theriotbefore.com

Freddy is unhappy with the recent tone of this blog. I know this because he told me. “The blog is depressing,” he said, in that low register people use when entirely unhappy about the subject at hand, but wishing to still speak forcefully. That is all he said. Then he got up from the couch he was sitting on and walked out of the room to smoke a cigarette, all the while avoiding eye contact. I had, as I normally do, an explanation as to why I had written with such unyielding despair, and why I reserve the right to do so again, but he wouldn’t have it. So I’ll explain that here instead.

There are numerous reasons I keep this tour journal, but standing prominently amongst them is my desire to paint an accurate picture of what it’s like to be on tour, in my head, in this band. We have all heard stories of rock stars on the road, but if we were to intersect their world of busses and back stages with the world that The Riot Before currently operates in, the concentric circles would share the tiniest area, filled maybe with late nights and a few similar instruments; though even then we’d differ because we’re still paying for our guitar strings, let alone guitars, and our nights, while indeed late, end most often in sleeping bags on hard floors. It’s like trying to compare a house painter with an expressionist. Both hold brushes but that’s as far as the similarities go(1). When these larger bands do recount their early histories, they do so with sweeping shallow statements, adulterated by the knowledge that those days have come to an end. It’s rare the unimpressive days are ever dwelt on, and despair holds a tenuous grasp to the inevitably optimistic narrative. As a result, no one ever really hears what it’s like to be out on the road the way we currently experience it; dressed in awkward flying machines, staring so longingly at the distant sky above, repeatedly crashing to the ground not far below, joyously celebrating any and all moments of gravity thwarted by even the meekest of glides, still holding out for that one day on a North Carolina beach when things forever change for the better.

And I like that story. I like telling that story. And I want to do that story justice.

In the first days and weeks of a relationship, we are often driven to extreme highs and lows by even the smallest action or non-action made by the person we’re interested in. We can’t yet know the relationship’s trajectory, there are not enough points plotted on the map to get an accurate prediction, and so every action is followed out to it’s illogical end, untempered by precedent. Pleasant phone calls become marriage proposals. A curt response becomes infinite excommunications. Only despair and elation can live in such an extreme climate and we pogo between the two, ever closer to insanity. All this is endured in the hope of a successful relationship, or, in some morbid minds that will go unmentioned, in the hope of sonically reaping the harvest sewn in the fertile fields of repeated romantic failures.

In our first few days alone on this tour the points plotted didn’t look so promising, and with the specter of the last tour still haunting the halls of our recent memories, we plummeted to pessimism. The present was dim and the future hid in the shadows. We all got pretty down, not because we had a few less than amazing shows, which is really no big deal, but because we had no idea if we’d ever have anything but bad shows. The underwhelming was looking less and less like a houseguest, and more like a roommate. So I wrote that. I didn’t want to end on an upswing. I didn’t want to pretend that I thought things would get better, because honestly, in that moment, I felt like they never would. And I want this to be honest. I want to be honest because, if anything, I know that I’m living through a time in my life that I will probably look back on with frequency, and I want to remember it all. I want all the textures preserved as accurately as possible, because memory likes to smooth things over, and I want to make a mold of the jagged before time erodes it.

I wrote depressed, and will do so again, because that’s exactly how it is to tour like this. You simply don’t know if things will get better and the only way to endure is to be prepared for the chance that they won’t. We had no guarantees in our immediate future, only more gambling. And we’re unlucky gamblers. But even in the midst of looking from bleak to potentially bleaker, we still held firm to the fact that it’s one thing to not know what will happen, but it’s a whole worse thing to wonder what could have happened. I’d much rather confront the unknown and fail miserably than avoid it and be forever plagued by “what if.”

It’s strange to be struggling in a pursuit often thought of as illegitimate, because the struggle is seen as a valid excuse to bail out. If I had entered a more structured profession out of college, I could very well be stuck in some lifeless cubicle right now, grasping onto the hope that one day I’d have a window and a job that I didn’t despise. But it’s well understood that the cubicle is a common step on that ladder, something almost everyone has to deal with before getting the chance at a view, and I would probably be regularly counseled to stick with it. But I’m not in a cubicle, I’m in a 94 Dodge van. The engine light is on, the left speaker doesn’t work half the time, and the air conditioning is opened windows. But I do have a view. And it’s a good view. And neither I nor any other person in this band are anxious to give that view up anytime soon, no matter how somber things occasionally get. At 26, I feel incredibly lucky that I’m currently doing exactly what I know I should be doing, even if it seems like, at times, I’m the only person who knows that. I don’t think many of my better insured peers can say that. And while that satisfaction, that contentedness, may not pay current medical bills, it’s preventing future therapist bills. So I guess it evens out in the end.

