deal.

So we cancelled our lunch dates at Iowa State on the 5th, the University of Kansas on the 6th and Lake Forest College on the 10th. I'm sure we were sorely missed. And so it was that our largest single cancellation due to financial and mental brinkmanship came to pass. We did keep one date in Evanston, IL, but it was close enough to home to make the drive in an afternoon, so we left it on the itinerary.

The Vintage Vinyl instore was interesting in that it was a place we'd visited on our first foray into the self-booking world of 2001, when we were poor(er) and full of naive unformed fire, scoping out soup kitchens and where every direction on the compass was a movie. It was a Someday venue, one whose marquee was always emblazoned with the names of artists we aspired to be categorized alongside while dealing with the grinding reality of playing basements and musty corners of skate parks.

We earned our ticket five years since. Getting access to the Back Door. When the employees moved the records so we could perform. If nothing else, this was another moment to gauge our progress. Still no large sums of money, still no reliable coalescing force. But we were playing Vintage Vinyl goddammit and that was something.

Like Swiss clockwork, Tim and his wife Sam were at the show. Kids were showing up in new and unfamiliar Brazil shirts and I realized that our label had finally followed through with at least a few posters and promotional schwag giveaways. The shirts weren't bad either. Nothing award-winning, but better than most of the designs we'd come up with on our own, save for the Eric Rose line.

We hit the road for home after grabbing a bite to eat. It was only seven hours. We probably made it in six at that time of night.

October 2, 2006 "Cha Cha Chee Boom"

10/02/2006 Wichita State University - Wichita, KS
Other bands: none

Two days to get from Denver to Wichita, and for once I don't remember what we did. I'm sure we burnt most of the daylight stretched out in bench seats or on the homemade bunk. Or in the drivers seat, or the passenger seat reading magazines or switching out a neverending rotation of albums. Watched endless horizons of brush and hill terrain, spotty farms, and one-stoplight towns with a Dairy Queen, a Subway and a granary. Played sudoku. Almost solved crossword puzzles. Listened to burnt CDs. Text messaged people back home. Watched DVDs from the library. Bought snacks at remote outpost gas stations at sunset. A prairie sunset in the fall is the most majestic thing.

I'm sure we got a motel room at 3am on the outskirts of some town where the hotel prices never break fifty bucks. And I'm sure we all humped our suitcases and sleeping bags up metal and concrete stairs and threw our personal effects where we always threw our personal effects in such motel rooms. James and Philip always slept on the floor. I always slept on a bed. So did Eric. Someone always slept out in the van.

I'm sure we woke up less than an hour before checkout and shaved and showered and coffeed and unplugged our phones and laptops, calling for multiple extensions on our checkout time. We called extensions almost every time we got a room and no one ever charged us for the extra time.

We probably stopped at Denny's or a McDonalds and got breakfast, stealing a USA Today to keep ourselves aware. And we probably stopped at the gas station with the lowest price on the block, even though they were all within three cents of each other, hoping it would cumulatively save us ten or fifteen dollars at the end of the month.

Wichita was no different than Utah or any of the other lunch stop whistle stop shows we endured. Loaded in through a side door into a student center lounge. Sat up gear on a stage riser. No posters or promotion that we could see. Maybe a mention in the student paper the day of the show.

It was maddening. It all seemed so avoidable. But we played anyway, even though we were told twice to turn down. It was too bright and we seemed too loud. I felt intrusive. Part of me just wanted to let these kids study.

There were a couple of kids that hung around to see us, dressed in their finest vintage threads. One was a girl with enormous breasts, dressed with the intent of making you aware of the fact that she had enormous breasts. It would have been more of a distraction if I hadn't been so tired. Eye candy, but the sugar rush only lasted as long as a three-minute song.


Wichita State University - Rhatigan Student Center.

The pile of postcards sits stacked neatly next to the typewriter. They are all from Mandalay and they all have the same lagoon scene and they all say “We whisper here” on the back in brittle handwritten script. It began with one, and now I receive sometimes two or three in a single drop. I tell myself I will run them up to the shut-in like a good neighbor, but each day brings a new struggle and a new opportunity to forget. Ten postcards from Mandalay borders excessive, and it seems that the shut-in upstairs keeps strange company.

September 30, 2006 "Bleary Eyed Duty"

09/30/2006 Marquis Theater - Denver, CO
Other bands: The Velveteen


Crawling melancholy was close to besting me again when we hit Denver. We were actually playing a real show this time in a real venue with a real band, but I was more or less consumed with a sad version of ennui from our slow fade back to invisibility on the highway.

The Marquis Theater was a great club with nice lights and good sound, close to downtown with an easy load in. Scored some drink tickets and used them quickly. Our set went as planned, but the audience stayed back twenty feet while we played. The lights shone in my eyes, destroying my night vision so I couldn't get a good gauge on crowd reaction. I was trying earnestly not to care, an effort which was getting easier with time but was not always successful, especially when coming off a week of playing unadvertised lunch breaks in college student centers.

I volunteered to get the van after our set to pull it into the alley for load out. It was the weekend so I lost our convenient space a block down within minutes. I drove around the block several times looking for another spot and eventually spread out into other streets looking for a spot as long as two vehicles so I could park. I was morbidly tired and I wanted to sleep. I just wanted a place I could pull in, text somebody a location, then crash out on a bench.

But I couldn't find anything. Denver's young were out in droves. So I pulled back in the alley behind the club and turned on the hazards. I laid down in the first bench and fell asleep until a hammy fist beat against the driver window.

"Hey! Move your fuckin' van."

I sat up and looked around, saw a kid with a cowboy hat, tight jeans and a giant belt buckle standing next to the van. His giant truck idled directly behind our van. His face looked stretched over a bone structure that was too big to accommodate the dermal real estate available to cover it. He was tanned, possibly from days spent out corralling cattle, but more likely from a Sunquest tanning bed, giving the illusion that he did so spend his time corralling future Angus burgers out on the plains.

"That's right. Wake the fuck up and move your fuckin' van, asshole."

I took my time. Didn't speak. Didn't look. Set the key in the ignition at my own speed.

"I will kick your fucking ass, you fucking faggot!"

