Great Friday, cool Saturday

we woke up (relatively) early the next day so we could do two things....have brunch with Kat, and buy tickets to see Low (with Milagres) on the 27th. I'm not sure if Low realizes that they get to play with the band that just did FIVE shows with husband&wife, but i'm sure they'll be excited when they find out. this was Kat's reaction when Tim said that same sentence to her....


we left NYC and headed for Winooski, VT. First things first....we met up with our Milagres buddies and went for some vietnamese food. it wasn't spicy enough for kyle. he likes them real spicy. he put sriracha and jalepenos in his soup to make it tougher.

after that we played a show, and when Milagres went on it looked like this:


i don't have any photographic evidence of this, but after the show we stayed with the sweetest girl in the world named Katie. She was super kind to us, gave us the scoop on what's good in VT, and made us feel very comfortable. Katie, if you're out there, we love you. please contact us and we'll be friends for life.

on with the show....

after we left Katie's place it freaking snowed and snowed and snowed all day and it was like a blizzard, but it was in April and it made no sense and we hated it, but what could we do because it was just dumb stupid weather. it was pretty though. see?



halfway through the trip to Maine, our van broke down. like i said, it was a blizzard, so conditions got a little hairy with no heat and no transportation. we drew straws and Zac and Bryant had no choice but to kill and butcher and eat me and Tim so they could survive. Donner-Party-style. here they are after their hearty feast. turns out, the van wasn't dead after all, so these two guys continued the tour without us.


i was just kidding about all that cannibalism business...what actually happened is that after the van broke down we were walking to the nearest gas station when we all fell down a rabbit hole and ended up in this magical saloon. i don't know what it was, but whatever cowboys lived in this alternate universe had won a lot of trophies. we weren't looking for trouble, and we certainly couldn't compete with these muchachos, so we had some shots of sarsaparilla, passed out immediately, and woke up back in our van, never to speak of it again. until i just wrote this blog.


we eventually made it to portland, where bryant read the paper while Milagres did a soundcheck. one of the great things about being the opening band is that you don't have to do anything but show up and play. sure, you're set's going to sound bad, BUT while the headliners are busy fussing over their monitor mixes and EQs and ryders, you can sit in the greenroom and eat bananas like this:

it's real fun to much a banana. you can tell, because i'm laughing.


for real though, Milagres rule. their record is coming out this fall on the Kill Rock Stars label and i'm super excited to hear it. until then, i'm going to hear these songs played over and over for the next five nights. you are jealous.

oh, i also got this picture of Chris for my collection of "photos of people who are sleeping or dead". there'll be a nice round-up of these photos at the end of the tour, but here's a taste for now. it'll kind of be like "Hot or Not", but you'll have to decide whether the people are alseep, or dead. get it?

But I can't f$&#ing close mine s#*%

New York City. We've got a serious love/hate thing going on with this city. Over the years, it's been home to some of our highest highs and our lowest lows. This time though, the stars aligned. We played the Rock Shop in Brooklyn, not only to a room full of people, but a room full our rowdy friends. It was the kind of welcoming show we're only used to experiencing in Bloomington, or Muncie, but here we were living it up in the big city having the thrill of a lifetime. Thanks to all of our friends that came out and joined in the fun. We appreciate that.

 
This is our good old pal Airbud. He provided us with a most comfortable crashpad during our visit. He's one of the kindest, funniest, friendliest jokers you'll ever meet. You can tell he's cool in this photo by the way he's lounging. Airbud strolls, that's it and that's all. Here he is telling us some story about sex-trade-mad-cow-disease or something like that. I wasn't paying attention. We were way too busy scarfing his leftover Passover foodover allover nightover.






Our first order of business in NYC was to stop by the Kennel to record a session with Jim Santo, Billy the engineer who's last name I never got, and Jack Rabid - editor of The Big Takeover. Those dudes were totally sweet and the recording session was fun and went smoothly. We'll have more on this (and you'll be able to hear it) in about a month or so.


