theriotbefore.com

We’ve been in a Chicago for a few days. It’s been fun. I like Chicago. It is raining. I don’t really feel like typing much anything profound. So I don’t think I will. Do I ever anyway? Not sure. But never fear, we’ve got some days off in Ohio coming up, and if Ohio is anything like how I remember it, I’m sure there will be little or nothing else to do but type and type and type and type and….

Before we left Milwaukee we took a tour of the Miller factory. This was pretty boring to be honest. We watched a really crappy video that was supposed to be about the history of Miller, and it kinda was, but it was mostly just a big reason for some voice over guy to say “MILLER TIME!!” a whole bunch. I took notes during the film. Here are some quotes. It’s important to note that the voice over guy for this movie had a deep, dramatic, almost majestic voice. With that voice he said this:

“From the beginning, man has longed for Miller Time.”

“You set out each night in search of that one moment when things change from good to very good, we like to call that Miller Time” (guy spots foxy chick at bar, him and his buddies raise their Miller Lite bottles in a salute Miller Time).

“1933. Goodbye prohibition. Hello Miller Time!”

“As every man knows, couches were made for Miller Time.”

We learned that this one particular plant bottles and ships 500,000 cases of beer each day. That, I think, explains a lot about our current political situation.

At the end of the tour we got to sample some free beer. Neat. They also had postcards that we could fill out and drop in a slot with the good ol’ people at Miller picking up the tab for the stamps. I don’t really know my friend’s addresses so I wrote some messages to people that I hope the Postal Service could track down for me.

I thought I was hilarious. No one else agreed.

That happens a lot.

That night’s show was in McHenry, IL. I’ve never heard of the place before. I had very low expectations. It was a Thursday, the show was in a basement in a development somewhere near a lake. I assumed there would be seven people there. Instead this happened:

The basement was packed with a ton of really enthusiastic people. It was probably 110 degrees down there. I could barely hold onto my pick because my fingertips were sweating. One of the best shows on tour. Who would’ve guessed?

Brett

“If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.”
-Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

I did an interview the other day on the phone with a guy from a town in upstate NY. I’ve only really ever done a handful of interviews and every time they’re over it occurs to me that I’m terrible at them. Answering questions, I’ve decided, is a lot like learning to flip on a trampoline. See, when I was in the third grade my parents got my siblings and me a trampoline for Christmas, and it wasn’t long before my brother and I started learning how to flip and spin and all sorts of different things. The thing with that stuff is the first few times you try a different flip, say a back flip with a spin, everything is a complete blur. But eventually you learn to orientate yourself in the air, you learn to spot the ground during a certain point your rotation and to land perfectly nearly every time. You become comfortable. You can do it with your eyes closed even. But not at first, and well, right now interviews are a lot like that. It’s a dizzy blur and then, before I even know what’s going on, it’s over and I’m rarely left on my feet. The problem is, and those of you who read this journal can attest to this, I’m bad at brevity. Like, really bad at it. It takes me a thousand words to describe something as insignificant as taking a picture with Juggalos, so you can imagine the difficulty I have when it comes to answering, “So, what are your songs about?” I fumble around with different themes, try to pick out a single representative song, think of an obscure one, get halfway through describing what it is about, stop, panic, worry it’s not the best example, pick another one, say “umm” a lot, and hope that when it’s all over I don’t land on my head too painfully.

After I finish burying the interviewer under a mountain of loosely connected thoughts and words, I typically spend the next few hours reconstructing what happened, answering the questions again in my head, this time doing a much better job. I did that the other day. In fact, the question about what my songs are about stayed on my mind for a few days. I kept trying to answer it and never really found a summary I could be happy with. Then I read the above Kurt Vonnegut quote and had my answer. See, the quote isn’t an argument against being reasonable. It’s not advocating abandoning reason in order to find love and notoriety, but about abandoning the unreasonable standards we use to determine whom we pay attention to. Think of all the unreasonable political figures in American right now, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Michael Moore. Think of all the attention we give the unreasonable. Then think of all the very bright, albeit reasonable, political scientists out there who actually have good ideas about what to do with the world. Think of how little attention we pay them. They’re boring. They’re ignored.