At that moment he was every stereotype of alpha-male egoism that had been seared into my brain since toddlerhood. He was the rotted underbelly of white, Christian America. A territorial pisser. The embodiment of national exceptionalism and wanton assholishness parading as patriotism and rugged independence. I wanted to smash his face with the jagged edge of a broken beer bottle. Gut it until his teeth fell out like Chiclets smeared with blood. Till his face was a gurgling mess of meat and bubbling humors. So that pretty young thing sitting in the passenger seat of his dually would run screaming in horror once the ER staff had patched him up. At that moment, and for reasons not entirely related to the 200lb sack of meat at my window, my ever-internalized and vaporish unease kernelized into a fine point and I truly, truly hated someone.

I drove off. I wasn't tired anymore. I drove, even though I passed spots that were now open. I had to keep moving or I would suffocate under shaking vitriol.

A fan gave me a copy of his first book, once I found a place to park outside the club. It was called The Bible of Animal Feet, a collection of surrealist poetry. He told me he loved the record in a typewritten note and hoped that we would play Denver again. New faces each time. Where were the old ones?

...do not confuse Pangea with a hostile gold-mining town.
-A PASSAGE FROM THE BIBLE OF ANIMAL FEET
(Thanks in advance to Chris.)

September 29, 2006 "Indiana"

09/29/2006 University of Utah - Salt Lake City, UT
Other bands: Crimson Night Festival

After trying to milk as many sales as possible from the SUU crowd - and I think we sold six of our new album - we jumped back on the highway to make Salt Lake City in time for the Crimson Night Festival at the University of Utah.

This was an annual underclassman mixer where the university played babysitter to a thousand hypersexual teens and early-twenty-somethings all eager for free food, free t-shirts and, if they were lucky, a free trip around the bases before the sun came up.

They'd roped off a classroom in a hallway behind the auditorium for our green room and filled with with boxes of pizza and water. Not bad, except I was sick of pizza. Our PA was a tiny four-channel amp at the side of the stage powering a single mic with an on/off switch. We already knew what kind of show this was going to be and we steeled ourselves to commit an hour to brazen self-flagellation.

And we were not disappointed.

At first there were a few hundred kids watching us on the enormous riser stage. Five minutes (or less) after our amps had hit their screeching highs, the number thinned to 100, then 50, until maybe five were left by the time we finished our set. Roving hordes of red-shirted post-teens would head east through the main corridor that our stage faced, then west, stopping only long enough to make the sort of comments kids make when they are flying high on the energy of their peers and have lasered in on an easy target. The band of spastic outsiders playing songs they'd never heard before.

I walked through the throngs moving gear. It always felt like a hundred eyes were on me. Kids saying to each other, backhandedly, "there goes that shitty, shitty band." I don't know if I'd always been that paranoid or if it was a symptom of my growing anxiousness.

We weren't paid, but the university offered us a room at the student center hotel, which we begrudgingly took after realizing it would take us almost an entire day to get to Denver. We could sleep, though for two hours.

It was typical of our damn luck. When we needed a room the most, we couldn't afford one and when we got one handed to us, we couldn't stay in it for very long.

September 29, 2006 "Lord Accept Our True Devotion"

09/29/2006 Southern Utah University - Cedar City, UT
Other bands: none

The distance from where I sit at my desk to the door that contains the mail slot is less than five feet. The distance from the mail slot to the floor is about four feet, or eye level if you’re sitting down. I inched the chair over to the door until my face was nearly even with the brass shutter and let loose my breath. For no reason in particular, I felt a feeling of general unease.

I took hold of the tarnished brass plate and slowly pulled it up. As I did, the thundering sound of a hundred stampeding wingtips and Oxfords charging up the stairs as if from a fire jarred me to drop it again. Like the roar of an elevated train, with no human sounds of breathing or conversing, the feet pounded their way up the stairs like the world’s most silent mob, causing the chain on my deadbolt to swing irritably and the bottles of Maudlin to clink Morse code-like in the fracas.

Then it ended.

The familiar eerie quiet settled over the building while I sat still with a heart beating like an over-worked typewriter. Everything was still. The bottles of Maudlin stood wetly at attention. The deadbolt returned to being dead. I peered out the mail slot and saw the going-up staircase banister. The going-down staircase disappeared into diffuse light and shadow down below. There were no scuffmarks on the walls to indicate a boisterously polite throng passing through. No sounds from came upstairs. It was complete silence except for the ringing of blood coursing through the vessels in my ears.

* * *


Cedar City. Beautiful views, but the beer sucks.

Our venue was the far end of a soccer field, where programing board people had set up a small stage of risers and a cheap PA. These shows seemed increasingly like afterthoughts, as if the person at our label responsible for booking them made the requisite "I need a quick favor" phone calls at the last minute, and the university people told them they'd "see what they could do."

We had a campus radio interview with a girl DJ who'd never heard of our band. We did some flyering around the quad area like we did at Warped Tour, except this time it was tarnished against a noticeable backdrop of fatigue.

Our noise attracted a few dozen temporary gawkers, but we sold very little merch. Driving the mountain states is brutal on the gas gauge, and even more so on the cashbox when you're not making money. It seemed like we should have been farther along than this.

Nikki secured us an opening spot after this run with a band called Smile Empty Soul, as her first official booking for our band. SES were a radio rock, post-grunge band in the vein of Nickelback or Sevendust who had a minor hit about drugs or some girls ass in the early part of this decade. Not really our cup of tea, but the money was good and we rationalized it by thinking that we'd never tried to tap into that audience before and goddammit we might as well try.

We hadn't struck gold anywhere else.

September 27, 2006 "(Well) Dusted (For the Millennium)"

09/27/2006 Club Congress - Tuscon, AZ
Other bands: Authority Zero, SKITN, Last Act of Defiance


Hotel Congress. Est. 1919.

Stayed the night outside Phoenix with a friend of Phillips. She lived in an apartment complex off a main thoroughfare surrounded by pawn shops and gas stations, which were surrounded by desert. Nothing fancy, and probably not much more than half a grand in rent. Bathtub ring and burn holes in the carpet included free.

The landlord was verifiably batshit crazy. Some breed of paranoid old lady who probably believed what she read in the National Enquirer and kept a thousand glass figurines in her rarely-visited-by-outsiders-except-the-minister living room.

