Winter Tour

Winter Tour '05

Utah, New Mexico and Colorado, Mar. 16-26

March 28, Reno, NV, I-80 West-

Burning Man is for sissies. The Ironman Triathalon is for wimps. The Arc D'Triumph is the finish line for a bunch of namby-pamby cyclists with nothing better to do but wear bike shorts all over France for two weeks. Really want to test your physical and mental endurance? Go on tour with Aphrodesia.

We're starting to feel like Odysseus, trying to get home for 17 years or so after fighting a war far from home and dodging obstacles that mount as we get closer. We're now down to 9 of us on the green bus- after Mully flies home, Johnny goes back to Boulder and we drop David back off in Monticello, Utah to deal with the wreckage of the white bus in the parking lot of the Days Inn. Before that we had to get to Monticello from Salida, CO, which was an all day drive over one 11,000 foot pass and several lesser ones that had us gripping our seats and mattresses even though the weather, for once, is on our side.

Before that we play two nights in Salida, where the old haunted brothel upstairs at the Old Victoria turns out to be more of a low-rent flophouse (not that we're complaining- a bed, or even half of one, qualifies as a luxury at this point) but where we get to spend Saturday at some nearby hot springs, luxuriating in natural baths and entertaining the possibility that being in a band isn't so bad after all. We also have to deal with a Blues Brothers moment with an owner who shorts us $250 for being late the first night- we thought setting up early on Saturday and playing to a decently packed house for five full hours would make up for the fact that the weather and lack of a defrost button held us up on Friday, but Molly the owner doesn't agree with us. So much for mountain hospitality.

So it's an all day drive back to the scene of the crime in Utah- someone has to deal with the bus, and since it's David's, that him. We say our goodbyes and hit the road at 9 or so at night, stopping in Moab to look for some veggie oil but coming up empty since there's only breweries and diners with nasty oil in this part of the world. We drive through the night, spending our remaining funds on petroleum and making the Nevada border by morning, where we push on through several mountain passes and a full scale blizzard that slows us to a crawl. It's Maya's birthday, and we entertain ourselves with 80's trivia games, lap dances and a vintage Cabernet with a screw top that we find by the slot machines at a roadside gas station.

Now we're in familiar terrain, finally, heading over the pass from Reno and crossing our fingers that the bus doesn't overheat or give us one final adventure. Although if it does, we know what to do.

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March 25, somewhere on Rt. 83 south, somewhere around Colorado Springs, heading to Salida, CO

Did we mention the green bus has no heat? Did we mention we're in Colorado, in March? Did we mention we're FREEZING OUR BUTTS OFF? Well, we are. In the Aphrodesia fashion world of the moment, blankets and wool hats are de rigeur, while acceptable fashion accessories include sleeping bags, shawls, random Mexican blankets, socks on your hands, and just about anything to keep the cold out.

We left Boulder this afternoon after saying goodbye to Mikey, who flew home to SF to work at a flea market (somehow, this makes perfect sense to us right now), and picking up Johnny Jenkins, who will play percussion for us the next two nights. Our bus not only has no heat, it has no defrost, and no electricity. Meaning as we drive down I-25 we have to stop every five minutes to scrape the ice off the windshield. Luckily Team Aphrodesia motivates and finds a propane space heater in Monument, CO which we place on the dashboard and which helps keep the windows clear enough to drive.

We made it to Vail on Wednesday, with the help of our friend Johnny Jyemo from Jyemo and the Extended Family, who graciously lends us his touring van for a day since the green bus and 10,000 foot passes mix like oil and water (we're dumb, but not that dumb). Why we made it to Vail is a different story- a mostly empty club and no rooms provided means we page the crowd for a place to stay and end up on some new friends' floors yet again. This time it's CJ and Colin, the bouncer and sound man at the club, who don't seem like this is the first time they've taken a band home from work.

Thursday in Denver is the String Cheese Incident afterparty gig at Cervantes, and we get Michael Travis from String Cheese to come by and sit in (along with Johnny Jyemo and Ira Sweetwine of the Extended Family) on a powerhouse version of Ting Be, but not much of the crowd that was at their show a few blocks away. So we play a tight, long set for a sparse crowd for the third night in a row while the horn section and rhythm section finishes a bottle of whiskey onstage, and by the end of the night precision isn't our strong suit. We collect our $200 guarantee from the club manager, who remarks that the club lost money paying us that much. When we express our sympathy in our most bitterly sarcastic voice the look on his face tells us that most bands are content with the privilege of playing this Grateful Dead clubhouse; as we walk away we calculate that 1/100th of whatever the String Cheese made tonight a few blocks away is probably more than Aphrodesia will gross this whole tour (welcome to the music business, son) and resolve that this is officially the last Aphrodesia Cheap Date Tour.

Not that any of that matters that much- the important thing is, we look damn good tonight.

