Exchange Rate

The brakes on the minivan sounded terrible. I called the rental car company and was able to get a replacement in San Jose. We could exchange it for one that was exactly the same, other than the brake issue.

We did not have a show scheduled Wednesday so we spent the day walking around San Francisco. It was cloudy again today making the city feel more like an unexplored area of Seattle than a city in California. We took a bus down to Haight St. to get some breakfast and ate at a Mediterranean place that also had breakfast burritos. We stopped in Amoeba, the largest record store I have ever been in. It was a bit expensive, but the selection was outstanding. Scott and Zane headed off to get the rental car replaced. The rest of us walked up Buena Vista, a well trodden hill sprinkled with sketchy people. To be fair, we were looking a bit rough by this point in the tour ourselves. Devon climbed up a large stump and sang "I Believe I Can Fly". R. Kelly would have been proud. Or embarrassed.

Our next stop was a bar called Zeitgeist. It was a cool bar with a unusually large back porch area. You could not take pictures back there. It may have been that this operation is not totally legit, or that the patrons smoking pot may not wanted to be in photos. But I have another theory. Remember that crazy squiggly roadsign in Pee Wee's Big Adventure? The one they see right before they fly off the cliff in the convertible? Well, that sign is there. Or a damn good imitation. I bet they do not want people taking pictures of the way that awesome sign has been defaced.

We cabbed it back to Zane's house, grabbed the cars and the replacement minivan and headed off to Berkeley. It basically looks like the U district in Seattle but bigger. We went to Telegraph and got some food at an Irish bar. The bar had an amazing outside section that we could not sit in. The whole place was filled with college aged kids. There is a certain and constant anxiety that college students have. It makes a bar jitter like a Freshman pulling an all nighter on a pot of coffee. Not an ideal situation to chill with friends, but it sufficed.

We went to a hotel with a case of beer. Jared and Joe exchanged this, at whatever the current exchange rate is, for a nice drunk. With this came singing and wrestling and a knock on the door from the manager. With this fair warning, we slept.

Lost and Found

The partying from Monday night left us feeling ill equipped to deal with another hot drive. Monday night when we went to go get beer at Safeway, I noticed that the brakes on the minivan sounded a bit weird. I thought maybe there was a piece of gravel stuck between the pad and the rotor. Driving it on Tuesday made it painfully clear that this was no gravel. The brakes still worked, but sounded terrible. We got to Streetlight records in San Jose. The record store had some pretty decent music. Imagine Easy Street Records being fat with irrelevant pop fluff and you will have a perfect idea of how this place looked. The young pony tail sporting sound guy was very nice. I suppose he was more the guy who brought and hooked up the mixer for us, but we have worse. Spirits were not high for this show. We all still felt ill. Playing a show in front of nobody was not going to help. Stencil was all setup when Mr. Ponytail was approached by an old lady. "Are you in the band?" she asked. He said that he worked for the store. "Oh good", she said, "can you get me a copy of Mamma Mia behind the drum kit?". He did and she was happy.

I was actually into our set. I felt like I needed to redeem myself from the previous night's miserable performance. Streetlight Records pays in T-shirts. That is fine by me. We packed up our stuff and headed off to San Francisco. As we approached the bay area the temperature dropped to something comfortable. Lucas's car was no longer a mobile hell emulator. Grant & Green was both the name of the venue and its location. The venue was about as big as the Chop Suey, but the stage was half as big and not the focus of this establishment. Some guys with baseball hats were watching the Giants game on T.V. I was wondering if we were going to be bothering them when we went on later. Brad said there was some square pizza nearby. We ate it and we were happy.

Bay area dwelling friends of Skeletons and Stencil started to file in the venue. When we went on, we rocked. Devon wiped sweaty face with his new T-shirt from Streetlight. The show felt great. The audience was responsive and we were on top of our game. Scott was wearing a Brewer's cap and some drunk guy who also had a Brewer's cap stood in front of Scott pointing to his own hat. Stencil put on a great set as well, Scott and I joined in on Singer's Young Friends with maracas. Some people came in from off the street to listen to us. It always feels good when that happens. Scott procured a place to stay -- his friend Zane's. Actually, it was his girlfriends house, but her and her roommates were in the process of moving out so we would have almost the entire place to ourselves. We got to Zane's house and started unpacking our personal effects. "Were is my bag?" Jared asked. "It is brown. Is it in the other car?". We looked in the other car. Not there. The wind had fallen right out of our sails. We unpacked both cars completely and sure enough, no bag. "It had the money in it" Jared said. It also had Jared's notebooks, clothes, and medication. We knew we left on the sidewalk next to Grant & Green and that it was gone forever.

I drove Jared back to the venue. This was an exercise in futility. Someone already picked it up. We knew this, but we went anyway. Jared hopped out of the car and looked around the sidewalke. No backpack. He looked despondently at the door to the now closed Grant & Green. Just then, the bartender emerged from that door with the backpack over her shoulder. "I am so glad you came back" she said. Apparently, she was trying to get ahold of one of us, but did not have our number. The bartender handed the backpack to Jared and he was very happy.

