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Sunday, September 30, 2012
To Portland
The Foggy Notion in Portland, OR
with Nasalrod & Ix
We woke up on Saturday Morning to coffee, eggs, bacon and sausage, biscuits, and gravy... Ash (of Ash-Hole studios) and his family treated us exceptionally well. I wasn't kidding about the generosity of our hosts. I don't necessarily eat all that stuff, but among the eight of us, it was consumed.
We didn't wake up early on Saturday. We didn't have much of an agenda. Our scheduled show in Corvalis canceled early and our options in Redington, Eugene, and Olympia all fell through. We were offered a radio show in Boise-- that actually sounded like a lot of fun, and something we were all interested in doing, but it was also five hours out of our way for a non-paying venture. Sadly, a gig that won't pay for its own gas could leave us stranded.
Everyone took their time heading to the Sun Cafe in downtown Boise, getting smoothies, mimosas, and wraps. The afternoon was wide-open, and we all just kind of chilled out for a bit.
Checking Facebook, we discovered that one of the phone calls Michelle made panned out... but it was after 5:00, and we were still in Boise. We did get to Portland just fine-- we left before Nasalrod in hopes of maybe making the show, but we rolled in around 11:30, and the everything had already wrapped, so the day was basically: sleep in, restaurant, seven hours of driving, restaurant, sleep.
We were all a bit tired of our mp3 collections, so we put my mp3 player on random until the batteries died (right in the middle of a Floating Goat song), and then switched to Michelle's. We even established rules: random means random-- no skipping, no selecting, just let the player go. This was fine until we got two KISS songs in a row.
“I only have one KISS album on here, too,” she says as one more corny, reverb-drenched song off Dynasty starts up. “And this one's going to hurt. This is an Ace song.” Then her iPod revolted-- it just stopped, never let Mr. Freeley sing a single note, and found the next song on its own.
Not even the iPod would put up with that much KISS.
We might not have been able to catch our last-minute show, but we got to Portland with plenty of time to hang out. Nasalrod all live here, so they found their homes and beds-- we found Dan from Ix, who often puts us up at the Plural Mural house when we're in town.
I had another friend to stay with, so I split off from the group-- they went to Bily Ray's Dive Bar; I ended up at C-Bar, playing pinball and drinking a Burnside Brewery wheat ale spiced with Habernero. Hells yes!
That is one of the great things about Portland: it's a devoted beer and food town. Bars have wild, creative tap lists and restaurants are multidimensional and always have Secret Aardvark hot sauce. I love eating and drinking here.
I got back to Plural Mural before ubik. got out of bed (figuratively speaking) and just hung out with Dan for a while. We were about four blocks from The Foggy Notion, and were free until the 8:30PM load-in to chill, restring instruments, snuggle the cats, listen to music, read Batman: Year One (it was on the bookshelf in the living room). Free time is nice when you come by it.
The Foggy Notion is a cool venue, and we came up with a setlist while Ix was playing. Maybe it was the energy in the room, but we ended up with a really high-energy, fast set. You'd think that with all our free time we would have written a setlist during the day, but ubik. doesn't often operate with a lot of forethought. We mean to... it just never happens.
We've all become really, really fond of Nasalrod. It could have gone either way: we liked the band, but we never traveled with another group before, and I like them even more now than when we started. Great band on stage, great group of people off stage. It was sort of bittersweet watching the last Nasalrod set, knowing we wouldn't be seeing another one tomorrow.
There was a big group around the fire pit at Dan's after the show, which seems to be the norm when we're with Dan or Justin (who has moved out of Plural Mural, but it was still a big Ix/Nasalrod party), and we hung out well into the night.
Though we only played four nights, the whole adventure seemed too brief, but it was a good run.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Non-cancelled shows in Boise
Ash-Hole Studios in Boise, ID
with Nasalrod, Gernika, 1d, & Raid
So, nothing bad happened to anyone... Well, not until the next day. We didn't realize the next show started at 5:00PM. In Boise. Boise is about seven hours from Spokane, and we didn't leave until about 11:00. And then we remembered we had to cross over to Mountain Time, and would be an hour later than we thought.
We have a tendency to forget Mountain Time exists.
And then we blew a tire. It didn't seem like too huge a deal: we have a healthy, full-sized spare, and we fired up our commando tire changing skills just like last time.
Except last time it was a back tire. This time, it's driver's-side front, and we crank up the jack to find the tire still on the pavement. Damnit. We sent Nasalrod on ahead to Boise, and waited. Luckily, we went out with roadside assistance at our back... but when we got assistance, it was hard not to feel like chumps: it took less than five minutes to change that tire. We waited an hour for professionals to show up with a somewhat taller jack.
We lost more time getting to a Firestone to replace our spare. Last tour, we missed a show when we blew a tire and then blew another, and we refused to hit the road without a working spare. It ate time and money, and we still don't have a way to lift the van high enough to change a front tire, but we rolled into town before Nasalrod finished their set.
Today was my turn in the barrel. I drove pretty much all day... we showed up at the Boise show with my fretting hand suffering hours of constant vibration and my shoulder on fire. We played pretty well, actually, but a lot of the attendees of an all ages show have curfews that we were not meeting.
That, and ubik.s defining characteristic: we're not for everyone. Even our most rocking songs have atmospheric breaks; even our spaciest songs do something jarring. That's simply who we are, and, while we've accepted it, that acceptance hasn't spread to everyone, everywhere. It's also something that won't fly with a sixteen-year-old straight edge punk rocker. For a crowd that wants direct, unambiguous anthems and constant high tempos... we are not going to scratch that itch. Not ever.
