Archive Sunday #12

AK: So this post will wrap up the east coast tour with NE-HI. We stopped in Richmond, Atlanta, Nashville and Omaha though it was all a blur. I honestly can't remember a single show. Even the pictures don't bring up any memories for me. That's sort of how it goes sometimes when you're on the road. Things can really start to blend together because it's all such a routine: wake up, drive to the venue, set up, play show, go to bed. Rinse and repeat. Often times I've found myself waking up in a hotel and forgetting what city I'm even in that day. Other times a stage hand will strike up conversation by asking what city we played the night before, and I can't tell you how many times I've literally forgotten where we came from the night before. It's a strange feeling and sometimes makes you feel like you're losing your marbles. But hey, that's the road life.

WT: I remember a lot of colds flying around the group at this time, and I was pretty hoarse for these shows. People kept recommending a "hot toddy", which is hot water, whiskey, honey, and lemon. In fact, nothing helps a sore throat except rest, and alcohol probably makes it worse. Still, you make do with the options you've got.

SD: Yeah so after playing DC9 in Washington DC we made our way down south to my old stomping grounds of Richmond, VA. We played at an arcade/bar/venue a few blocks from where I used to live called Strange Matter. I remember getting some of their famous vegan mac+cheese before the show and stopping by my old apartment building to visit the mural of jesus taking acid in the elevator shaft between the 2nd and 3rd floors. After the show we crashed at my parents place, but I felt kinda bad when my pups woke everyone up before 6am during their morning routine.

From there we went east to the old alma mater William and Mary, so Will could play an acoustic set at the student-run Meridian coffeehouse. This visit brought back memories of some of the early shows we played there in college together when we covered songs like "Dance Yrself Clean" between originals like "Stoop Kid" and "Bodys" while the artsy kids watched House of Wax on the projection screen behind us. This show had some calmer vibes though, offering a much needed break for the students cramming for their upcoming exams.

After the afternoon solo set, we started making the long drive down to Atlanta. There we played a venue called the Earl. This place reminded me of a typical southern venue where you could nail just about anything to the wall and find it still displayed there years later. I remember being so psyched when they told us we could order anything from the menu complimentary at the restaurant next door. I don't if this was just unusual without any restrictions at the time, or simply because I was famished for a non-gas station type meal.

Next we headed to Nashville to play the High Watt right next to the Mercy Lounge. This was the worst day for Will's cold he picked up on tour and his voice was super raw, but we tried to make the best of it. On top of that I remember one of Will's guitar pedals decided to crap out in the middle of the show, so he just crushed and dismantled it on stage handing out knobs and metal pieces to audience members while the rest of us jammed haha.

Our last show of the run was at The Demo in St. Louis. Afterwards we all hugged it out with our buddies Ne-Hi and took a quick tour shot outside the venue when we were packing up. Then we grabbed some food at the local White Castle on our way to the motel to celebrate making it through a pretty rough week. I think we all split up in Omaha where Will went east to visit his family, I went back to Brooklyn, and Ethan and Andrew continued west back to Seattle. I made sure to leave my caffeine pills I bought when I was working the graveyard shift back home in the van for Andrew's drive to Seattle (pretty sure Ethan didn't have his license yet).

Ethan's Blizzard Writeup:

We ended our first big North American tour of 2015 in Omaha, Nebraska. The show itself is sort of a blur, but I remember it feeling both triumphant and chaotic as we’d been out for about a month and the wheels were coming off a bit from exhaustion. I definitely remember finishing the show with a broken string, and commemorating the last show with an impromptu set addition (or new arrangement?) we hadn’t practiced before. In any case, there was a satisfying closure to the final show and the sense that we had mounted a long and complicated tour successfully and well, and that we could enjoy a long stint at home for the holidays. The trip home, however, ended up being eventful in its own right for Andrew and I, as after Will and Seth flew back to Virginia the next morning, we had the task of driving “Bertha”, our 94 Econoline tour van (on loan from Andrew’s folks), through several mountain passes on the long trail out of Nebraska and back to Washington, in the middle of a blizzard. Memories from this are also hazy, as the next three days ran into a sort of dreamlike, graytone blur, but I remember the ominous feeling as we started up Bertha for the first time to crawl back onto the highway; for some godawful reason I remember the first song I played being “The Overload” from the closing minutes of Remain in Light, and hearing Eno’s dystopian, William-Gibson-flying-a-helicopter-esque synths as Andrew and I plowed through a churning white nothingness. After some initial doubt, we successfully got onto the highway, but for a stretch of several hours we were simply following the two red tail lights of a municipal snow plough, unable to see the road, much less the other lanes or even the sky. Not having my license at the time (still wearing braces, in fact) I couldn’t drive, so Andrew took us home and over the next several days I was car mixmaster. Cuts I remember listening to on the long drives include:

• A Maria Bamford comedy album (possibly an older George Carlin, too)
• Several episodes of Marc Maron’s WTF, including the one with Obama (he amusingly critiques Marc’s interview technique at the end)
• The final two pre-reunion Pixies albums in their entirety (Andrew started singing along to the extended outro on “All Over the World”)
• Some Andrew Sega mod-tracker tunes for the “Crusader: No Remorse” video game soundtrack (great driving or working music)

As a fresh-faced touring greenhorn I had no real frame of reference for whether this experience seemed scary or risky, and sort of took it as it was without thinking much on it. As the person operating the vehicle, Andrew was much more stressed and later remarked that, if worst had come to worst, it was lucky we were hauling several dozen T-shirts and hoodies in the back in case we’d broken down and needed to keep warm. We also both agreed that if things had come down to it, he would definitely need to eat me.