I'm Not Here

With a drive time of about 8 hours, the Portland to Sacramento leg was the longest yet. After stopping just outside of Portland for some Burger King, I took over the wheel in Lucas's car. I was never very good at stick shifts, and this skill left unpracticed for 6 years did not help the situation. I had not taken a shower at Nick's so when we stopped to get gas in south Oregon, I bought some shampoo and washed my hair in the sink. The man who pumped our gas was skinny and short with a salt and pepper Santa Claus beard. After our gas had been pumped and my hobo shower taken, he approached me. "I write to Obama every week, but he never writes back" he said. He went on to say that he wants Obama to make it illegal for anyone to pump their own gas in the entire country, thereby creating numerous jobs. I am not sure how this would have helped him. He already lives in a state with this stupid law and is already employed pumping gas. He told me that he was getting some traction by getting published in a local paper's letter to the editor column. At this point, he became more excited. "If a black limousine pulls up and a man named Guido asks for me, I'm not here".

With that I got back in the car with Lucas, Jared, and Brad and headed onto California. We met up with the rest of the group in Yreka at a Subway. There we found out about the movie game that the guys in the other van had been playing. It is a variant of 20 questions that you play with a group. You can keep asking questions as long as the answer is "yes". If the answer to your question is "no", then it is no longer your turn to ask questions. You can only use a negating phrase (not, other than, etc.) three times in the game. After I started to work around this rule by creating non-negating questions that were comprised of multiple "or" statements (is the first letter of the characters name A or B or C or D or ...), they added another rule where you can only have one "or" in a question. It was honestly difficult to not draw from Back to the Future and Star Wars. I spent a long time thinking about it and made my answer to be the whale from Pinocchio. Devon made my answer Buffalo Bill from Silence of the lambs. I would not have guessed it without employing a brute force algorithm.

The venue in Sacramento was coffee shop. Even compared to other coffee shops, this one was very colorful. The opener was a blond girl who played an open-mic quality set. She could not figure out how to turn on her amp and apologized several times during her set. Her lyrics made her seem even more vulnerable. The lyrics were simple and appeared to have no more depth than the literal interpretation. One lyric that may have deviated from this was "the back door is open and no one is watching". I have a feeling that she was actually talking about a literal door, but it may have been "open" to interpretation.

We decided to put a softer set together than we usually put on. It was difficult for us to keep it tight at this volume. Maybe the lack of sleep was catching up to us. Because the Town is Sleeping was a total disaster. We were playing it for about a minute with Scott in a different key than everyone else. The audience was bored with our set, we had not made a connection with them. By the time we were done, I was completely depressed.

Stencil fared far better. They are always very tight and their music translates well in this setting. Jared's banter was great.

We got a alcohol and a Motel 6 to hold up in for the night. By the end of the night Scott, Joe, and Devon had empty beer cases on their head singing "here comes Mr. Beer Head, he's got a case of Miller on his head".

I have not felt so terrible in a while.

Smoking Hot

We stopped at Devon's parent's house on the way to Portland. It is weird seeing a friends childhood home for the first time. It is never like you imagined it would be. My concept of his house did not involve a cul-de-sac. My concept definitely not involve a room with carpet on the ceiling. Devon's parents had prepared appetizers for us and fed us hamburgers. I took a little, but much needed, nap on the couch. Devon's dad gave Devon a birthday cigar which was then and there. He looked incredibly smug smoking the cigar wearing his smoking hot cowboy hat and aviator glasses. This cigar would later leave a less savory taste. The next morning he said that it tasted like someone pooped in his mouth.

The Ash Street Saloon was an impressive venue, like Nectar in Seattle. Apparently, there are semi-professional wrestling matches here when bands are not playing.

Between Scott, Brad, and Devon calling their Portland area friends in advance, we were able to pull a decent crowd. Decent for an out of town show at least.

The first band was sloppy drunk. If their instruments were heavy machinery, there would be dismembered limbs everywhere. The front-man wore a sleeveless shirt and the bottoms of his jeans rolled up making him look a bit like the hillbilly character in The Simpsons. His phrasing reminded me of Wolf Parade and in this context, I found this set entertaining.

It was incredibly hot. When Jared rocked out, sweat would drip with every head throw. It was more like pour, really. Like rhythmically tipping a glass of water until just a little water poured out, again and again. Although I thought the sound worked out alright at Bob's Java Jive, the sound was immaculate here.

The last band, Oceania, announced at the beginning of their set that this was their CD release show and their last show. These radicals had some other tricks up their sleeves. At the end of their set they literally released their CDs upon the audience by throwing them at the audience. One hit the suspending stage lighting causing the CD to open and fall directly to the floor. One hit Scott in the head. The keyboardist was nice though, and his music was dark and interesting.

Devon's friend Nick offered us a floor to sleep on. He lived on the top floor of a house that was converted into apartments. I am not sure what the other apartments looked like, but this one looked to be the remainder of whatever division had happened. The door to Nick's bedroom was high enough to allow a hobbit to pass. If any ring wraiths happened to crash our little party, we could just have taken one of the swords off the wall and dispatched them thusly. We were soon packed like hot little sardines on his living room floor ready to get three hours of sleep. Then onward. California here we come!

