theriotbefore.com

A lot was riding on Amarillo. Prior to our arrival we had gone, more or less, 0 for 3 in Texas, and Amarillo was our last stop in the state and the last chance for Texas to redeem itself. This worried me from the instant we pulled into town. Why? Because downtown Amarillo looks like this on a busy Thursday evening:

The place was a ghost town. Even worse, you know what else was a ghost town? The venue we were supposed to play at. No one was there. The people putting on the show were nowhere in sight. By now this was almost expected. It was the eighth inning, Texas was pitching a no hitter, and didn’t look like it would be lobbing anything our way anytime soon. We called time out, stepped out of the batter’s box, postponing the inevitable, and got some Mexican food.

Texas is the cornerstone of American gluttony and the restaurant we found had no intention of breaking stride with this longstanding tradition. In true Texan fashion the Mexican place we went to, Acapulco (coincidentally one of the only inhabited buildings downtown) also served hamburgers, hamburgers that looked like this:

An entire pound of ground beef on a nine-inch bun. I can barely eat a pizza that size, let alone an entire hamburger. Jason and Freddy wisely split it.

Cheers.

As a recent convert to vegetarianism, I am still in that honeymoon stage where I hypocritically look down on people eating food I thoroughly enjoyed in very recent history. This new arrogance gained even more momentum during this meal because it was combined with my already strongly negative views about American gluttony. With both in full force, I sat back, ate my bean and rice burrito, and smugly passed judgment on the giant burger, my pretension taking the opportunity to overindulge in its own little feast of self-righteousness.

I sat perched upon my high horse until dinner ended, when I was then knocked back to the ground when we returned to check on the venue. It was still empty. Two hours after we were supposed to load in. Unable to even get in touch with the promoter, we faced the fact that we would not be playing a show that night. We had stood and faced Amarillo, swung, and missed horribly. Texas shut us out.

Beaten down, we piled back into the van and decided to leave where we obviously weren’t welcome, get out of Texas and head towards Albuquerque, where we had friends, as soon as possible. After filling up our gas tank we opted to swing by the venue one last time just to check to see if someone had finally shown up before we left for good. Like Lot’s wife we needed one last glance when we should have just put our head’s down and left. For this we were punished. Our van’s electrical circuits were turned to salt; specifically the trailer lights, the van’s rear lights, and our dash lights. We’ve lost these before due to blown fuses, but a quick check of the fuse box revealed that fuses weren’t the culprit this time. The problem lay somewhere deep in the vast inner workings of the van’s maze of electrical wires. Forced to choose between getting a hotel in a town that obviously hated us and possibly getting pulled over on our way out of town, we threw our hazards on, jumped on I-40 and got the hell out of Texas.

A crescent moon, hidden above the roof of the van, sat high in the sky and turned the occasional low tabletop hill, an import from further west, into a silhouetted sneak preview of landscapes to come. Cory looked out at the darkened landscape longingly. It being his first time this far passed the Mississippi, missing this drastically unprecedented scenery was almost enough to make us pull over and sleep, postponing our drive until the sun could shine light onto the land around and on the disappointment that would have followed, as he would have inevitably learned that, despite what the deceptive shadows around alluded to, there’s really no difference between western Oklahoma and eastern New Mexico, and what is new is nothing that we won’t see in abundance as we get closer to Arizona.

Inside the van, with the dash lights no longer working, the cd player was an island of soft blue and red light, interrupted only by the occasional cell phone display or Ipod. The latter coming alive after The Shins record ended then quickly fading away into hibernation once The Pixies we settled on. Garrett sat illuminated by his computer screen, occasionally referencing his new GPS program to give Jason updates about speed (no dash lights means no backlight speedometer) and location. I sat with my headphones on and listened to a “This American Life” podcast, growing increasingly envious of the intellectual, writing life I imagined Ira Glass lived, rubbing shoulders with successful, talented authors all the while tying together their stories with his own original, simple, profundity. I wanted that. I want that. People, after all, go to his shows.