Overhearing the conversation between Michelle and the kid who was “just trying to understand what it meant.” Ironically, there was more than a dash of Keanu Reeves "woah" in his voice, an awfully stoner trait for a straight edge punker to have. She related that she understood ubik better after her first acid experience, but she couldn't offer him a straight edge gateway to grasping what he was trying to understand.
I suggested a sweat lodge.
Kids too young to buy tobacco and alcohol calling themselves “straight edge” are hilarious... that's not so much a lifestyle choice as acting superious about obeying your mom. No judgement on the 21+ people I know that choose a clean lifestyle; they decide to live their lives a certain way and stick by it. It's awfully easy for children to swear off things they're not allowed to have. Those grapes are probably sour, anyway.
Nasalrod fared much better than we did. Their fast, raw energy really lit this crowd up. We arrived during their set, and could barely push into the crowd; no matter how odd and complex they are, Nasalrod can own a punk audience, and they brought the house down tonight.
Our hosts were incredibly gracious. We stayed up late, carousing and swapping stories. I quit somewhere around 3:00, but they say Joel was still upright when Justin was singing his solo pieces at the top of his lungs after daybreak (as Kat tells it). Michelle, Tyler, and I slept in the basement, away from anyone who might have disturbed our sleep.
Friday, September 28, 2012
...and we finally made it to Spokane
The Hop in Spokane, WA
w/ Nasalrod, Mercy Brown, Dysfunktynal Kaos, Boneye, & Abode for the Dead
“Hey, look at those cows! They're outstanding in their field.”
And, hey-- We're actually making it to Spokane this time. We stopped in Ellensburg for old time's sake... and Mexican food... and gas... but it's nice to be charging east and full of hope.
It was a long haul, about five hours, and we left early. Joel started to get road hypnosis by the end. Michelle was tuned out for a lot of it, dancing in her headphones. Literally.
She popped them off to see what Tyler, Joel, and I were head-bobbing to. "I looked up any you were all grooving, so I had to see if what you were listening to was better than what I was listening to." It was Joel's mp3s on random-- we were all head bobbing to Gojira.
Actually, "random" for Joel's player means "a lot of Dead Milkmen and Burning of I." Which is all pretty fantastic driving music. Even in our van's tinny speakers, those Burning of I songs are stand-outs... they were my first write-up, and like most freshman efforts, I look back on that piece and think they deserve a better review. They should be heard-- get their records. And hey, we're playing with them at The Kraken in October.
But I digress...
While we didn't actually get there last time, Ellesnburg definitely wasn't this hot last time out. Spokane was really, really sweaty. We got to the venue before the doors unlocked and found a pub around the corner with WiFi, air conditioning, and $2 Blue Moons.
The Spokane crowd was really nice-- Spokaners, as far as I can tell, are really nice in general-- and I was handed a parking lot Pabst tallboy while we were loading in. The end of that beer was like swallowing sand... I drank water through most of the night.
We initially balked at the pay lot behind The Hop... until we saw the price. Paid parking lots are expensive in Seattle. The lot we were in, noon, evening, and night, was $1. I think we can handle that.
ubik. and Nasalrod were absolutely the weirdest bands of the night, and different kinds of weird, so one of us couldn't inoculate the crowd for the other. There was a lot of metal metal metal on tap from the Spokane bands, and we were in the middle of the whole thing.
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| Nasalrod at The Hop |
And we met Bono. He covered Alice in Chains. It's rare to see a club empty out so quickly.
While that was happening, we discovered the "backstage" area-- the kitchen is right by the stage at the Hop, so I didn't round that corner until I saw Joel, Tyler, Tim, Kat, and Justin head over there. There are stairs down into the basement with a "staff and performers only" sign above it.
Hey-- I'm a performer!
and the next door says "Employees only," and, since the club was going to pay us, I considered myself qualified.
Well, that, and half my band was already in there.
Pretty keen little place, all told. I liked The Hop quite a bit-- they mic everything, which is not my personal preference, but Nasalrod (who's seen us often enough to know) says we sounded good, and they sounded great as well. The sound guy definitely knew what he was doing.
The show ended at midnight, so we hit Spokane and found some places to be... which included (and I wish I had a picture of this) Justin surfing on top of the Nasalrod van holding on to Michelle sitting outside their passenger window (she was his seatbelt).
At bar time.
In the middle of downtown.
I, being the devil-may-care rocker that I am, was just waiting for tour to stop dead as Nasalrod and ubik. each had to bail a member out of jail. I am old and stodgy. Of course, that's just me being neurotic. Nothing bad happened to anyone.
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Kickoff at the Funhouse
The Funhouse in Seattle, WA
w/ Nasalrod, Slave Traitor, and The Vatican
Well, this is different: we've never gone out on the road with a band before. I hadn't seen Nasalrod since they kicked my ass at The Kraken... and they sorta intimidated me last night-- they're so uptempo and rocking that I watched their set with two parallel thoughts:
“These guys are awesome. I'm so glad we're going on the road with them.”
and
“Damnit. How are we supposed to follow this?”
Which is just something that happens in my head... it wasn't actually an issue. We played last, of course, since we were on our home turf (Nasalrod will close the Portland show), and the whole gig went pretty damn well. It was great to see Slave Traitor again-- it's been a while-- and I'd never seen The Vatican before. Then again, I'd never seen one of Slave Traitor's fabled fistfights/wrestling matches... that was a new one.
We attempted to keep the group together and crash at The Josephine, just to get us on the road at a reasonable hour. It worked... kind of. Still-- the theory was sound. The Spokane show started at 5:00PM, and we had a long drive ahead of us.
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