Monkeys, Strippers, Oh My

We played at Bob's Java Jive in Tacoma last night. If you are not familiar with this establishment, it looks like a teapot. Built in an era when people built dog, dinosaur, and other various shaped establishments. Diversions for the road weary. The "Hey that teapot is way too big; we have got to check that out and get inside of it" type of crowd. Jared said that there used to be monkeys in this teapot. They would would throw feces and masturbate on the tables. Well, that is what he said anyhow.

The part we played in is not part of the original structure, but a rather unspecific shaped addendum to add more seating. The stage is rather high; this fact is apparent due to the low overhead when standing on it. There is a bar surrounding the stage that comes to chest height when in the audience; from the stage, it is around your knees. Devon says this is evidence that this place was once a strip club. I hope that this stripper speculation and the monkey story are true, and that these two states of lust and lunacy coexisted at a single point in time. The interior has a jungle theme with leopard patterned cloth behind the main bar, further adorned with various monkey cartoons (yes, the obligatory see no evil trio appears hear in full force). They have a couple of old videogames next to the pool table. Lucas tried to plug in Tetris, but that caused the circuit breaker to fail. Apparently, the stage is on a different circuit.

Like Le Voyeur, there is no sound guy. They provide a PA, some ramshackle microphones held up by some equally ramshackly mic stands. We got Stencil dialed in, and they were off to the races with Telephone Wires. It sounded surprisingly good in the audience. The addition of Brian's bass parts were definitely helping the sound. Everything about their set was a bit better than the previous night. The audience was mostly composed of people waiting for the last band, but was enthusiastic about Stencil's performance.

Our set seemed to be a bit better as well. The audience was also enthusiastic about our set.

At the end of our set, a woman approached me and told me that our music "was actually good". Apparently, there is a popular conception that our music is bad. I thought maybe this was a chance to sell a CD or a t-shirt, but before I could pitch our merch, she followed up her previous comment with an explanation. She was the drummer in the next band and was afraid that her performance was going to be rocky. She made this conclusion on the fact that she had only played drums 3 times before. When they started playing, I could have sworn that she had played the drums at least 4 times. Their lead guitarist was a bit innocuous -- simple riffs that were neither here nor there, but at least he put time into learning his instrument. Listening to the lyrics were a bit like eating broken glass. A desirable effect for a hard core band, but it was not working for this one. The singer kicked around the word "whore" in a few songs. Not in a playful or ironic way, but in the way you would write about your breakup in 8th grade. Their last song was a knockout punch of unintentional ironic sexuality. "What would your boyfriend say?" he asks in this song. "What would your husband do? I wrote the kama sutra all about you". He goes on to explain that he thought of the "lotus flower in the shower" and that he does a lot of thinking in the shower.

I was thinking it still smelled a little like strippers and monkeys. Bob, we love your jive.

Tour 09 Kicks Off

Judging by the most recent post on this blog having to do with The Fish Don't Mind... well I am not sure what conclusion to draw from that. Something revealing about my commitment to blogging, no doubt. In any case, we are on a week long tour supporting our album All the Other Animals with our friends Stencil right now. We kicked off the tour in Olympia at Le Voyeur.

Tonight we had 3 vehicles -- Lucas's, Devon's, and mine. Lucas and Devon's car was filled to the brim with equipment so the three members of Stencil that would be performing that night hopped in my car with their guitars tightly nestled in my undersized trunk. Traffic was surprisingly bad.

Scott and I were both feeling a bit under the weather, not terribly so, but enough for me to not want to have a beer. I borrowed a hoodie from him to try to "sweat out" the sickness. While standing in Le Voyeur donning Scott's hoodie, drenched in sweat, it had crossed my mind that "sweating it out" may not have any medical value and all I was doing was making myself uncomfortable.

The opening band last night (Unicorn Basement) had a crazy monologue between songs. It went something like this:

This next song is about Billy Corgan. Billy Corgan and I used to be pen pals; we would write each other all the time. We stopped writing. I became tired of his verbose correspondence. I sent him a letter, an envelope only, with the words "fuck you" written on the outside.

One time Billy and I were near the Puget Sound. He said, "look there is a man on a motorcycle". "That just looks like a man, it is really a dog" I replied. Then we got JFK masks and robbed banks.

This next song is about people having sex.

I do not remember much about the band after them. There was a spectator that found a red hand truck and attempted to cart himself around. If this sounds impossible, it is. He managed to demonstrate this fact empirically.

Stencil's "The Singer's Young Friends" went over well. Hand truck guy wanted to know if they had any more fast ones.

Our set was pretty shaky. There were long periods of time between songs where a drum was being fiddled with or a guitar being tuned. There was a group of girls outside in the alley behind us smoking pot. They started to dance like crazy when we played Power Cords. When the set was over, I was about ready to chalk the show up in the minor disaster category when we were approached by a man about our age with a military haircut. He said he really enjoyed the set and wanted to buy a CD. He explained that he and his two friends were about to be shipped off to Iraq. Scott insisted that he take two complementary CDs for his friends. Genuine enthusiasm from someone we have not played for before can really turn a show around in my mind.