Freddy missed all of this, preferring the excitement his subconscious could project onto his closed eyelids to the repeating darkness punctuated by farmhouse lights that seemed to extend for infinity outside our van’s windows. All the while, the hazard lights turned on, off, then on again each second, revealing in each moment of their brief repose that our lights were not getting the whole of the message sent by the switch on the dash. The message telling them to turn on and stay on was getting lost somewhere along the way, and so we settled with the emergency lights and limped three hundred miles west. Beaten and bruised by Texas, but not defeated. This, after all, is still much better than working.

Brett

You know that part in “Back to the Future” when Marty picks up the guitar and totally shreds a sick solo at the dance after his parents have kissed, his hand restored from an eerie limpidity, and his fate is secured? You know how sometime between kicking over a guitar amp and sliding across the floor on his back, the whole crowd stops dancing and looks at him completely quiet, five hundred collective jaws on the floor, utterly unable to deal with the strange noises that they are hearing, especially when coupled with Marty’s overly charismatic, uniquely odd delivery?

Well, last night in (appropriately enough) Midwest City, Oklahoma, I knew exactly how Marty McFly felt. I understood very well what it was like to look out at a sea of out of date indifference. But before I get into the details of the show, let me go back in time a little, all the way to last Saturday in New Orleans.

We are, to put it bluntly, not a popular band. Like, people don’t know who we are…at all. Granted, every once in while our name precedes our van, but this is a rare event indeed. The great majority of the time we play shows for people who’ve never heard of us, with the hope that after we’ve finished our set a few folks will be won over. It’s a long, difficult process earning fans this way, definitely the most arduous way to build a fan base. But it’s also the most organic and the one we prefer. That said, if people don’t know who we are, the only way they are going to see our set is if they come to the show we are on with the intent of watching one of the other bands we are playing with. As of right now, we have typically been playing shows with local bands from each town we’re in, and we depend on those local bands to bring out their fans and friends in the hope that we’ll have a crowd to play to. Most of the time this works out. For example, in Mobile, Alabama, we played before Criminal Class & the Hush Hush Revolution (think Rancid but more diverse and with talent) and there ended up being a solid fifty to sixty people watching us (that’s really good). We were excited about this. But then, the following day in New Orleans, on what should have been a dependable Saturday night, both locals dropped off, leaving us the only band left and about six people in the crowd. We were not excited about that. The following three nights were plagued by cancelled local bands, a case of the Mondays, and tornadoes, which, when combined, resulted in crowd sizes that ranged from three to ten, with a grand sum of no more than twenty non-band audience members in four shows.

So all in all, it was a pretty nice feeling when we showed up to the venue in Midwest City (granted, this was after our first show of the day was cancelled) and there were actually people there. Real, breathing, people! There to see a show and everything! It was hard to grasp at first, like walking out of a dark movie theater into a bright summer’s day parking lot, but we eventually adjusted, and what we saw gave strength to our atrophied optimism. An optimism that stood strong even after we realized that the three other bands we were playing with were screamo bands. “So what if we’re playing with bands that sound different,” I thought. “That doesn’t really matter. After all, people are capable of liking all different kinds of music. Right?”

Wrong.

Our entire set, though performed in front of people, could just have easily been in a wax museum; a wax museum of very bored, unhappy sculptures. And it’s not like we’re a difficult band to get. It’s not like we do something that is over people’s heads. Throw four chords into a bowl, mix with upbeat drums, a riff or two, and some words about, more or less, “the system,” and you’ve got The Riot Before. It’s not rocket science. It’s fourth grade science fair science. But apparently, in Oklahoma, they haven’t quite got to vinegar and baking soda music just yet. We didn’t scream, and, well, neither did they.

I’m not saying that everyone hated our set, a few people came up to us afterwards who seemed to have they enjoyed themselves, just like what I’m sure what would have happened to Marty at the “Enchantment Under the Sea Dance.” if he hadn’t sped off to meet Doc and the flux capacitor. I bet a few of the people there actually loved his solo, but just didn’t feel like going against the overwhelming sentiment of the rest of the shocked motionless dancers. But, unlike Marty, I couldn’t confidently end with, “But your kids are going to love it.” We don’t have the time to wait for posterity anyway. Instead, we drank some watered down beer (it’s 3.2% in Oklahoma), packed up every cd and shirt we showed up with, and soberly drove away, nurturing out once again beaten down optimism with the hope that the show the following day in Amarillo would redeem Texas and steer our tour back on track. Little did we know what would meet us in Amarillo. But that’s another story for another blog. I’ve got to find a place to sleep.

