Maiden Voyage Tour, August 19, I-5 North, Irvine CA (or something)
We have traveled in a rickety airport shuttle bus the size of a dorm room that shuddered to a stop beside a steaming Indiana freeway and plowed through ice storms up the Rocky Mountains while ten of us shivered inside like caterpillars in sleeping bags, brandishing its jade green hull from the dirty streets of the Mission to the canyons of Manhattan. We rode a fading white city transit bus and swung from the commuter handlebars as it wheezed its last breaths on a dusty Utah highway. We have crammed a short bus like refugees and driven days down desert blacktops that lead nowhere, and stuffed bags of jumpsuits in the trunks of our own cars to speed through the Pacific Northwest and arrive at clubs as dazed and disoriented as if we had emerged from a Guantanamo interrogation room.
But those days, for now, are behind us, and as the sun sets on another choked Southern Californian freeway we recline on the felt seat backs of our 1979 MCI Crusader II coach bus, the kind you feel an urge to buy a ticket from a pot-bellied man in a Greyhound shirt and cap upon boarding. We press 36,000 tons into the buckling pavement and breath more horses than Off Track Betting, thanks to our friend Sean from the Hot Buttered Rum crew, who flew to Riverside County for us last weekend and returned lighter the begged, borrowed and practically stolen cash we had given him for the trip and heavier our gleaming (in our eyes, anyway) bus in shining armor, a ticket to a brighter future with leg room to spare.
None of which, of course, means there aren’t still kinks to work out. Todd and David arrive at the Green Tortoise mechanic shop on Wednesday at noon, Santa Barbara awaiting us six hours away, a much-needed tune-up having been completed the night before. They find transmission fluid spewing over the shop floor from our undercarriage and frantic mechanics wondering where to order a missing valve. Which leads to a 4 PM departure, which leads to arriving at the SoHo in Santa Barbara 45 minutes after our scheduled start, bad news to the handful who arrived at 9 expecting a show but apparrantly no great shakes to the sizeable crowd that gets down with us for two sets anyway. Mike Hoffman, sitting in for the day job-impaired Slapsaw for the tour, has treated our songs like a law student before the bar, nailing every nook and cranny.
The next morning we stretch the coach’s legs out through Los Angeles heading to San Diego. It handles like a pre-surgery Bo Jackson, and its cruising altitude of road level feels so smooth we half-expect a pre-flight oxygen mask demonstration from a flight attendant. We remember nights spent waiting for bus tow trucks while big rigs screamed by at 70 MPH and decide we are worth it.
Winston’s in San Diego is a love-in: it’s been two aborted attempts to play here since February, and we’re thrilled to see that some of the crowd we remember- like our buddies Neil and John and Kristen- remember us too. We give it up until closing time, and then some of us retire to the Jungle, a funky overgrown bungalow lot, while others of us drink beer a few blocks away with a songwriting Marine newly returned from Iraq and some new friends who wandered into Winston’s not knowing what to expect, and when we sleep on a futon in the same room as a blissfully copulating couple it all seems normal.
Back Home Again in San Francisco, August 22, 2005
14 Below in Los Angeles is a white-jot blur- Afro Beat Down throws down the gauntlet with a positively slamming set, and we pick up the momentum and run with it. The stage temperature reaches 2,000 degrees and our jump suits are soaked through with sweat by the end, but when we emerge after blasting through and hour or so of our heaviest slabs the crowd lets us know it was worth it. After Delta Nove’s typically monstrous set, all of us get back on stage for a rendition of Fela’s “Sorrow Tears and Blood” with all three bands, and someone counts 22 of us on stage at once. It’s epic, but the night is unfortunately marred by someone who swipes Mikey’s snare drum from the club at some point during the night, giving rise to band fantasies of personal Terminator robots programmed to exact vengeance on equipment thieves.
The next day we make a pit stop at Todd’s mom’s for a cook-out, then head to Los Osos, where Kluster Funk fills the air with electro-madness before we hit it for a long set that builds on last night’s momentum even though we’re already dead tired.
We drive our silver stallion through the night and land on David’s floor in Oakland at 7 am- since the bus still has seats in it it’s near impossible for many of us to get any sleep while we drive. Somehow we stagger awake and make it up to Hopland for Solfest on time, picking up our bus guru Sean on the way, who shows us how to drive a coach bus four days after we started doing it. Oops.
Solfest- a solar-living festival thrown by the alternative-energy folks at Real Goods- ends our min-tour on an appropriately high note. We play a tight- focused set as good as the one in L.A. and catch Mickey Hart drumming along to us on the side of the stage, and meanwhile the crowd doesn’t seem to mind that our new bus isn’t running on vegetable oil. Yet.