The heater is making the bus marginally less painful to sit in right now, and the bright spot of the last few days is that the green bus' veggie system is alive and well- we're in the freezing Colorado mountains going uphill on nothing but used cooking oil. We've also found rt. 115, which will wind its way up to Salida and deposit us at the Old Victoria Theater, which has rooms for us upstairs in an old brothel that legend says is haunted by dead prostitutes. Somehow we can't think of a better ending for this adventure until we begin the long drive home.

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March 23, a cafe on Broadway, Boulder, CO-

Somehow we make it to the Southern Sun in Boulder and play to a packed house, but wonder why we're playing in a brewpub in Boulder working our own sound drinking most of the night's pay away. The next day we meet with our booking agency and talk contracts, business plans, commission rates, publicity strategies and marketing tools- in other words, the real business of music, as opposed to fanciful irrelevancies like notes, scales, harmonies, polyrhythms, songs, lyrics, reverb pedals and the rest of things we've spent our lives so far trying to figure out. It's a good meeting and we decide they're mostly doing a good job for us but that we've got bigger problems to figure out right now.

Such as: How the hell are we getting up to Vail on Wednesday? If we had known we'd be in the old bus we never would have taken the gig, but as it is we drop the green bus off at a brake shop to get worked on since it won't make it up there and back as it is, rent a van, and furiously work the phones trying to borrow or beg enough wheels to get us there (up a 10,000 foot pass or two) and back. Oh, and figure out where we're staying in Vail, where the club isn't giving us rooms and we know no one. Perhaps some skiiers will take pity on us and take all 12 of us to their hot tub, where we can sing for our supper by improvising verses about brake pads and coolant fluid.

Meanwhile some of us sit in cafes, fantasizing about a new interactive video game that will outsell Grand Theft Auto and make us rich. The working title for this game is "Waste of Time and Money", and in it you are a 12-piece band in a rickity old city transit bus. You must make it partway across country to each 'gig' on time, where you gain money points which then must be distributed among band members evenly. Your bus sometimes runs on vegetable oil, which saves you money points and also gains you 'karma points', though the makers of the game stupidly didn't program in a tangible benefit to those. Various obstacles are thrown in your way, such as broken buses, impossibly long drive times, band members who must be rounded up in different locations every morning, and the declining 'morale points' that plummet southward when each band member's money points dip too low. Fall too low in any category and band members may leave your band, in which case you must improvise from a variety of options to find a replacement, since showing up to a 'gig' without a full complement of band members deducts points. You also must forage for housing, food and sometimes alternative transportation or be in danger of losing points, which may cancel your tour, or leave you with negative band members once you get back home to San Francisco. The best part is, once you finish each 'mission' (we decide the "Colorado Rockies Tour in March" option will be a particularly challenging setting), you can just hit repeat, repeat, repeat.

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March 21, I-70, 70 miles west of Denver en route to Boulder, CO, way up in the Colorado mountains aboard the Green Bus--

Q: What do other bands do when they break down in the middle of the desert?

A: They freak out, drink beer, fight, get depressed, do heroin, and break up as a band.

Q: What does Aphrodesia do when they break down in the middle of the desert?

A: All of the above, minus the freaking out (well, for 11 of 12 of them, anyway), fighting, depression, heroin, and breaking up.

And of course, there are a couple other things Aphrodesia does besides. They call their friends 1500 miles away to come pick them up in a new bus and bring a replacement trumpet player. They rent two vans to get to Sante Fe for their next gig, then learn that the green bus is already in Arizona, motoring to the rescue, kind of like the nearest ocean liner steaming towards the Titanic survivors in the North Atlantic (ok, bad analogy). They decide to ferry the equipment to Moab and play another gig at Woody's, which they do because Shari the owner answers the phone when they call and makes Mother Theresa look like a crabby old bag lady.

They call Sante Fe to cancel the gig, only to be told that the owner has been 'trying to get in touch' because their liability insurance lapsed and they can't have shows. Meaning it's a good thing they didn't drive all day to Sante Fe in rented vans. And that this is all happening for some sort of bizarre cosmic reason that we've given up trying to figure out. They hit the streets of Moab and drop by the radio station to get the word out about the new show, and it seems everyone has heard about it already.

They play Woody's again, to a club that on a Sunday is more packed than it was on Friday, pass the hat and make an extra 300 bucks to help with the bus towing, and bus repair, and bus tires, and bus fuel, and...um, never mind that part. Evan and Todd arrive during the second to last song and incite total mayhem- we can't believe they're actually here and neither can the crowd, all of whom seem to know about our whole situation. Evan solos on mouth harp, Todd leads us through "Front Lines" and we parade outside and back in the club after "Zombie" just to make sure Moab remembers us (we think it worked).