We parked our van across half a dozen spaces like we always did and camped out for the night. Next morning, she marched up to whomever was in the van at the time and demanded they move it out of the parking lot. So we did. We let it idle in the parking lot across the street until the rest of the band was ready to come down. Then we circled it back around to the apartment to pick up the rest of the gang. She came marching back out as we pulled away to head to Tuscon, launching daggers from her eye sockets and mouthing something unintelligible as we drove away.

We parked there again later that night. Phillips friend explained to her that we were friends from out of town and that we were staying at her place for two nights but the lady wouldn't have it. She followed us from the van to the apartment, ranting the whole way in her shrill and warbled menopausal voice, calling our host "young lady," while we toted our suitcases and sleeping bags up the stairs. Most of us ignored her. James allowed himself a shouting match. Quite a site to behold - crazy vs. New Jersey.

I noticed a worried look on Phillip's friend's face. She was, after all, the one who to lived there. She would probably suffer some serious blowback for as long as she continued to do so.

I talked to our new agent Nikki for the first time outside of the Hotel Congress, which housed Club Congress. She was a Colorado transplant now living in Brooklyn and she sounded tough. We sealed the deal and she was ready to hop on board to start selling our shows to whomever would buy. She told us we should stay in the hotel, and I thought someday. But not today.

Our performance at Club Congress was stellar, full of swagger and joyous bile, and most likely inadvertently so. We had, I thought, a drunk heckler and heckling had by now become a psychological trigger. Where it once used to eviscerate me psychologically, it now energized me. Flipped a berzerker switch.

And now I could actually notice a tangible difference between the crowds entrance when we started and when we ended. We were keeping them interested.

September 27, 2006 "100% of Nothing"

09/27/2006 Arizona State University - Phoenix, AZ
Other bands: none

I've probably said it before. Arizona is hot. Even in late September.

We rolled into the quad area in the middle of the lunch hour. I could feel the sun attacking my forehead skin like a blowdryer on plastic wrap. It was almost dizzying and I tried not to move much at first on account of wearing too many clothes.

We found a small half-built stage in front of what looked like an administration building, facing a student center commons area. A medium-sized rock inched its way down my esophagus and nestled in my stomach when I realized we'd be selling ourselves to a roaming organism of text-occupied nineteen-year-olds in the middle of their workday. We'd be a thirty-second novelty at best. Cannon fodder for restless and uncreative hecklers at worst.

The stage was fortunately tented when all was said and done. We had a single contact from the university, a girl who we rarely saw. She either worked for the school radio station or the programming board. The stagehands were anonymous and unspoken. We set up right alongside the credit card hawkers and poster sellers.

So we swallowed hard and cranked the amps and squinted the sun out of our eyes. I was becoming much more the hardened entertainer, saying all the introductory lines and pleases and thank yous, sometimes in earnest, sometimes without a shred of sincerity depending on how I gauged the crowd. Stage manners were to be employed no matter what the cost.

An older man came up to the side of the stage and did an old man dance to our set. One part Ian Curtis, one part Freedom Rock. And when one person comes up close amid a sparse horseshoe of onlookers like this man did, it's hard to not think you're being made fun of. So I jumped on his back from the stage.

I rode him around the front like a horse until he dropped me on the concrete. Turns out he just enjoyed the music.

No hard feelings.

September 25, 2006 "Brats in Battalions"

9/25/2006 University of Southern California - Fullerton, CA
Other bands: none

It did me well to think about waking up on a daily basis in a Mission Viejo house like this one, shuffling out to that private veranda with a French press in one hand and a laptop in the other. Clothing optional.

I never had too much of a problem with my Indiana backyard, other than the typical ennui one usually associates with one's hometown. I had a half-built fence on mine. Plus an overgrown garden. A fire pit with a few empty beer bottles scattered around it. A decaying plastic tugboat full of play sand. A fence separating my yard from my neighbor's yard and trampoline. I watched it fill up with snow in the winter, get tunneled by moles in the summer. A state of mind.

My backyard was an old comfortable shoe. Home in solitude, an ever-so-slight embarrassment in the presence of company. It's where I could sit in a plastic chair in front of a fire, drinking beer in the middle of the night to try to take the edge off the burning "whats next" questions that ate away my days off the road.

Everyone is beautiful in California and every backyard is too. Even the derelict alleys and HIV-infected denizens of skid row have cinematic charm. You've seen it all before. Probably paid $8.50 to sit in a darkened theater to do so. Johnny's neighborhood was the E.T. neighborhood, was the Mulholland Drive neighborhood, was the L.A. Story neighborhood, was the Shopgirl neighborhood.

Backyards. A state of mind. But I digress.

The label had set up a bunch of collegiate shows moving forward that offered no pay, not much stage time, yet the golden opportunity to hawk our merchandise to roving herds of students during their lunch hours. It became obvious that we were playing the role of street busker, only without a collections hat or sandwich board and with much louder instruments.

Three or four guys from Immortal made the drive to see us perform, which was something. It used to surprise me how often LA people, most of whom we'd see once or twice a year, would shirk coming to shows on the basis of the length of the drive. Maybe I just got used to driving an hour to Indianapolis or two hours to Cincinnati to see anything halfway good.

We performed in the heat of midday, the sun blistering my forehead. Hundreds of students hiked across the quad from one building to the next, usually pausing for thirty seconds to watch us, nod (or roll eyes), then walk on. We were still high off the Chain Reaction show and burnt through the set on fire until I jumped off the stage and ran and jumped in a fountain 50 yards away, twisting my ankle.

The Immortals were humbled and awed. Thankfully so. I never felt like we awed anyone at Fearless, ever. Not with our live show, anyway.

We talked strategy for a bit while I dried out and hobbled to a grassy knoll where we sat and ate label-funded burritos. The free-meal routine was just that by now. Routine. Eat what you can get for free. Nod and say your "mm-hmms" at the right place while they recite a bunch of metrics and drop a bunch of names to get everyone excited. Then get in the van and slowly realize you'll be lucky if just 20% of what gets said gets done.