We probably haven't gotten a chance to mention it yet, but we totally sold-out of the Proud Flesh LPs that we brought with us about halfway through this tour, which was definitely unexpected. For as talented and incredible as we are, we're very humble, so the selling out came as a nice surprise. Here's a photo of the package of MORE records, sent to us by the lovely and beautiful Jared P Cheek of Flannelgraph Records. Hopefully, if we can sell the rest of these, we can afford to get Jared some drawing lessons and he'll stop drawing Bullwinkle on everything. Until then we'll be spending our time at the moose, goose, and got-loose.


Kat Lee is one of our oldest and dearest New York friends. This is her (and husband Corey's) band ohnomoon, and they are great. They should be dropping some recordings on us soon, so prepare yourself accordingly.


Right before we played, Tim dropped his cell phone behind/under the stage. Here's Kat laughing at him during his first (of several) attempt at crawling under there to retrieve it. It was gross down there, and probably full of spiders (like mayberry's old bandstand), but he eventually got his phone back and even scored a few new cables while he was down there.


In 2009 Glass Ghost released one of my favorite records, Idol Omen, on one of my favorite record labels, Western Vinyl. Here's me seeing them live for the first time and loving every single note of it. For those of you in the know, its kind of like if Ben Lumsdaine and Dave Segedy were fused together and joined Kill & Eat but had Aaron Neville singing. Not to mention, they were incredibly friendly and charming. I hope we get to cross paths again soon.


And finally, here's our old buddy Taylor getting into a shouting match with Bryant. Neither of them were upset, and they weren't saying anything, just shouting. For like a half hour. It was super annoying, so we ditched Taylor and murdered Bryant. Here's a picture of his corpse.

a day off, not a day on aka Martin Luther King Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger

we're gonna kick off this blog entry with a game of "What is it?". here's how you play.....
guess what this is:


if you guessed "Tim's gross slobber", you're right. congratulations!


on with the show.

April 19th, 2011 found us with a day off. we drove our van halfway across new york, from jamestown to ithaca to cut the driving in half for the next show. ithaca is a magic place, full of adventure. let me tell you about it....


the first thing we did upon entering ithaca was find the nearest record shop so zac could get his fix from the old five-finger-discount-bin (he's a kleptominerac) and lay off our stuff for a change. we have to stop by a place of business every couple of days so he can get it out of his system, otherwise we just end up with a bunch of pairs of bryant's underpants missing, or Tim's mustache trimmer, which you can tell zac stole a long time ago.


this is what it looks like when zac's trying to decide whether or not to steal. devils on one side, angels on the other. zac always chooses devils.


after chowing down on some phoney baloney mexican food we settled into this sweet hotel room and watched that new Sherlock Holmes movie until we fell asleep. it was decent, but he should have said "elementary my dear watson" more.


the next day we woke up early and headed for our 4:20 show in CT. BUT, the stoners dropped the ball and we found out halfway there that the show was canceled. luckily we found out about another show we could jump and headed for danbury, CT. the first thing we did there was get in a staring contest with this dude. he lost.

oh geez, i just realized it's 2:30am and we need to get up early, so here's a bunch of pictures. make up your own captions. the best entry gets a free husband&wife tour poster. submissions can be mailed to hell@xrarecords.com, subject "caption contest":







A, B, C ya!

i need attention, 24 hours a day

first off, check this out!


this is husband&wife doin' it's thing. thanks to travis for the sweet photo.

on with the show...

we woke up yesterday in Indiana, PA, which was Jimmy Stewart's hometown. We stayed with the sweetest imaginable babes, who were very kind to us and made us breakfast and everything. it was a great sendoff, and we can't wait to get back there.


after we left their place, we had a little time to kill, so we got started right away on building this quick barn. Zac drew up the blueprints on this Apple Macbook computer, i documented the whole process with photos, and bryant got cracking on the actual construction work. Tim was going to help, but it took him like 5 hours just to write one email.

after the barn was done, we headed for Jamestown, NY, Lucille Ball's hometown. We got there just in time to check out Townhouse Records and grab some Vitameatavegamin at the Labyrinth before the show started. here's what that show looked like:

that's us loading equipment in.

bryant was getting really jealous of zac and his concentraton-blackmagick loading technique, so he decided to give it a try. he concentrated really hard, and groaned and strained and held his eyes shut as tight as he could, but none of his gear budged. however, this DID happen..............