Brett

P.S. What’s the deal with all my time travel talk lately? This is strange. Am I becoming a nerd or something?

A few entries back, I wrote entirely about this thing Freddie does where he thinks up ridiculous hypothetical questions and then immediately asks them, no matter the circumstance or direction of the current conversation, in utter sincerity. The questions are all so absurd and funny that I hated to see them wasted on only a few of us, and I decided, towards the end of last tour, to write them down, saving them for a blog, which I then wrote when the tour was finished. In that blog I mentioned I would continue to document Freddy’s absurdity and write it here for everyone’s pleasure. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way. There really haven’t been that many hypothetical questions asked, and when they have been, given that Freddy now knows they could make there way into writing, seem somewhat diminished in earnestness, a little less organic. It’s not really anyone’s fault, it’s just how things go. Like if the Star Wars Kid released another video, but this time on purpose. It just wouldn’t be the same. So today, when Freddy said during dinner “It would suck if you were invited to a buffet, but then, when you arrived you found out that you were the buffet,” and, after laughing at this, Garrett suggested it for the tour journal, I knew that the era had ended. I will no longer be following up on my promise to keep including Freddy’s questions or statements here, because the environment has changed, Freddy can now milk for celebrity what was intended for humiliation. And that’s just sad.

Speaking of sad, did you read my last entry? Holy crap, I was bummed. Well, no, not really. If you know me you know that I’m rarely sustainable bummed, though occasionally I go through a bout of extended melancholy, (which I don’t apologize for since, you know, Keats defends it and all) and I wrote the last entry for the sake of journal diversity. I want this to be a somewhat accurate representation of what it’s like to be on tour and the last entry helped fulfill some of my “tour totally sucks right now” quota.

The good news is that in Orlando we filled up our “make fresh squeezed Florida orange juice” quota.

It was delicious.

Then, in Tallahassee, we filled the “play in some sort of hay/tarp structure in someone’s backyard” quota.

Halfway through our set a gust of wind blew down part of the tarp, I successfully fought off the urge to make a “raise the roof” joke, thus saving face.

We played in Mobile two days ago, and, upon arriving at the venue early I decided to go for a walk. Downtown Mobile is a lot smaller than I originally thought it was, and before I knew it I was walking, all alone at night, down by the docks. Now I make it a point to avoid watching scary movies, but even though I haven’t seen many, I know that down by the docks, alone, and nighttime are terrible things to combine. By the time I realized this, I was already pretty far from the club and walking alone under some highway. I wasn’t sure if Mobile was a dangerous city or not, but not wanting to risk testing this, I about faced and walked back to the more well lit part of town. On my way back, I was, I think, “propositioned” by a guy in a Land Rover who followed me down a dead end street. I did my very best to quickly and successfully de-escalate that conversation.

A few of the bands scheduled to play the show in Mobile dropped off and, to fill an open slot, two girls from Germany played some songs on acoustic guitar and violin. They had flown to America a few weeks before, had been traveling wherever they could get rides, and had spent the last few weeks living in a tent in the backyard of the …Hush Hush Revolution’s house. Their music was great, only surpassed by their personalities and we ended up hanging out for the rest of the night, which, well, didn’t really end until morning. See, in Mobile, there’s no last call. Bars stay open for as long as they want. Combined with no open container laws, people can walk the streets all night long carrying drinks from bar to bar. It’s ridiculous. Don’t be a cop in Mobile, too much work. With this in mind, when the venue we played at closed at 3 am, the party didn’t, but instead moved to a gay bar down the street where Kariokee ensued until the sun rose. This last part I didn’t actually participate in. I had stayed up to record late levels a few nights in a row and, be unconditioned for that sort of thing, fatigue had finally caught up to me and I fell asleep in the van while the band and the Germans carried on.

But before you count me out, say I can’t hold my own on tour, check this out. The following morning, while everyone was still asleep, I went for a walk, and in spite of clearly posted signs…

I broke the law and read Proust in anarchic defiance…

So. Punk. Rock.