So I guess that’s the key to my answer. The Riot Before’s songs, for the most part, are about being reasonable, about defending reason as something worthwhile, something worth loving and remembering. I’d like to redeem reason. Those who are eager to shock, anxious to entertain, have colored reason as flaccid, weak, and ineffective, but it’s not. It’s powerful. And when reason is guided by wisdom, it’s possible for it to occupy seemingly extreme ideas. That’s the beauty of Vonnegut. He was entirely reasonable yet rarely status quo. He was not boring because it is unreasonable to be boring, but first he redefined boredom, redefined entertainment, made you realize that it was foolish to be entertained by those who weren’t thoughtful, then, when you began to see through the shallow arguments and ideas of those who polarize, those who react without thinking, he made you value the opposite, which, surprisingly, was the thoughtful, reasonable people you once thought boring, but now find fascinating. The litmus test for Vonnegut, and I hope for my songs as well, is, “Is this reasonable?” And I think that whether the songs are about politics, personal beliefs, relationships, or anything else, reason is a theme common to all.

Unfortunately, that still took me way too many words to answer. Maybe it’s not my fault, maybe brevity is unreasonable. I guess I’ll figure it out soon enough. Hopefully soon. I’d like to experience being interviewed rather than trying in vain to make sense out of the blur that it currently is.

The good news is that not everything is a blur. It’s currently day 49 of our tour. I’m in Milwaukee where last night we played show number 44 in a small packed basement. Tonight is show 45. In another basement. This one in McHenry, IL. By the time we get home we will have played nearly 150 shows in our first year since Freddy joined the band. And while every show is a little different, we’ve played enough to be able to see clearly, to make out what is happening, to be comfortable in the spin, and at the end of each set we more or less land on our feet. It’s fun. I love it. I love being on tour, even when it’s not all that glamorous. Even when we drive eight hours from Missoula, MO, to Provo, UT only to discover that the show has been cancelled, that we must drive another nine hours to Denver, to another show that will get cancelled, then to Lincoln, NE, to a show that never came together, even then it’s worth it. It’s worth it because we’re still doing something. It’s worth it because at our lowest points, when we are sitting in Denver with an emptying gas tank and a cancelled show, people we don’t even know, who have no obligation to us, make phone calls and find us a show, with a band that doesn’t know who we are, but generously shares the stage with us, and, shockingly, the door money they were supposed to make that night. See that’s the thing about tour, you show up in a town and people help you out, even though they don’t have to, even though they get nothing out of it, even though they sometimes lose money over it. Everyday I am reminded that no matter how much work we do, we are dependent upon the generosity of others, people who give us stages to play on, floors to sleep on, food to eat, and so many other things. Every day we are humbled. T.S. Eliot wrote, in the Four Quartets that…

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

I know that when I go home, humility won’t be as abundant, and, as a result, neither will the wisdom that is derived from it. I will not struggle with where to sleep but I will struggle with being proud. And it is that reality that brings me to already lamenting the end of tour despite the fact that it is still three weeks away.

Oh, and they don’t sell fireworks in VA. That sucks too.

Brett

I know I made a big production of sorts in the last blog about granting myself amnesty in regard to recapping the entirety of our experience out west. And while I still plan on holding to that—I have no intention of describing the late night hot tub in Reno or why Freddy got the nickname, Bobblefred, while in San Francisco—there’s one thing that happened while we were in Chico that’s just too big not to mention here. I’ll explain.

Last year, on our first tour, we were sitting around in Buffalo after a day off in Niagara Falls talking about some upcoming shows. In doing so someone, I can’t remember whom, brought up the fact that in Detroit we would probably happen across some Juggalos. I had no idea what a Juggalo was, guessed that it may be similar to a Gigolo, and was surprised to find out that it was a person who was a super-fan of the Detroit based rap-rock group, Insane Clown Posse a.k.a. ICP. I didn’t even know that ICP still existed, I thought they had faded out with Fred Durst and friends, let alone the fact that they were alive and well enough to warrant a sub-culture of devotees to what is, more or less, a modern, white rap, knock-off of Kiss. I was intrigued and after spending a few minutes researching Juggalos on Wikipedia , I was thrilled that I may come face to face with a few, we all were.

But as those of you who’ve read this journal from the beginning know, we never actually made it to Detroit on that tour. The van broke down in Ohio, thus killing the dream of seeing Juggalos. As a result of our built up excitement never being fulfilled, we have had a sort of obsession with Juggalos ever since, always keeping an eye out for face paint and Jnco jeans, hoping that one day our paths would cross. Finally, after nearly a year-long Juggalo drought, in Chico, CA, the heavens open up and gloriously rained Faygo down upon us.

