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.