We shot some video with Isaac and Jason, mostly of me harassing students and faculty with my accordion. We did manage to sell a surprising amount of CDs, giving both us and the label hope that this next week wouldn't be the grueling test of the limits of patience and sanity that it would actually become.


Most of this was shot at this show and the Chain Reaction show. I'm peeing on Chain Reaction at 2:24.

September 24, 2006 "Mr. Totally"

09/24/2006 Soma - San Diego, CA
Other bands: Mutemath, Shiny Toy Guns


Soma.

Now and again, as always, luck would take a sideways glance in our direction and we'd find ourselves on an actual stage worthy of 6 years of work and in front of crowd that, though still not ours, satiated at least briefly, a band's universal and desperate need for attention.

We pulled into the SOMA loading docks, the only van amidst a caravan of buses, still a complete unknown. The place looked like it was carved out of a relatively new movie megaplex. Covered with flyers, but still carpeted and not yet dingy enough to feel like a true musical swingers lair.

Both Mutemath and Shiny Toy Guns were bands that had thus far remained outside the ping of my radar, yet were building enough simmer to attract pricey tour budgets and stage plots with, admittedly, pretty amazing lights and fog. Indie cred be damned, I would have given my left leg to have a bus with enough room to lay longways in without having to be six inches from another members foot.

The bands were nice (unlike the house manager who told Bryan our mix sounded like shit) but aloof as the five of us were scooted onto stage for a quick soundcheck. I say "five" because Nic caught a plane home to participate in a lengthy bout of court ordered therapy due to an arrest a few months earlier. He was popped by the local 5-0 leaving a local bar and apparently blew just enough to get him a night in the drunk tank.

This stressed me out more than it should have - one, because it meant he would be leaving the tour at some point and thereby throwing our fragile (in my head) existence into tumult, and two, because for all Nic's quiet, pensive genius, I sometimes worried about his excesses, even though they were really no more excessive than any of the rest of us. I could not escape being a protective brother.

So we spent the few days off at Johnny's parents rearranging our setlist to primarily include songs with the least amount of piano and to make sure I could play and sing on the songs that we did play.

I won't say I pulled it off magnificently, but the diminishment of our life show was marginal at best. Nailed the break in The Vapours but gave up singing during the break in Breathe entirely. Regardless, the crowd of several hundred stood and stared, motionless, politely clapping at the end of each tune. I played to the front, escaping my binding nerves as I was increasingly able to do, even thought the front was a wall of text-messaging girls and their coiffed boyfriends.

And we sold no merch. Despite the lines out the door. Despite the nearly sold-out 1000-cap venue and the draw of the other bands. We were invisible, an inconvenience on the way to ninety minutes with the nu-prog rock darling of the fiscal quarter, which wasn't us.

September 23, 2006 "Death of a Gremmie"

09/23/2006 Chain Reaction - Anaheim, CA
Other bands: Lola Ray

So we stayed a long day at Johnny's house, meeting his mother and grandmother Lola Ray, for whom the band was named. She was a charming old Filipino lady that shuffled around the house making sure the rice cooker was always full and steaming for us growing boys.

We were back West for the first time since resigning and therefore had all sorts of meeting and greeting to endure. It was always a fascinating thing to do, meeting these folk and seeing their digs, but it usually always led to us being late for load in. The first person we met was Isaac who came out with our first load of CDs.

He was a gangly kid who gave us the lowdown on everyone we'd met in the offices. There was Jason who came from Victory Records, Daniel who came from Universal and Happy who owned the joint and made his money pimping nu-metal in the 90s when it was actually nu. Except Happy was never there. He was always off somewhere exotic honing his photography skills.

So we listened to our new CD in Johnny's upstairs loft. It was a bittersweet joy to finally hear it in the final version after all that we had been through to bring it into this world. The label had even taken so long to send payment that Tarbox was threatening to file suit. I can't say it was a comfortable place to be, and in fact more than a little embarrassing.

But payment did finally come from the turnip, and our CD was released fully packaged with gleamy glossy retail sheen. We each took a copy and unwrapped it. Felt its matte booklet. We'd never had anything other than straight, traditional glossy.

We stuck it in the player and during the verse of You Never Know it skipped. We put in another CD. It also skipped. We all took turns with all the rest we'd opened. They all skipped.

The strangest thing was, when we went to the Immortal Entertainment offices - which were in a Santa Monica Boulevard high rise with a huge wrought iron Immortal logo, behind a gilded receptionist desk, down a marble hallway, and through doorways slung in platinum records - and played it for them, they didn't hear it.

We pushed it a little bit, but I think we were through fighting battles on this record. It was out. I hoped that maybe each person that bought it and heard it would think that they had the only malfunctioning copy and would excuse it.

I've discovered the amount of times a band can play a shitty venue before finally deciding to mop it up, and that amount is five.

The vibe of the Chain Reaction had changed much since the first time I'd been there. Geographically it was the same. The stage was in the same place. The floor layout was the same. I had been there when it was shoulder-to-shoulder with industry trying to see what some were calling the next fill-in-the-blank band. Us. And I had been there two years later when no one gave a shit.

And we were here again, still silently hoping for the high of that first time, and knowing that we weren't going to get it. I won't attempt to wax a poetic cliche about Southern California being the proverbial boulevard of broken dreams, but there is something to be said for the enormous amounts of money and attention floating around the area looking for something to be aimed at and channeled into without rhyme or reason maybe just because the singer has two different colored eyes or the guitar player talks up a half-made up story about living on the street. The potentialities of it all make people do strange things. Perhaps the strangest of all is the compulsion to ignore the odds.

I drained a 40 in the car of Tazy Phyllipz who ran an indie show responsible for breaking No Doubt and Sublime. He put a microphone in my face and conducted an interview while I tried to keep up with the questions as best I could in a haze of Mickeys.

Blaze was there again. Hung out with us in the dressing room while Nic and I drained a bottle of cheap wine that turned our mouths purple. He said he was worried about our drinking. I told him we were fine. It was the only thing I could find that would place the buffer between a thousand sets of eyes and a soul. It was like dancing in a room walled with a 2 way mirror. I knew they were there but I didn't care because I couldn't really see them.