Brett

1. I am not hinting here that our band is artistically more legitimate than those who tour in grandeur. I grasp at the neck of my guitar with the precision of a paint roller. Instead, I’m trying to illustrate (pun not intended) the different worlds which people of the same profession can exist in.

My cousin Casey is a professional stuntman. He, to gloss over the intricacies of the profession, jumps off of stuff for a living. If you have ever had the pleasure of being aquatinted with Casey, it would come as no surprise to you that this is how he pays the bills (I use the term “bills” loosely so as to encompass certain purchases whose necessity is debatable/awesome ). He has a disposition as well suited for a life of stunts that most fish have for swimming, and had he the misfortune of landing some sort of office job instead, he would have most likely been fired for, well, setting fire to something then jumping through and/ or over it, naked. He would have done this regardless of whether or not he was on break. He may have done this while in a meeting. But as fun and exciting as his current occupation is, there is quite a downside to having a constitution lacking in what could be called “normal” quantities of fear. Mainly, you get injured. Because no matter how much your mind is convinced that jumping 70 feet over a road on skis is a great idea, there is no convincing your bones that they should not break under the pressure of a landing less than graceful. As a result, Casey knows his way around emergency rooms. He’s had splints, stitches, and surgeries, and once even had his scalp stapled back on with 32 staples, which meant that, because medical staples come in sets of 25, the doctor had to stop and re-load the staple gun part way through the procedure.

A few years back he tore his ACL while wakeboarding and was more or less unable to participate in his normal activities for six months. Tearing your ACL, by the way, is grueling. I know first hand the pain of the initial injury, the intense agony after surgery, the frustration of physical therapy, of crutches, of braces, of being temporarily handicapped. It’s hard enough to endure when mildly athletic, but I can barely imagine the restlessness, the claustrophobia, experienced by those whose lives are, in a way, defined by being active. But recovery was endured, and the day finally came when Casey was cleared to go skiing the following winter, and, a month or so before that day actually arrived, Casey went skiing. That was to be expected.

But the comeback would be tragically short-lived, because Casey, an incredibly advanced skier, took a seemingly inconsequential, almost silly tumble on his very first run. He, probably for the first time ever on skis, wasn’t even going too fast or trying any absurdly huge jumps; just taking it easy. And he fell over. And he heard a pop. And he felt a familiar pain. The same pain he had felt six months prior, in the water of the lake that sat not too far from the end of the ski run he now laid on. And, worst of all, the pain was coming from his other knee.

Casey had torn his good ACL a month before his previously torn ACL had fully recovered.

Sometimes you just have bad luck.

I can just imagine the disappointment he must have felt while laying on the snow. The tragedy of having re-visit all the pain and restlessness of an injury on the very day you thought it all behind you. It reminds me of a particular scene in the movie, Alive, when the two men who had embarked on a journey to find help triumphantly scale a huge peak, anticipating civilization and rest and safety on the other side, but instead only find an endless vista of similar jagged and hostile mountains. There would be no immediate repose, only more of the same struggle, made heavier by the dead weight of now flaccid hope. Crushed, they made a silent descent, trying not to think of the countless grueling ascents ahead.

I can imagine all this well, because, unfortunately, this last week has left little to the imagination. This last week has been our silent and discouraging descent in the ominous shadows cast by more of the same; this week has been our frustrating return to a struggle we thought lay mostly behind.

Our first week of shows were couched on the buoyancy of Bomb the Music Industry’s draw. They were some of the most fun we’ve ever played. The last three years of my life have been lived in reckless abandon to a handful of songs, and those enthusiastic crowds we played to stood unified as the best, most comprehensively convincing apologist for that recklessness that I have come upon in recent memory. Suddenly, it was worth it; and tangibly so. I looked forward to playing shows and, after our set was through, was left to deal with an unfamiliar sense of fulfillment, of high expectations met and even surpassed. But our time with Bomb was short lived, and soon we were back on our own.