Anxious to play music on the street corners of New Orleans, the Germans joined us as we headed west. But, not before we took a picture!!!

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans still did a very good job of finding its way onto television, but mostly because of its reputation as a crazy place to party. The E! network dedicates a healthy majority of its programming for much of the year solely to blurring out various bead laden bodies congregated on New Orleans’ streets. But is this really what New Orleans, especially Bourbon street is like? I went to find out. Turns out, TV, believe it or not, has lied to you. This is the real Bourbon Street.

We didn’t hang out very long.

I was ok with this.

We’re in Texas now. Mexican food is finally dependable. This is exciting.

Brett

I was recently asked, I think by Freddy, what I would do if I had a time machine that could only go forwards or backwards in time, but not both. Would I choose to see the past or the future? After some thought I decided that I would forego the future and head back instead. I chose this because I figured that the future is set in stone, you can’t change it, so there’d be no point. It would be neat, interesting, entirely worthless information. But the past is different. Seeing the past would allow you to understand history better than anyone, you would really know what had occurred during that time, what regular people felt, how leaders were perceived, etc. That information would allow you to better gauge the present times, to see them in their historical context, and ostensibly become a smarter, wiser person. Knowledge of the future, while tempting, is paralyzing, while knowledge of the past contains nothing but potential energy.

At least, that’s how I would have answered Freddy’s inquiry then, but now, well now I’m not so sure. Right now this tour is currently in a trough of sorts, and there is a big part of me that would like to know just how long we will be here and whether or not we will ascend out of it any time soon. I’d like some perspective, even if I could do nothing with that information.

Our show last Thursday in Athens looked like this:

Apparently there were three other shows in town that night and we just couldn’t compete. Two people showed up. We played five songs, mostly practicing those we haven’t played in a while, ate some pizza, and went to bed.

The next day things started to look up again. Stateboro went well. The Hanger Haus has treated us incredibly two times in a row now and I can’t wait until we can go back. People had a good time, we had a good time, and the town that I otherwise would never have set foot in now holds a fond place in my heart.

Our show in Orlando ended up not happening, so the following day we trekked back to Athens and jumped on a show with Bomb The Music Industry, O’ Pioneers!!!, and Pegasuses XL. It was our second time that week with O’ Pioneers!!! and we couldn’t have been happier for that fact. There were definitely more people than two this time, which was nice, but a huge storm also showed up and kinda put a damper on what was an early Saturday bbq show. We had a great time hanging out afterwards, Athens has been good for that, but unfortunately, with gas costing as much as it does these days, it’s hard to get around on good times alone.

The same was true for yesterday. We had a show fall through and M16 was nice enough to add us to a show already happening near Tampa, but it was a Sunday and it’s hard to get people to come out on Sundays, especially when the town in question goes to sleep at 9pm and the venue takes nearly everything from the door. What was left over didn’t get close to covering the cost of the eight hour drive and so we sank a little deeper. Luckily, a very generous couple bought us beers, let us crash at their house, and cooked us breakfast. It’s people like that, complete strangers who open their homes to us, that I think is one of the biggest redemptive parts of being in a touring band. It helps keep my otherwise resounding cynicism in check.

Then today happened. After a delicious breakfast of pancakes and potatoes, we said our goodbyes and headed across the state to Jupiter. The show in Jupiter, FL looked like this:

In other words, it didn’t happen. The venue cancelled the show just minutes before we pulled into town. We drove a total of seven very un-free hours, burning very un-cheap gas the whole time, and the venue decided last minute not to open its doors. It’s called The Orange Door in Jupiter, Fl. Call them and tell them they suck.