I wanted to burn through those bodies like napalm. The Chain Reaction was a place where I'd felt most disconcerted, the most let down in the history of all our touring. It was usually the first place we would play in the region and would set the tone for the rest of our stay. I couldn't connect with those kids because they were all rich Orange County punks with more money and better skin. We were flyover trash disconnected from any sort of scene at home or abroad.

But this time we had our armor. I had my suit on. We tore through a set like it was a snakish religious experience. I threw myself to the crowd time and again. Stood defiantly at the front of the stage, arms raised with imaginary foam fists attached to my hands, pulling out reaction from their bodies like it was hardened mutagenic tar.

At the end of Strange Days I pulled the entire front row onstage and crawled through their legs, lifting them up on my shoulders. Falling down into a pile.

Lindsey texted Blaze to ask how we were.

"It's the best I've ever seen them."

It was the last time we'd ever play Chain Reaction, and in my head, we burned the fucker down.

September 20, 2006 "Mushmouth Shoutin"

09/20/2006 Meridien - Houston, TX
Other bands: Lola Ray


Me, at Meridien. Wait, no. That's Edgar Winter, a different albino.

It was four or five hours to Houston. We normally didn't have to be at clubs until 5 or 6, which meant we could sleep long in San Antonio. Then we had two blank days to get ourselves from eastern Texas to Orange County, California.

Meridien was a big multi-tiered complex with a small room for small shows like ours and a big room for big shows with bands like AFI or My Morning Jacket. It was well-kept and seemed fairly new, and seemed to be put together by someone who had been in the concert promotion game for quite some time.

I spent all my time in the dressing room watching Nic fashion a helmet and gloves out of aluminum foil. I tried to stay out of the main rooms in all the clubs we visited as much as possible because it still affected my nerves too much. I could toggle the alter-ego switch better if I stayed in the green rooms.

The show went well but without much audience participation (primarily because there wasn't much of an audience to participate). But there were four girls who came to see Lola Ray and became Brazil fans by the end of the concert. They were young college-types, eager to let us sleep on their floor and we obliged.

We left late the next morning, heading west on I-10 after a fast food breakfast and piss break. If we were smart we would have all been obsessive coupon clippers and Subway Sub Club card carriers. If we were even smarter, we would have signed up for a frequent-lodger program with a hotel chain. But we didn't because fame was always right around the corner and it seemed like a lot of work for something that we'd expense a major label for anyway at some point.

We saw Texas scrub once again turn to New Mexico and Arizona desert. Arizona desert turn into California desert, and then into California's version of paradise. Two and a half days seems like time enough to get from the middle of the US to the left coast. But unless you are driving in round the clock shifts, it is not.

Cash was again a scarce commodity, especially since we weren't making any money for two straight days, so we slept in the van at a rest stop on a deserted desert highway. It was high adventure camping - some of the guys opened up the trailer and used it as a shelter - but I worried about scorpions and coyotes and the fact that desert highways seemed like places where a senseless massacre by a rogue trucker would most likely take place.

That "movie" feeling of automotive desert crossing had lost some of its potency over the years but it was still there. I could still feel a tangible change the closer we came to Southern California, as if the smell of money wafted through the air the minute we passed Indio.

We arrived at Johnny's parents' house in Mission Viejo in the middle of the night. It was an upscale place in a cul-de-sac in the hilly outskirts of Los Angeles County, and a home that might fetch $400,000 in Indiana, but in California would probably sell for upwards of three quarters of a mil.

In the tradition of true Filipino hospitality, an enormous spread of food was left out on the table for us to devour at 4am.

September 19, 2006 "My Freeholies Ain’t Free Anymore"

09/19/2006 The Sanctuary - San Antonio
Other bands: Lola Ray

Bloom, a woman of terrible genius and fashion sense, founded a summer camp, with her seventh husband, for young and exceptionally gifted writers. Bloom’s portion of the book was actually ghost written by her fourth husband at the time, owing to her obligations with a certain brand of 120 proof rye whiskey. It was her third husband who offered to publish the guide, and her thirteenth who signed on to ensure its publicity. When the Guide became somewhat of a success, her first and second husbands demanded a share of the royalties, her fifth and six husbands publicized a smear campaign against her, calling her an opportunistic windbag, while husbands eight through twelve tried, rather successfully after a time, to convince the others to form a rugby team and forget about the whole affair.

* * *

Two-day hauls across four states are usually regarded as a big ordeal by common folk, but for us half-dozen uncommon brethren it was just another interlude of gas station culture and ever-increasing familiarity of barns between mile markers.

I used look at tour itineraries of bands I liked and imagine myself following an atlas in my head playing second tambourine or perhaps singing backup doo-wops. Playing the basements and bowling alley rec rooms of the indie world. It all seemed like great fun. I would look at the itinerary one week, and then again two weeks later in awe that someone could be out having an adventure that long while I suffered quietly behind a school desk.

Then I started to do it, and it was great fun. The Unknown beckoned like a spectral hand, and for a few years it was great. But now I'd reached a point where ends of The Unknown were starting to seem like the ends of the highways in Pleasantville. Full of promise, but ultimately leading to the beginning of the shop half of an unromantic sound stage. Veil off. Magic drained.

All the times we played Houston and Dallas, and each time as if it were the first, in a new club, in front of a new handful of people. San Antonio actually had traction. The people in the audience were ours, and it caught me off guard. The Sanctuary was still a dive, and there weren't as many people there as had been for the Emery tour, but there was a small crowd and the ratio worked in our favor.

We all drank in the attached bar afterward, scoring free drinks from a gay Asian man that Nic befriended, and then drove to a gated community where lived a girl who moonlighted as a band manager for a local modern rock band. Most of her family was out of town so I was able to sleep in a bed for the first time in days.

Two days of bench-sleeping wiped me out and I crashed in some kids bedroom and slept black sleep for at least ten hours.

September 17, 2006 "50 in the Clip"

09/17/2006 Big Daddy's - Tallahasee, FL
Other bands: Lola Ray

Whether or not it was the best idea I ever had, I went with Angelique to a porn mart down the street from the club in Tallahassee. It was a cheeky thing to do, completely in risque fun and with a veritable stranger (albeit a good looking one), though she had made it clear to me that at any time I wanted to ditch the scene, and for that matter our clothes, she would accomodate.