Our first show by ourselves was in Amherst, MA, at Hampshire College. There was every indication that it would go well. It was free. It was promoted very well. It was at a small school where the majority of the student body lives on campus, a minute’s walk from the show. Some of the students who helped promote it went above and beyond and baked dozens of cupcakes to give away before we played, as an incentive to stick around for our set. But like my cousin’s skiing injury, sometimes competence and effort are no match for bad luck. We set up to a full room of over a hundred students, happily talking and eating cupcakes. Unfortunately, cupcakes were the highlight of the night, and our set interrupted their conversations. They started leaving. By the time our set was halfway through, the cupcakes were gone and the room was drained of most of its previous occupants. I’m sure the fifteen people that stuck around could see the enthusiasm drain from our faces as we confronted the reality of a seemingly endless mountain range in front of us. We played progressively worse until the end of our last song, which we butchered. Embarrassed and disheartened we turned to shut off our amps, relieved at least that the set was over. But we were given a chance to end on a good note when someone from the “crowd” who was not even a student of the school, just a person who came to see us, on purpose and everything, requested another song. We played “In Perspective” sufficiently, all the while trying and failing to sufficiently color our own outlook with anything but gray.

We played to 40 people over the next three days. We lost money every night. On our way to Cleveland we confronted the reality of our situation and reluctantly decided to cancel a tour we had planned through Texas after the Fest. Instead we’d go home and earn some money that the road was endlessly draining from our pockets.

That night we almost didn’t even bother unpacking the van. By the time the Saturday night house show was scheduled to start, only three or four people had arrived. We hid from them on the back porch while Cory sent out emails alerting people that we no longer needed the shows in November that we had asked about. Eventually about fifteen people showed up, so we quietly set up our gear in the basement, and, surprisingly, played one of our better sets. Minus a few broken strings, things actually went pretty well and we were all, at least, happy with our performance. For our efforts and the 300 mile drive the preceded them, 10 dollars were collectively donated by the fifteen in attendance.

We sold nothing.

The next morning we put another $80 dollars in the van’s gas tank and headed off to Michigan.

Re-injured, with endless ascents ahead.

Brett

Someone stole my shorts, ironically enough, in Providence. It was last Sunday, and I guess it’s taken me a week to recover from the trauma of the loss to just now sit down and write about it. They were good shorts, though not always shorts. I originally bought them as full length jeans from a sale rack in the mall at Express, but they fit awkwardly in that way that jeans can be subtly amiss, and were eventually replaced by a more adequate pair of Levis. I cut them into shorts just before the summer of ’07 and was pleasantly surprised at how they excelled in their new position. Apparently the discomfort they had previous caused was contained entirely below the knee, and my simple amputation had breathed new life into their black cotton fibers. They joined me on this tour under the designation of “show shorts,” to be worn while playing so as to spare my jeans the sweat and stench induced by shows. They performed splendidly and heroically in the midst of the punishment inflicted on them. I was proud. But they were not flawless. They did not dry quickly, and this, sadly, would be their downfall.

On a cool humid Sunday, after a hot matinee show in Boston, the sweat saturated shorts stayed saturated up until the time for our second show of the day, in nearby Providence. I opted not to change into them, citing the understandable protestation of “gross,” and instead chose to play in the jeans I was currently wearing. I draped the shorts over the van’s passenger side mirror in the vain hope that they would dry out just a little bit. This, it turns out, was a fatal mistake. I have now come to understand that while sweat soaked cut-off jeans shorts are not really appealing to me, even when the sweat is my own and therefore way less disgusting—like how your own farts are disturbingly pleasant—these same shorts are irresistible to the inhabitants of the nation’s smallest and oft neglected state. I know this because when I walked back to the van after our show, the shorts were gone. They had disappeared into the dark and mysterious Rhode Island night.

I’ll never see them again. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye. It was heartbreaking. There’s an emptiness in my heart now that no other jean short can fill (and I’ve tried since I did, after all, pack a second pair).

These are somber days.

I guess what I’m basically trying to say is that if you see someone in Rhode Island wearing black cut-off jean shorts, can you please steal them back for me?

Thanks.

After I found out about my shorts, this happened:

It cheered me up.

Brett

According to the inerrant wisdom of Wikipedia, the temperature of lava—the molten rock purged from the bowels of erupting, oft angry, occasionally grumpy, volcanoes—ranges from 700 to 1,200 degrees Celsius. Celsius! That’s 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit! 1,573 Kelvin! Kelvin for crying out loud! I don’t even know what Kelvin is, but 1,573 Kelvin sounds like it would impress even the most skeptical scientist as to the utter hotness of lava! It is so incredibly hot that the filling of an overcooked Hot Pocket and leather seats on a summer day would fall prostrate at the sight of lava, repeating the Wayne’s Worldian, “we’re not worthy” in humbled, babbling rapture. Lava is the kind of hot you don’t mess with. It is of a temperature that demands respect. A sacred sort of heat.