It started small with just a few Juggalos.(and Juggalettes I might add, lest you think I’m some sort of sexist!) walking down the street, decked out in full gear, faces painted just like how the internet said. It was unreal. I was just plain ecstatic as we drove by them, a smile permanently spread across my face, my heart bursting with joy! Finally! We considered circling around the block just to get a second look, knowing that it may be months, years, or never again before being blessed with more Juggalos, but that turned out to be unnecessary when we turned the corner and hit jackpot. An ICP concert! There were at least 200 Juggalos standing in line, all face paint and Faygo, and more were showing up by the minute! I couldn’t believe my eyes. You know when Moses went to the top of the mountain after forty years of wandering the wilderness and God finally showed him the Promised Land? Well in that moment, while driving by an entire city block completely saturated with ICP fans, I totally knew how Moses fest. But we were not content with simply seeing Juggalos from the safety of the van. We had to get up close. We had to document this monumental occasion. Posterity needed proof of this fateful day!

We parked the van a few blocks away and, unsure exactly how the Juggalos would react, especially since they were in such a large group, we nervously made our way over to the show. You know how people go diving with sharks, but not in a cage, they just jump in the water and hang out at the bottom while sometimes hundreds of sharks go swimming by? You know how the guide guy who is getting interviewed is always calm and insists that the sharks won’t bite, that they aren’t concerned about humans, but inside he’s probably terrified, knowing that sharks are about as predictable as a roulette table? Well that’s how I felt. Except the sharks had their faces painted.

We walked by once or twice, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, unsure of how we’d go about getting a picture with them, doubting the feasibility of safely doing that. Finally, Jason, a friend of Broadway Calls, who was with us and just so happened to have a fancy camera with him, approached some of the people in line and enthusiastically asked them if they wanted to be photographed for a local magazine. They did. Like, a lot. About thirty of them went pretty crazy, yelling, striking poses, spraying Faygo, and though I still wasn’t sure it was safe, I jumped down in front of the group with Josh and Matt from Broadway Calls. Worried that I’d look out of place, I quickly threw up a Westside sign, hoping that would conceal my huge goofy grin and teal t-shirt. It did! No one noticed. They were just pumped about being in a magazine (they weren’t going to be). I retreated back to safety just as the entire line, at least 200 Juggalos and Juggalettes, starting chanting, in unison, “FAMILY! FAMILY! FAMILY!”, but not before I got sprayed with some Faygo and the moment was preserved forever in my heart and more importantly in this picture:

Tour could seriously have ended right then and there and I would have been ok with that. Everything else is just icing on the cake as far as I’m concerned.

Brett

During my senior year of college I had a lot on my plate—two bands, two jobs, tons of school, a surfboard I irregularly disgraced, a myspace account—and as a result I got in the habit of not turning in most of my assignments on time. It wasn’t that I was lazy, the opposite was probably true, I simply had too much on my schedule. The thing about turning in assignments late is that it can be embarrassing if you wait too long, beyond a certain acceptable grace period. A few days, a week, two weeks even. That’s no problem. A simple sorry accompanied with the paper and everything is cool. But wait longer than that and all of a sudden it’s different. It’s shameful. It’s almost, no wait, it IS humiliating turning in an assignment that is a month or more late. I had to face this humiliation a number of times, and, commonly, my solution was not to face it. Instead I waited it out until the end of the semester, sometimes with the paper finished long before, and turned in the assignment at the last minute, once even after the final, therefore ensuring the least amount of future class time spent living in the shame of my educational tardiness.

This, of course, makes no sense at all. It’s not like having an unfinished paper is any better, any less disgraceful, but that’s how I dealt with it then and, unfortunately, that’s kinda how I deal with things now. Like, I don’t know, let’s take a random thing, like, umm….let’s see here….uhhhh.….this tour journal for instance. Yeah, that’s a good, completely random example. It’s been sparsely updated as of late in spite of the fact that a lot of really fun, journal worthy, nay! journal defining, events have taken place. But I’ve opted to experience these things in real time and then to sleep, and unfortunately that has left very little time for writing about what was happening (though I did write about going home which really had nothing to do with tour and I’m sure annoyed all the people I’ve been traveling with as well as those of you who read this). So, like myself at the end of college, or like you when you have that movie that’s way overdue, like months or maybe even a year, and you don’t even want to confront the issue anymore so you just leave it on your coffee table even though it haunts you every time you try to watch TV, reminding you that you are, at your very core, a total slacker who can’t even take the time to drive down the street and return Y Tu Mama Tambien which, come to think of it, you never even watched because though subtitles seemed smart and pretentious at the movie store but just sounded tiring when you got home, and then later you found out there’s a bunch of male nudity in that movie and you’re not sure you even want to watch it anymore……..wait, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, this journal has been like that. Not the male nudity part, but more the slacking off because you feel bad for originally slacking off.