So now we're packed up and packed into the Green Bus (We love you!! We'll never forsake you again!!), which is cozy, to put it mildly, with 13 of us packed in here. But we don't care- it's running on vegetable oil, and it's moving forward without any smoke coming out of the engine (big plus). Now we're backed up in traffic heading over an 11,000 foot pass, wondering if any of this is such a good idea. If you're reading this, it means we made it to an Internet cafe somewhere....more later

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March 19, Room 200, Days Inn, Monticello, Utah (Aphrodesia Press International)- There is now officially no way, no how, we could make any of this up. Where to begin? True, there are some events from the last few days to which we've grown accustomed over the last year or so, such as-

- Spending four hours under the bus in the parking lot of an auto parts store in Provo, stringing a line for the coolant fluid from one of the veggie tanks to the engine.

- Rocking the crowd in Park City, Utah so hard some of them take us back to their rented hot tub for a night of freestyled verses spun at 113 degrees.

- Losing power going over the Sierras because something was wrong with the veggie oil.

But some things are new even to us, and we're starting to wonder there's such a thing as a Days Inn Frequent Guest Card.

We leave Moab after a night at Woody's Tavern filled with thankfully non-Utah beer and lots of new friends, as well as a drive to Moab that sees the veggie system working for around 100 miles or so (well, it's a start). The drive through towering red rock cathedrals leads us to an incline 10 miles north of the desert hamlet (and that's being charitable) of Monticello, Utah, where we lose all power and are the highway-bound equivalent of dead in the water.

Quick investigation reveals flames shooting out of the engine block (big thanks to the truckers who ran over with a fire extinguisher!) and, perhaps more importantly, an engine that resembles a watermelon that David Letterman dropped off a four story rooftop. In other words, this bus ain't goin' nowhere, son. Trooper Michael Bradford of the Utah Highway Patrol motors to the rescue and ferries Mully and Ezra into town, arranges for a bus tow truck to drive to the bus from Grand Junction Colorado, tries to track down the proprietor of the local U-Haul and drops Mully and Ezra off at the Peace Tree Cafe. We decide he's worth a CD. The Peace Tree Cafe is run by Moab refugees Karen and Doug, who are so incredibly cool they not only let us use the cafe phone for a million long distance calls to every car and truck rental place within 200 miles (wondering is there are still places cell phones don't work? There are), they also offer to drive us the 60 miles to Moab in the morning to pick up the two vans we finally find available to finish the tour. We decide they're worth two CD's. We also, unfortunately, have to call Stella Blue in Albuquerque and cancel tonight's gig- boo-hoo!!

Meanwhile, the rest of the gang holes up in the bus, directs traffic, goes hiking and finds an old rusted bus graveyard (Ironic? Iconic? A metaphor for the Aphrodesiac condition? We don't know, it was just cool, that's all), and arranges for our friend Evan to drive the green bus (remember the green bus?) from San Francisco to Colorado to meet us.

Did you get that last part? It's true. The green bus (the 'Votemobile' for Aphrodesia tour dairy junkies..) is on its way from San Francisco to meet us in Colorado. Refer to the first sentence of this entry again.

Unfortunately, things get even weirder. Our new trumpet player, Brian Switzer, who not 12 hours earlier had been wowing the crowd at Woody's in Moab with a freestyled hip-hop verse on "Make Up Your Mind", decides he's had enough and leaves to go home. Except that we're not near an airport, or a bus station, or a taxi stand, or even a working phone. We're smack dab in the middle of the Utah high desert, and it's getting cold. We try and reason with him, but the last we see of him he's walking north with his bags on Rt. 191, 60 miles south of Moab, and a hell of a lot farther from anything after that. Granted, breaking down in a bus with a bunch of crazy musicians who are used to this sort of thing more than you are must be hard. But we liked Brian a lot and he seemed to be rolling with everything and having a good time along with us until he flipped and headed out. We're short a trumpet player, but more than anything, we hope he's OK (if you're headed down rt. 191 reading this, keep an eye out!).

EXCEPT (you didn't think we were done, did you?)- we're not short a trumpet player. Todd Grady, our right hand man par excellance, decides after minimal cell phone peer pressure to hop in the green bus with Evan in San Francisco and meet us in Colorado on Monday, blowing off a week of work and thereby likely dooming himself to a life of sleeping in broken buses by the side of the road with 11-piece bands who try to drive around the country on vegetable oil. We're stunned, beyond psyched, flattered, honored, and above all heartwarmed at the thought that someone out there is as dumb as we are (that's a compliment Todd!).

Tomorrow we wake up and get a ride to Moab and hopefully rent two vans in time to shuttle back here, pack everythin g off the bus and make it to Sante Fe in time to play at Bar B. We'll also try and keep our minds off the money we're losing, paying, and not making to deal with the broken bus and rent the vans we need to play for our new friends waiting to be made in New Mexico and Colorado (Oy vey- don't ask!). If you'd like to make a contribution to the Aphrodesia Bus Debt Fund, click here. Keep your fingers crossed, and check back soon....oh, and if any of this sounds far-fetched, refer to the first sentence of this entry.