So you can imagine my excitement when, a few days before we left on this tour, I saw a commercial on television advertising Taco Bell’s new Volcano Taco, complete with fiery red colored shell and, Lava sauce. Holy shit! Lava sauce! In the commercial, the consumption of the taco and it’s molten hot sauce led immediately to uncontrollable fire breathing, smoke spewing from pretty much every above neck orifice, and, oddly, theft, followed by deceit, followed by more theft. Granted, I’m not too much into the latter, or at least I don’t pine for foods that increase my already sufficient natural urges to lie and steal, but the idea that, even if just for a few moments, I would possess qualities awesomely dragon-like, well that was just too much to resist, even if I had to steal and lie and steal again. On top of that, it was only 89 cents, so I had plenty left over to, if necessary, pay for my bail.

Though extreme, my love of Taco Bell and my excitement for its new product was not all encompassing. It is a sort of love exposed by drought; sufficient when sufficiency is the best one can strive for. When I’m at home or in a familiar place, Taco Bell lies far below the surface, and is never even considered when my mind wanders over possible Mexican dining options. I know of a handful of places in Richmond where I can get authentic tacos, and, if time allows, I can cook something up that wouldn’t cause me too much disgrace south of the border. But tour is a desolate landscape, and here Taco Bell sits on a tarnished and broken throne, but a throne nonetheless.

It wasn’t until the fourth day of tour that we actually got around to crossing the threshold of the Bell’s kingdom. It was a little before midnight after a show in Connecticut, and the entire drive from the venue to Taco Bell was dominated by discussion of the Volcano Taco. I was, after all, not the only person in the band who had seen the ad before tour and filed away his enthusiasm for a time when the context would be appropriate. For all that Taco Bell does well, spicy was never its strong suit. Even the hot and fire sauces aren’t all that hot or fiery. So the advent of lava sauce brought with it a renewal of hope that our tongues and throats would soon be burning with the delightful trickery of capsaicin. We ordered our Volcano Tacos and, along with some of Bomb the Music Industry, cheersed to a bright and spicy future.

(not pictured, me)

On my the night of my 24th birthday, after consuming many drinks in a very short amount of time, Freddy walked up to me while I drunkenly sat in a dark corner of a bar, anticipating tomorrow’s regret, and he handed me a shot. I slurred an adamant refusal, but he insisted, and, soon, so did about ten other people. I sat there, holding a shot of what I assumed was vodka, barraged with frat like demands to drink, and in an effort to get everyone to just shut up, took the shot. Then, silence. Silence from those around as they waited for my reaction. Silence from my taste buds and throat, which had until that point made quite a ruckus when greeted by liquor. I finally broke the silence when I asked, confused, “was that water?” Instantly everyone erupted in laughter as I sat red faced with drunkenness and embarrassment, inwardly relieved that there was one less thing I’d be violently throwing up later. But what I want to focus on here is that moment of pause I had when my mind, anticipating the burn of alcohol, instead processed tasteless water. It wasn’t instantly recognized because it wasn’t expected. I when my brain repeatedly told me I had drank water and not vodka, I still didn’t quite believe it. Such is the strength of our ideas over reality.

When I took my first bite of the Volcano Taco, I was met with a similar blankness. I had anticipated the burn of lava, and I didn’t quite believe my taste buds when the first message I got back was completely devoid of any mention of heat. I took another bite. Then another. And soon I sat face to face with the truth that lava sauce was a lie. It resembled molten rock like Marty Mcfly resembled a high school student. I was heartbroken. My Volcano Taco was simply just a red taco. It tasted fine. Like Taco Bell does. But it didn’t surpass anything, no new ground was covered. It reaffirmed that while Taco Bell still reigned supreme amongst national fast food chains (and I would like to stress the world national there, Del Taco kills the Bell, but, sadly, only regionally), it would never be anything more than a D+ when my expectations for food are Tommy Callahan’s for college achievement.

Brett

Certain things get better as the night get later. You know?

Up to this point, it had been at least fifteen years since I’d eaten a foot long hot dog. I would like to make a promise right now that I will never allow such a disgraceful amount of time to elapse between dining on such delicacies. Life’s too short.