So that’s how tour has gone so far. It hasn’t been entirely terrible really. At every show it seems like there has been someone or something that has redeemed that show. We’ve had a good time for the most part, it’s been better than working for sure, but, unfortunately, at it’s current rate, it’s not sustainable. I especially feel this fact in the pit of my stomach every time the needle falls once again to E and we pull into another gas station, it’s sign advertising that we will be plummeting into the red $2.95 at a time. It’s terrible that money plays a factor—that it’s even an issue at all—but that’s how it goes. It’s reality. A very, very unfortunate one. I hate that we can play a show, have a great time, meet amazing, generous people, and that something as small as money, gasoline really, does it’s best to spoil that, tarnishes what was otherwise pure. What we’re doing, at least I think, is better than money. Money is silly and trite and not very interesting to me, while music is just the opposite. And I’m sure that when I look back on this part of my life, I will think very little about how much I earned or lost, but instead focus on what I did, what I learned while doing something that isn’t entirely common, and is entirely important to me. But for now, I don’t have the pleasure of viewing my current situation from a distance, separated by a cushion of time elapsed. I don’t know how this will end, what direction this tour, or this band for that matter, will go in the next sixty days. And that is very unsettling, especially since I know what direction the cost of gas probably won’t go.

Being someone that has always harbored a desire to perform music, I’ve paid extra close attention to band biographies, and have watched them less for entertainment and more for education. I’ve studied the stories of other musicians in the hope that maybe I could glean some knowledge that would better prepare me for the road I’ve chosen to travel. One thing I’ve noticed, one thing common to all of their stories, is a period of struggle. They all went through a time when it was easier to do something else, when the outcome didn’t look very positive. And maybe it’s just for dramatic effect, maybe it wasn’t so bad for a lot of them, but whatever the case, I think it’s part of a rite of passage in a way. You have to go out and fail a few times before you can really succeed and truly value that success. I’m sure thousands of bands before us can attest to that fact.

So here we are, in the red, in a trough on stormy seas. I knew we’d be here, it was inevitable, but now I’d like to know how long. Will we, in our trusty (I hope) ’94 Dodge van ascend of this and spend the next sixty days riding the crests of the surrounding waves, or will we be overtaken by the odds that appear to be stacked against us? And it’s that question that now, if I had a flux capaciter and a bunch of gigawatts at my disposal, I’d use to go forward a bit and find the answer.

Brett

During the weeks and months that preceded this tour, when describing it to other people, my recitation of dates and locations was almost always met with some sort of exclamation of a varied degree of envy, something to the sound of, “Oh, I would just love to get out and see America.” America, I’ve gathered, is something that most Americans want to see. On a very basic level I’m sure this envy is motivated by a distaste for work and a desire to spend a couple months doing anything else. But I don’t believe it stops there. The yearning to travel, to explore this country, is ubiquitous in all Americans, not just those who’d like some time off work, and this is largely because the “myth of the road trip” makes up a large part of our cultural identity, so large that we all feel obliged to partake. Since we were young we’ve been continuously taught of the glory of the road trip. In history class we learned about the bravery of Lewis and Clark, the Pilgrims, or even the ill fated Donner Party. In one of the very first computer games we played, we forded rivers, shot bears, and tried to avoided typhoid, all while traveling west on The Oregon Trail. Mark Twain’s classic American novel, found in nearly every high school lit class in this country, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, teaches, amongst other things, of the redemptive power of the road trip. Leave the classroom, and this myth flourishes in pop culture. When I think back to nearly every movie I liked when I was fifteen, (Tommy Boy, Dumb and Dumber, etc.) they stood united in their praise for the road trip. I could go on, but I think the point has sufficiently been made. We all seem to have been born with our own little manifest destiny fire already instinctively burning in out hearts, and our culture is first to fan those flames.

As a result, when I mentioned to friends or coworkers that I would be driving around to nearly every state in the country over the course of the next couple of months, it touched on a narrative so deeply intrinsic in each of them, as classically American as repeatedly turning left or overeating, that they couldn’t help but wish they had the chance to do the same.

So, being both a American traveler and wildly philanthropic, I have set forth, in this great and grand tour journal, to mine the vast depths of my wisdom and experience, gather what I have accrued, and take you on a virtual road trip of sorts. I have endeavored to take the vastness of this country, all its diverse terrain and peoples, and painstakingly condense them down to their most basic, most vital elements, then offer that to you so that you may be able to, from the comfort of your own home, partake in the great American road trip experience and sooth that burning flame in your soul. I will do this all free of charge.

You’re welcome.

So dear reader, or shall I say Great American Traveler, Road Tripper Extraordinaire…

this….

is…

AMERICA!!!!!!

There, I just saved you, like, tons of money in gas and terrible fast food. You owe me.

Brett