The thing with slacking off a little bit when trying to describe something as non-stop, as action packed, if you will, as tour, is that everything piles up into some sort of crazy jumble of good times and insightful thoughts and PBR, and it’s hard to sort it all out. So, I don’t think I’m going to sort it out. For the sake of my sanity I’m just going to summarize all that I’ve neglected over the past few weeks so that I can move on, so I can get out from underneath all that has happened.

Here’s the deal.

We played with Broadway Calls from Tuscon, AZ all the way to Longview, WA. From early on we realized that they were, for lack of desire to find a better word, totally awesome. There’s something about meeting up with new people that adds new life to tour, takes you out of the rut that so easy to settle into, makes the mundane stuff more exciting. Plus, the shows got better, much better. So that didn’t hurt either.

In San Diego we all got really hip star tattoos on are elbows.

In Redding we swam at a lake…

….grew some killer mustaches…

…and there were kittens!!

Yeah, Redding ruled. I recommend that place.

In Portland I got a fancy latte…

…and saw some of my best friends. I love Portland and being there for only a day is such a tease. It was way too short lived.

Sadly, our last show with Broadway Calls was that night, near Portland, in Longveiw, WA. It was tough to say goodbye (though we did get to see Matt and Ty in Seattle the next night) and made even worse when the cops came to the apartment we were staying at and threatened to take all of us to jail for “partying” and “providing alcohol to minors.” The thing was, that night, we specifically opted not to party. We were all tired and felt like just hanging out and talking. So that’s what we did. We went to Matt’s apartment and tried to enjoy a quiet night with our good friends who we wouldn’t be seeing for a while. Well, apparently we weren’t quiet enough, the downstairs neighbors called the cops. They showed up and demanded that we all go outside and give them our ID’s. We tried to asked questions, not being from Washington most of us were unfamiliar with this tactic, thought it illegal without a warrant, but anytime we tried to politely ask the officer what was going on and if it was justified, tried to explain why it was unfamiliar, he immediately got more angry and threatening. Wouldn’t let us talk. Cut us off. Made us do what he wanted. He told us that we could all be taken to jail because there was beer there and it was available to minors, and—since beer in a fridge with an underage person in the house didn’t seem illegal, especially since only one person bought that beer—when we asked for a reason behind this he just got more upset. Never gave us a real answer except that we could go to jail, implied we would if we didn’t cooperate. I’m not a very confrontational person, I rarely get upset, I normally do a pretty good job of calmly de-escalating situations, and that night I was the epitome of sober, yet every time I tried to politely ask about my rights I was treated like an argumentative drug addict. It was infuriating to me that a police officer can show up anywhere, make demands of people, make up laws, not answer questions, and still get his way because the only way we could have fought back would have been to spend a night in jail, pay to get bailed out, get a lawyer, pay that lawyer, show up at court, beat the charges against us, counter sue, and try to win that. We had to be in Seattle the next day and that didn’t really leave us much time to make our way through the legal system. So we just did what the cop wanted. And sadly, I’m pretty sure that’s what happens 99.9% of the time, especially when the police can safely assume that no one in the room has passed the bar or has a rich lawyer for a parent. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people to have to deal with actual police abuse on a daily basis, and not just our pithy little ruined evening. Sometimes it’s the small seemingly insignificant things that help one see the larger picture more clearly.

Maybe NWA was right after all.

Brett

“You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.” John Steinbeck, Travels with Charlie

If you follow Interstate 5 south through Central California as it outlines the eastern edge of the Pacific Coast Range—where the rugged cliffs and peaks that not a hundred miles west defiantly resisted the pounding waves of the largest ocean on Earth, now, unchallenged and untested, devolve into lazy golden hills that abruptly give up, surprisingly overtaken by placidity, and cede to the vast, perfectly flat, fertile fields of the Central Valley, you will eventually run into the tragically under-laned Highway 41, more than likely crowded with restless drivers, anxious, single file, trapped twenty cars deep behind a semi-truck slowly, cautiously, frustratingly, traversing the ever-changing landscape. At the intersection of those two roads the ambitiously named Kettleman City, though ostensibly not even an actual town, exists for the singular purpose of feeding hungry cars, trucks, and travelers. It was there, after descending eastward down the hills and past those insignificant travel stop staples—the In-N-Out Burger, the Denny’s, the Arco, the Exxon—while driving by an immense green expanse of freshly watered alfalfa, that the hot air valley rushed into the van’s open windows, entirely saturated with the smell, so sharp, so recently unfamiliar, stung my nose, made my squinting eyes water, and unpacked from mothballs my entire childhood.

