October 21, 2006 "White People Do This"

10/21/2006 Irving Theater - Indianapolis, IN
Other bands: Theanti, Them Roaring Twenties & BIGBIGcar

Words do little to describe how much planning went into this concert, our official release show for our third offering for public consumption. Our second, long-awaited full-length album.

It started weeks before in Kansas City, in the massive basement entertainment center of Aaron's aunt and uncle. The idea struck me that it might be a good, or at least interesting, idea to go whole hog on the absurdity tip and make this concert a confetti-fest of Spoonful Weighs a Ton proportions.

So in our downtime, I scoured eBay for cheap confetti cannons and beach balls. I passed a small budget by the rest of the guys and went on shopping spree of sorts, buying up entire lots of balloons and beach balls. I found a case of 20 twist-to-fire confetti cannons, each about 2 ft. high and in the shape of giant champagne bottles.

I bought a shitload of those tiny confetti poppers that drunk people pop on New Years to pass out at the door, and I looked for a place I could rent those giant dancing air-filled balloon people that are always in the front of car lots but all the places I could find were out of state and too expensive. I thought it would be great to have those things spring to life at the end of Strange Days when Eric launched into his solo.

I bought pancake mix and borrowed a portable self-heating pancake griddle to fling pancakes at the crowd. I made muffins to do the same. (To be fair, I didn't invent the pancake gag. Everything, Now did it at their release show and I was riding their jock.)

In short, I was preparing for massive messy mayhem in a room full of sweaty, confetti-soaked kids floating dozens of volleyballs above their heads like enormous pastel molecules floating on a dark sea of hands. I was preparing for aural armageddon in a wash of bright blinking lights and the smell of fog and burnt pancakes.



Captain Mainwaring at The Irving Theater, 10/21/06.

The venue was an old historic building, an old 600-cap venue with a stage that once lived in Market Square Arena and that supposedly supported Elvis' fat ass a few decades prior. A local kid I'd never met but who was a friend of a friend of a band I knew made the connections to set up the show. He promised a massive flyering campaign all over the city.

We also partnered with a national Darfur campaign, who put our name on glossy promotional material and slapped our pics up on their smooth website right next to the likes of Sparta and Rise Against. We were one of only a dozen bands on the carousel, and because we had agreed to lay out some literature and say a few words between a song or two about the cause, our show was listed on the site in front of millions of eyeballs worth of traffic.

This show, by all intents and purposes, had the makings of greatness. Another stepping stone to The Storybook Ending and a monumental reminder that we were, in fact, still relevant and that good things come to those who wait and that Jesus Christ and Ray Kroc and John Wayne love us all.

So when the twenty ticket holders trickled in the door, including my wife, whom I had finally convinced to come to another show after nearly four years, all the while hoping she'd see the vast amounts of progress we'd made (only to leave early), I went backstage and got drunk on Canadian Club.


"Oh god, people actually listen to these guys." -written on a Brazil poster at the Irving. We think it was Bigbigcar.

October 17, 2006 "Avalava"

10/17/2006 Village Green Records - Muncie, IN
Other bands: Arrah and the Ferns, Works Cited

Flat-bed trailers, I'm convinced, we're invented with the expedient musician in mind. I knew a guy once - actually the guy that recorded our demos at The Back Forty in Markleville - that hatched up a plan to do drive-by banding, wherein his band would set up on the flat bed of a large truck, drums and amps bolted to the floor, and they'd pull into parking lots and intersections, power up, and rock the fuck out.

He had electrical schematics drawn, welding scenarios, the whole bit. I don't know if he ever did it. He smoked a lot of pot so it likely never got farther than the couch. But I always thought it was a great idea.

Flat-bed trailers are great, especially because an instant stage is never more than a friend-of-a-friends-dad away.

There was one parked in front of Village Green Records, which was the new town hipster nest that had opened up in a former video rental place owned by a blind guy.