And I entertained the idea, if only at arms length, chewing on it like a warm rubber band. Having a kid does things to certain aspects of life at home. This could have been a perfect storm.

Ultimately, I never acted on any such urges. It was a short diversion and a ninety-second walk up the sidewalk to break the drudge of tour and even though I did feel a bit guilty about the whole ordeal, I was able to rationalize it by saying I ultimately never acted on any such urges. I merely danced around the flame, that's all. It was a game.

It did, however, cause me to wonder if I had opened a proverbial little red door, and maybe the next time I'd find myself in a similar situation I'd subsequently find myself on a dark van bench drenched in the smell of legs and hair with a stomach full of regret I'd have to drink away.

I put it out of my mind and Angelique left without incident.

Besides, my sex was on the stage. Maybe it was no coincidence that I now wore black gloves onstage, "rapist gloves" as some of the other guys used to call them. Performances were anymore a giant hatefuck directed in the direction of the smalls seas of apathetic faces dotting the lonely 200-cap landscapes we found ourselves in night after night.

I never turned my back on the audience anymore. They were a spotty wall of flesh that I constantly pushed against. And the more I did it, the more they seemed to pay attention.

If performing the way I did was a felonious offense, I'd just tell the cops "they asked for it."

September 16, 2006 "Sophisticated Squaw"

09/16/2006 The Orpheum - Ybor City, FL
Other bands: Lola Ray

Wearing my new pants, which were jet black stretch denim, in the central Gulf Coast of Florida at the tail end of summer in subtropical America was a true hardship test. Before the first merchandise tub was brought in, my legs already felt wrapped in moist neoprene.

But I felt like someone else, and that was all that mattered. Life was a fundamental struggle and all things good and fashionable came with a price. Right?

The cobblestone streets of Ybor whispered back to a day when Cuban immigrants rolled the finest cigars of the 1920s for the rest of the country and ropa vieja was on every menu in town. (Well, I suppose it still is.) I'd like to think this quaint little district kept its authentic flavor through the passing down of real estate from one old world generation to the next, but it was more likely a place like Ieper Belgium, where the city had nearly mandated a sort of neighborhood association ordinance on properties in or around the city center so that they would look like the charming peasant neighborhoods of Belgium past.

I could have been wrong.

Had it actually been 1920, I might have slid comfortably into the social fabric of the time. I still had the ratty Russian motorcycle goggles and tweed vest ensemble I constructed in August. I had also added a black leather cabbie hat and black leather gloves - things, which, combined with the fog of alcohol, and whether others agreed or not, gave me an intoxicated aura of a 1969 New York underground zeitgeist via Weimar Berlin cafe society.

There was a girl at the show. She looked at me once while I was putting my goggles on my head offstage. I thought she looked strange in these environs. Too clean. Too put together, like a librarian who happened to be blessed with good skin and bone structure. She looked once in my direction and gave a vibe I received as "put off by my stink of rock."

But afterwards, she came up and introduced herself as Angelique. "Like a stripper," she said. Except she wasn't one. But she was infatuated and I had lifted personal sanctions on flirting in efforts to win over more fans. She told me she was coming to the next show in Tallahassee and I told her I hoped she would. I assumed she wouldn't.

I saw her again in the parking lot of Big Daddy's the next night, four hours away.

September 15, 2006 "Kirisute Gomen"

09/15/2006 The Social - Orlando, FL
Other bands: Lola Ray

Bivouac this time was with a girl Philip knew. He had quite an extensive Internet fanbase, shall we say, which bothered us none as long as the rest of us could take advantage of floor space and stovetops.

This was a smallish apartment with a wide living room that both bands could stay in, and did. Most of our next few drives were less than three hours away, so I spent a generous chunk of my days indoors on my computer trying to feel in touch with the rest of the moving world. This life was the Fast Lane to a point, a point after which you begin to notice your friends younger siblings having babies and getting paid sums of money equal to or more than their parents. Suddenly they're the ones that seem to be passing you by. And your record contract, once a status symbol of goodbye-mundane-world, becomes a millstone around your neck.

I had a stack of Netflix movies I brought from home that I'd watch and then throw in the nearest mailbox. Had some library movies, too. Usually four, which was the maximum you could check out. I'd just call every week and renew them, sometimes half a dozen times. I always thought I'd eventually make them mad, but they never seemed to care.

"Hi, I'd like to renew some DVDs I have out. Jonathon. Newby. Thanks."

I watched Bad Taste with a couple members from both bands. Ridiculously horrible, but I'd wanted to see it since I was a single-digit age and saw the VHS cover in the Marsh Supermarkets movie rental section of the alien giving the finger. I used to devour Fangoria Magazine as a dweeby teen hanging out at the bookstore and the image of the alien zombie stumbling around with the axe in his head was as iconic as a Z-grade screenshot can be.

The Subway across the street from the club still employed the world's biggest crank, a 40-year-old man that considered customer service an inconvenience to be sidestepped. It was of such a magnitude that complete and utter strangers standing in line would bond over how distastefully rude this man could be. I guess I didn't blame him. This was the downtown of a steamy party district and I could foresee his store getting deluged by hordes of drunk and high trasherati in the late hours of the night, most of whom also likely considered most civil niceties an inconvenience to be sidestepped. I used the restroom there once and only once, after I realized the used condom on the floor was probably the cleanest thing in the room.

The Social wasn't nearly as full as when we played with Emery. The stage is high and towers over a pit, which is surrounded on all sides by rising landings with handrails and places to put your drinks if you happen to be TCTM. Third time around, the club seemed small, like visiting my old high school. Depressing.

I think I figured out what it was, though. That lonesome feeling that kept pulling at my shirt tail when we'd hit venues we'd played before on larger bills. I'd seen these places - participated in them and their accoutrements - when they were full of life and vitality. Beautiful people. Rapt people. Ticket-buying people. And seeing these same walls again on a low-tier bill, with vast swaths of empty space and noticeable reductions in crowd decibelage was like walking into your living room the day after a party. It's the same room, with the same furniture, the same paint. It's just hollow. And a bit sad.