Driving that road I felt like Steve Martin in Father of the Bride when he breaks out his old tuxedo, overtaken with fond memories, dancing and singing in rapture in front of the mirror, only to snap back to reality when the badly out of fashion suit rips, the past vanishing into the split seam. Every time I return to the Central Valley I put it back on, naively believe it is real, it is relevant, then soon realize, like Steinbeck, that I am dressed only in memory.

Reminiscing is a lot like drinking in that it provides a pleasurable buzz while it transports the intoxicated from the present reality to an ephemeral, undefined, hazy, entirely enjoyable world. Like alcohol it can be harmless fun or it can be abused. And like alcohol the line between the two is often less definite that one assumes. It has been defining that line, determining what memories to entertain and for how long without getting entirely wasted on the past, that has been a constant struggle since entering California over a week ago.

It started easily enough in San Diego. I saw an old friend, familiar landscapes, walked by a place I worked. I had a few, it felt nice, but I was still good. Could totally have driven home and everything. Then we drove north and played near Riverside, to a bunch of people who watched some of the very first The Riot Before shows, back when it was just me and a guitar, it was great, long overdue, but a few people were absent and that kept it from being overwhelming, it sobered me up a bit. But then I drove north with my cousin to Santa Barbara, where my family was waiting for me, where my old friends would be, where four years of my life waited at every corner to intoxicate, and I realized that I could not simply indulge on every fond memory that came at me. That maybe I shouldn’t anyway. Maybe I needed to take a new approach, try something with a little more substance.

The reason, more or less, behind this entire tour was my brother’s graduation from college. I knew I had to go, wanted badly to do so, and decided that rather than spend money on a plane ticket it’d be a lot more fun to get there by tour. Kill two birds with one stone if you will. It actually worked too! So, after over a month in a van, on a clear, cloudless morning in Santa Barbara, I sat with my family on the beautiful campus that I called home only a few years prior, and watched my brother graduate. It was wonderful being there, in one of my favorite places, with my family, seeing old friends. For two days I almost non-stop tried to catch up with as many people I could, to resurrect old friendships and old memories in a city that still feels more comfortable to me than any other place I’ve been. Then, I rushed off to my old hometown, Kingsburg, CA, ate dinner with my family, hugged my aging dog, saw some old friends, and threw up (though this had really nothing to do with anything. Kinda strange really. Just got home and puked. I think I ate something my body didn’t want to eat. Maybe it’s a metaphor for something? Maybe not.).

In total, it was about four days of way too much but not enough done at the same time. How does one see a person he used to live with whom he hasn’t seen in two years and reconcile that in a twelve-minute conversation? How does one really catch up? What does that even mean? Catch up. Building friendships takes such a long time and during that process a pace is set, is increased slowly, there’s a certain intimacy there and no matter how good one’s intentions are, after sitting on the sidelines for years it’s impossible to step right back in. You lose ground. I’ve lost ground with so many people, and every time I go home, no matter great the talk is, no matter how much I’ve shared in the past with someone, if it’s only twelve minutes, or twenty, or one day, it’s not enough. It’s not home again, just reconstructing an illusion of it through shared memory.

Sometimes when having a really great dream, I’ll be startled awake and immediately, upon realizing that the dream is gone, force my eyes closed and try to fall back to sleep again, in the hope that I’ll be able to clasp onto the tail of my dream and catch up with it before it is gone forever. But that never works. The dream ends once I wake up and all I can do is fall back asleep, start fresh, and hope that when I do wake up I’ll be able to remember that great dream I had. That’s all. There really is no going back. And, well, going home is just like that. It’s so tempting to try to pick up where I left off, and every time I go back I occasionally catch myself clutching onto my pillow, forcing my eyes shut, trying to bring back what is gone, and failing to do so every time. I am finally learning, after two years living far from home, that I am no Jesus I need to stop making demands of the past like it is Lazarus. .

The good news is that I’m getting better. I’m learning how to go home without simply immersing myself in the past, binging on “remember when.” I’m learning that while I can’t just jump right back in at the same depth I once felt comfortable, these people are still my friends and we originally became friends for a reason. Because we get along! Because I like them! And so now, rather than going home and getting drunk on the past, I’m learning to start new with old friends and old places. I’m learning how to drive through that alfalfa field near Kettleman City and spend a moment letting that smell take me on a tour through the halls of my youth, to enjoy that for what it is and be thankful for it, but not to get greedy, to let it go, to roll up the windows, keep driving, pull into the old familiar town, but to leave my old home in mothballs in memory, and instead to be at home with my old friends and family.