Friday, July 3, 2009

What Happens in Wisconsin...

Chicago was lovely. We had an energetic crowd, partially influenced by an injection of high-school-drama enthusiasm, which I remember from my days of old. The night ended with a lovely hummus plate I shared with a music journalist whose real name is Amber Valentine, who like myself, is in the music industry as a quick-path to fiction fame. I'd like to think we had good conversations with the few words we were able to get out intermittently under the loud jazz-funk band playing twenty feet away. Amber was allergic to wheat so I got to eat all the pita.

We received a text a day or two before Chicago asking us to play an outdoors park show in Madison Wisconsin. When you think of outdoors park shows, you generally tend to think about a large outdoors stage, a festive summer atmosphere, maybe even a couple of pretzel stands on the side. Or slush. This is what a summer, outdoors music concert tends to be.

When we arrived, we saw a small sports shack on a tiny strip of grass barely passable to be labeled a park. The audience members, barring the 3 people suntanning and a few children on the playground, were the infrequent kayak renters.

Being the professional musicians that we are, we say hey, we may as well play. Which would have been a possibility had the 20-year-old sound system not shat the bed one song into our set. As luck would have it, a few nightmare of you fans showed up expecting an actual show. With no sound system you have no vocals. No vocals mean no songs. What do you do with 8 musicians, no sound system, and no songs? a 40 minute, alcohol-laced spacejam.

What occurred was something I like to refer to, in memory, as Plushmare of Goo. A completely improvised atonal series of melodies being sprayed around rather haphazardly. Apparently, two people asked for CDs and the name of our band. Absurdity works over time.

The next stop on our trip was Omaha Nebraska. We came and went and everything fell where it was, as far as Omaha is concerned. We did meet a very nice young vegan lady who gave our tour manager, Skippy, a vegan cookie in Lawrence Kansas. Skippy is also a vegan, and on a trans-continental trip through the united states, a task of being such becomes quite complicated, making this small genuine gesture of cookie-giving a beautiful notion of human kindness.

Speaking of Lawrence Kansas, we have come to the conclusion that we really do like Kansas. But something horrible happened. We needed to pull an all nighter from Lawrence to get to Denver at 8:30 am the next day for a radio promo spot. That was hellish enough, as a concept, without the need to add an extra serendipitous fuck hole in our left tire. Thanks to an awesome dude, we were on the road sooner than AAA got there, and made it to Denver with one minute to spare.

while that was happening, we found out we co-won the Deli Magazine's artist of the month with the band, the Narrative. Congrats to us.

Sign the frog.