I'm not sure that we sold much merch that night. We grabbed our $250 and made our way back to the bivouac to lounge around in decaying sleeping bags and sweat-damp clothes, hoping we weren't wearing out our welcome. In my promoter days, I'd had bands stay with me for more than a single night due to van trouble or itinerary gaps.

It wasn't easy on the other end of the coin either.

September 14, 2006 "Gold Dust Kids"

09/14/2006 The Masquerade - Atlanta, GA
Other bands: Lola Ray

I wondered how many times you could play a burned out textiles mill cum creepy clubhouse and still be endeared by its charm.

The spooks hanging from the ceiling in fetters, the wrought-iron chandeliers, the vampish bartender girls who looked like thigh-booted clubgoers from The Crow. My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult in the chocolatey South.

There was always plenty of food and beer. Dinner entrees in the kitchen on the third floor. Snacks in the green room behind the stage on the first floor. It was hard not to get bloated sitting around with all the food and yeast-based beverages. But sitting around made you think too much about sitting around. The same jokes get told. The same dwindling conversational ruts. No longer an adventure, but a real-time observation of the degradation of a plot of real estate. Each go-around like a bi-annual snapshot of gradual sea change.

We brought suitcases into the clubs now, full of our Tesla-wear. Commandeered the dressing rooms and changed into our secondary identities. Nic would always find some way to amuse himself during the block of down time before stage.

He found an exterminator's backpack tank and sprayer and wore it in shoes with underwear. Nic's understated comedic nuance magnified its humor tenfold. I always thought he had the genius gene.

Someone big played up top. I never found out who. It was usually someone like Hank III or Mudvayne, and it was always after our show was over. We were still the After School Special. Not yet big boys, even though most band members in big boy bands were now younger than us.

Boredom was a tangible being. You could speak to it, but it would not go away.

September 12, 2006 "Slippery, Hippery, Flippery"

09/12/2006 The Basement - Columbus, OH
Other bands: Lola Ray, locals

I never knew tight pants until I met Lola Ray.

Johnny lived in NYC and had the biggest East Village wardrobe one could stuff into a vintage suitcase. I imagine some people would pay lots of money to have people like Johnny dress them because he seemed likely born wearing an ironic tee and motorcycle boots. In Lansing I told him I liked his pants, so he gave them to me in Columbus.

Until that point, I'd been wearing a pair of dark brown flannel slacks from H&M. They were snug, at least on the first wear after a wash. But these new pants were snug in the way Spawn's pants were snug. They were quad-hugging varicose-bursters of the first order. Jet black and slightly flared at the boot. If I left them buttoned for more than thirty minutes, I risked internal organ failure.

Johnny gave them to me graciously, and after I changed in The Basement restroom, the Lola bassist looked at my strut and said "now that's an ass I can get behind."

Perfect.

Another piece of the Dark Man puzzle coming into place.

The Basement was a lower-level counterpart to a larger venue, similar to how The Shelter was at the bottom of the larger St. Andrews Hall in Detroit. It was cleaner than The Shelter and roomier so the fifty or sixty people that showed up still looked like a small family reunion minus the fat aunt on a scooter.

We knew a guy in town who dated a long time friend of ours whose sister had a place near downtown. He promised us we could crash there for the night.

He gave us directions and we left separately. We found the house and made the slow luggage parade up the sidewalk and made ourselves at home. Threw sleeping bags in the corners, grabbed couches. Took a piss in the bathroom.

Then the sister came downstairs in a nightgown swinging a hockey stick.

"I don't know who the hell you are but you better get the hell out of my house."

The precariousness of the situation would have been worrisome if it weren't so comical. But we were polite guests, so we vacated back out onto the sidewalk until her brother arrived to defuse the situation.

He calmed her down, reassured her we weren't a gang of sharp-dressed serial rapists, and we filtered back in, but only after she had ambled back upstairs horribly embarrassed.

Seventy dollars for a hotel room was seeming less and less expensive every time we hit the highway.

September 10, 2006 "My Face Screams No"

09/10/2006 BSU Tally - Muncie, IN
Other bands: Lola Ray, Freakshow Foley

In ten long years I'd gone from a nameless wallflower kid in a farm town scene to the relative culture king of a region. I rarely had money to go to bars where the beer wasn't free, but when I did it was handshakes and backpats for the duration.

My first years in college found me studying exercise science because I was an ardent worshipper of the almighty Health Club. I could take a blood pressure and calculate a Body Mass Index like nobody's business. People could never grasp the concept of 'exercise science' until I elucidated that it was a discipline encompassing physiology, kinesiology and various other -ologies relating to human performance. Really, I just wanted to put tubes on people and make them run on treadmills.

But I was a round peg in a square hole in that scene and quickly realized I didn't fit the personality profile of most of my fellow tanned and wind-pant-clad classmates. The people I ran with preferred to go to shows in smoky bars and dark clubs and stay up all night talking about The Beatles and punk rock and C.S. Lewis. My classmates were pretty young things with cross-trainers and ever-present water bottles. I had a mohawk and a nose ring with a chain connected to my ear. Petty, yes, but it's hard to stay motivated in a classroom where you're the only one drawing band logos on your microbiology notebook, even if I was really, really healthy.

In 1995, I was a boy-faced freshman too young to get into Headliners, the local hipster bar back when hipster meant bleached tips and tribals on guys and nose rings and bell bottoms on girls. It was a little slice of Lollapalooza at the end of Dill Street, and I could only stand on the sidewalk and watch girls I had crushes on walk into the dark and smoky ambiance with upperclassmen whom I was convinced would take advantage of them in ways I certainly never would. That's the story I told myself, anyway.

The place I could go was The Flying Tomato Pizza, which was a multi-level pizza and beer joint down the street that had Sunday night local shows. And in 1995, this was usually death metal or grunge. There was a band from our town that signed a $25,000 publishing deal with Interscope once, and it was a big deal.

Half the time I would stand with my other too-young friends outside the window, watching the band freak out on some crazy blast beats or proto-yarling. I didn't care about getting in, nor that I was usually freezing. I was away from my parents, carving out the first nebulae of my own universe in the steam-breath nights University Boulevard, fall semester 1995.

And like all college scenes (and biblical travails), this too came to pass. I promoted small shows on my own. Then bigger ones. Then I started to tour. Then my band got signed. Then I was a big deal.