The Hoosiers of Pennsylvania

Day 3, fool. We left Indiana and 7 hours later, we were in.....Indiana. Indiana, PA, that is. Being the long drive that is was, one has ample time to get done what one needed to do, such as this:



.....and this:



.....and this:



All that doin' works up an appetite. So we went to Cici's for lunch. You should have Cici'n the crap I took that night.

We also found the time to film our scene for Heavy Metal Parking Lot 2011. Here are Bryant and Zac talking about why Rust in Peace is the most supreme thrash album of all time- a "Thrashterpiece", if you will:



We finally arrive to Indiana, PA. Shortly after the second band started, the neighbors threatened to call the cops if the noise didn't cease immediately. These kids brought the ruckus. Not what I expected for a Body Count cover band:



They were only able to make it through Evil Dick, Smoked Pork and Bowels of the Devil before the show was shut down. Luckily, a few Good Samaritans offered their basement and we were able to get the show moved at the last minute.



Basement shows rule. Through the kindness of strangers a potentially disappointing night turned out to be a success and a total blast!

Space Race

i know you think this looks like fun, but it's not. it's dangerous. and it's serious.

back in the saddle....

here we go again!
i am super exhausted...the main reason is because we're having fun, and we'll sleep when we're dead, but you know how it goes.
we're two days into the tour, and it's been a total blast so far with lots of belly-pressing with buddies, and no time to rest. i'm hanging here at T-Rex with some of our boys from Support The Troopz (be warned...NSFW, unless you work in a strip club, or a tattoo parlor) and i'm going to fall asleep here real soon...let's make this quick!


Team Ethic, our friends in Ypsilanti (or if you're Zae, "Ipzillanties"), who put on a great show for us at Woodruff's. We met some way-cool people at this show!


Zae got tired of packing his stuff up in the van night after night, so he came up with a new system where he uses magic, rather than brute force, to load and unload his stuff. basically, what he does is concentrate real hard, invoking the powers of baphomet - the goat of mendes - making his drums disappear into thin air, one-by-one. then, at the next show he just does the same in reverse to conjure the drums back up, no big whoop. after this scene you're seeing here, he also did these dishes using concentration magic, just to be nice.


after the show we went back to aaron's place (our favorite haunt) after a brief detour to jimmy john's. we were all pretty tired, except for Zae, because he didn't use any energy to load equipment, so we all sat there while he played every eagle eye cherry song he knew on this acoustic guitar.


bryant couldn't stand it, so he got out his PJs, slammed his suitcase closed and said "tomorrow I'LL be gone!" before he stormed out and slept in the van. we never saw him again...

we got approximately 4 hours of sleep before we had to get up and drive to marion for the Spotted Cow Festival. we played at 1pm, but it was great nonetheless.


here's a ticked-off bryant trying to steal our merch after he stormed off the night before. we talked him down, and he agreed to finish the tour, but i think we're on thin ice...


this is what the festival looked like. KeRaAaZy!! these are our buddies from Years tearing it up.


we saw this. it's a space-rocket-racecar-time-machine, duh. we passed this dude on our way from marion to muncie for show #2 of the day. here's john glenn giving us a wave right before he lifted off and flew off into the sunset.


Zae is colorblind, so he thought Dan was pulling his leg when he told him the truth about the wall behind him here. things got real confusing...


Chad Serhal w/ She Does Is Magic live at VGR. they slayed, for real.


Derek "No Shirt" Miller, being irresponsible.

after that, my camera died, but ITFOW played after the Troopz and it was great. Long Live VILLAGE GREEN RECORDS!!! We'll see you tomorrow...........................................