It was a house-ish property that had grown a dense crust of paint and flyers and faded vinyl stickers. The barnacled crust of youthful liberalism. Short-term boarders crashed and long term renters stayed in the back rooms, rehydrating dried asian food in an obliterated kitchen with out-of-code wiring and unseen, but smelled, water damage. A vinyl utopia saturated in the esoteric stench of incense.

Eric and Aaron and I had worked up some acoustic versions of some songs, none of which were very solid but they were interesting arrangements nonetheless, replete with accordion and glockenspiel. My new props from the theater of the Absurd. It felt surprisingly good to break away from high-decibel walls of sound from time to time.

I was nervous, feeling like someone's lame dad playing for all this new blood. My guts still churned with ammonia residue of caustic criticism both heard and imagined. One local kid trolled our message board the previous summer and tried valiantly to wound our pride with snide comments about our exploitation of another country from our choice of band name, and our sonic derivations from bands I never owned records of but whom he was sure we listened to constantly. A post-adolescent blowhard, intensely opinionated but intellectually inept. We traced his ISP from the message board and gleaned a few clues from his posts to find out he was a dishwasher at a local dinner spot.

Something about a prophet is without honor only in his hometown.

So we sat up on the trailer bed in folding chairs, singing dark and serious songs that were loose and held together by a vague sense of tune and time, playing after two sugary-psychedelic-devil-may-care indie pop darlings of the time. Our music, to me, felt overwrought and melodramatic in those climes. My banter felt contrived and indulgent.

Because I rarely left the house anymore when we were home, the sets of eyes staring up at the truck bed felt critical and unwavering. My scene was gone. I no longer had my finger on this town's pulse.

Intermezzo 9875

I forgot to mention that we'd been offered a two-week run with the band Say Anything during the space between our ill-fated college tour and the beginning of our long and quizzical stretch of dates with post-grungers Smile Empty Soul.

This marked a well-deserved return to large stages and sold out venues and guaranteed free dinner every night there was a show. A tonic for the ego, even though the inevitable subconscious fan envy would undoubtedly take hold the minute we watched our tourmate's merch tables get mobbed. Regular hot meals would almost make up for it. Almost.

The band had a singer named Max who, it was said, suffered from an acute personality disorder that required fistfuls of medication in order for him to function properly in normal society. I talked to him a few times during the run, but most of the time he shuffled around the bus area in pajama pants and a band t-shirt. Every interview I read about him started with a few paragraphs about an infamous incident where he was found running down the middle of a Manhattan street, naked and incoherent.

He may very well have been certifiably insane, but the way his batshit antics were almost too perfectly baked in to the press release made it seem as if there was a preconceived marketing concept at work under the surface. And to those of us who were under some real mental duress at the time, any insincerity in Crazytown was highly, highly frowned upon. I kept my eyes open.

But in the meantime, I grabbed a couple days of work from the glass and aluminum shop. I grew to hate the cochlea-raping scream of the aluminum saw that used to hit me as soon as I walked in the door at 5:55 a.m.. I wore headphone-style hearing protection to keep my wits and the integrity of my most valuable asset, but I realized I liked the solitude of not having to hear anything in that shop, ever, and I eventually never took them off.

I didn't have much to say though, and I don't think a lot of my colleagues were all that anxious to hear what an on-again-off-again rocker had to say about anything, since most of the rock guys they knew were local burnouts who played The Water Bowl once or twice a year. They were nice guys but I could see their eyes glaze over when I told them about the "other thing" I did.

To some it was a glaze of disbelief and to others it was the glaze of "you're not living real life." It certainly made for awkward conversation when a publicist from New York would call me while I was up on a ladder in Blackford County to talk about doing editorial for Alternative Press, a magazine you could buy at the supermarket across the street from our employee parking lot. It would seem too surreal, and I would feel like I was coming across like a kid who makes outrageous lies to get attention.

One guy said he picked up the new Brazil CD at Best Buy, which lent a good dose of proof to my burden. But the idea that a guy that sweeps floors at a metal shop behind a Wal-Mart supercenter could have an album available in the electronics mega-mart across the highway was beginning to illustrate a hard truth that was not always apparent to a casual observer.