And while I was away on tour, the Village of my first alternate universe dissolved away. Headliners went out of business. So did Ben and Jerry's. Whole blocks of nook-n-cranny head shops were razed, and posh new retail outlets and sandwich restaurants were built on the ruins. The Flying Tomato became a gyro joint, which also went out of business.

I used to know just about everyone who would go to a local concert in town. During my promoter days, I couldn't walk a block down campus without a car driving by and someone yelling my name. In 2006, I could look across a small sea of faces and be lucky to recognize ten. The college, and life, had churned the rest out.

September 9, 2006 "Monkey David Wine"

09/09/2006 Orange Street - Akron, OH
Other bands: Lola Ray, Oh No! Oh My!, locals


Akron. Family.

Lola Ray had a surprisingly big following, probably due to being signed on Good Charlotte's label. This is not to say the shows were packed by any means. But for a band none of us had heard of prior to getting the tour itinerary e-mail, they seemed to draw about enough to make it hard to see which of our two bands had the real draw from night to night. Bear in mind, these were still forty-ticket nights.

Lola Ray was fronted by a charismatic and handsome Filipino from New York via Los Angeles named Jonny. He had Trash in Vaudeville clothes and $100 hair but somehow he seemed a little more real than the kids I found myself more and more looking down on. He looked like a young kid but with tattoos on his hands and arms of fighting robots and kitchen appliances, an approach to skin art that always appealed to me. The idea of getting something absurd etched into your skin forever as an eternal affront to life's rigidities.

There was something about his voice, too, in the way that it channeled a twenty-five year-old Robert Smith and his tarnished and sour melody lines. Lola Ray was a band that helped affirm my suspicion that it doesn't matter if you're good or not. It just matters how much money you have, who knows you and how good the lead singer's abs look in the lights.

Orange Street was a sweaty dive, even in the crisping air of September. Tiny rotted plywood stage on one side of a partition, tiny rotted bar on the other. Mics held together with duct tape and cords rough from the dried residue of a thousand shows.

Strange Days was losing itself further down the rabbit hole with every tour, getting more raw, more blown out, more spiritual. I liked the idea of being able to speak without the pretense of melody. I preached. And at the end, when it all came down to prepare for Eric's guitar solo, I went down into the audience and shoved as many as I could onstage at the moment the sonics and decibelage hit the ceiling. This energy was to share.

September 8, 2006 "Earth by Invitation Only"

09/08/2006 Mac's Bar - Lansing, MI
Other bands: Lola Ray, locals



It took six years, but I finally came around to the conclusion that I didn't very well trust a label with our band's presentation anymore. I just wanted their money.

I carried the mistaken, and admittedly lazy, notion that once the ink dried on the contract all the sparkly visual stuff would be taken care of by design gurus employed by the record company. All our one-sheets and marketing copy would be expertly written by ultra-talented freelancers who would nail our essence on the proverbial head with their vibrant wordsmithery. Our legend would be crafted by outside forces working on our behalf while we sat back and played with twelve-string guitars and vintage amps in the studio.

But now I was certain the only way I was going to be able to deliver my vision after countless lukewarm tour receptions and respectable, but not inspiring, record sales was to take matters into my own hands and strike a deep personal vein in the brainspace of anyone who happened to pass through our high beams.

I was over the top at first. A character had started to form, an off-kilter, eccentric mad genius of sorts, seemingly stuck in an anachronistic gaslight era of pre-modern history. It was a character I dumped all my purest passions into for less than an hour a night, leaving the nerves behind in a fog of whiskey breath and stale corn chips in the dressing room. I posted blogs with strange and klunky language, as if Shel Silverstein or Edward Gorey had turned slightly evil and maniacal. But just slightly.

I started personally updating our blogs and news bulletins instead of letting our label or management do it. I wrote op-eds for Purevolume and Alternative Press. I took all the nightly mailing list collections from our shows and sent each address a personalized letter thanking them for coming out to the show. When people posted comments on our Myspace page, I visited theirs and commented back (something most bands do nowdays, but we had almost twenty-thousand friends at the time). I took note of where they were from, what they liked, what kind of person they seemed to be, and went to great lengths to not leave a sterile spam-sounding form letter in their comment fields. I responded to every e-mail as earnestly as I could, remembering the days when I was fresh out of high school trying to contact bands to play my tiny town and getting a two-sentence e-mail in response, if I got a response at all. A veritable shrug-off. I called fans who had signed up on the street team, leaving some speechless, and others insisting I talk to all the friends that happened to be in the room. It took me four years to find my singing voice, but it took me six to find this one.

No one was going to paint a picture of our band anymore except me. I couldn't trust anyone. But this meant that my family time at home was even more encroached upon. Evenings that should have been lazy trips to the park or an outdoor concert or a Tuesday night dinner with friends became laptop sessions filled with hours of e-mails and Myspace commenting and blog writing. The challenge was invigorating, but I found myself with my nose in a computer every night on our breaks until I fell asleep with my face on the keys. And on tour, I sat most of the time on the bench behind the driver's seat, typing away at new blogs, new news bulletins, filler editorial for low-tier rock zines I got roped into contributing to and Husherville, saving them all as Word documents until I could upload them later using the club's wireless Internet.

In Lansing, I found a greasy spoon diner across the street from Mac's Bar and spent most of the pre-show time at a table drinking coffee and clicking away in my stylized mad scientist syntax.

Mac's was fuller than I would have expected for two bands whom I assumed were still relatively unknown. Lola Ray, from New York, dressed more stylish than we would have a year earlier. But now that we had grown into our costumage, it was as if fashion didn't matter. Hair and jeans and all the other trappings of scene comeuppance were inconsequential, because we were now breathing deep the breath of theater. We lived and breathed and played in a parallel universe attainable only through the wormhole of our album.

Jonny, the singer from Lola Ray, said afterward that he was amazed and grateful that his band could tour with such a great band as ours. It went a long way in setting the tone for the camaraderie between the two bands, something that had an effect on the energy of the tour as a whole. And needless to say, as the overly self-critical artist that I was and am, I still felt upstaged by this new band we'd now be sharing the highway with for the next two weeks.