Tour Recap (or "There and Back Again")

So, was our recently completed tour very much like the book, The Hobbit?

No. No, it wasn't very much like that at all.

Sure, it was an adventure: a quest to reclaim the stolen treasure of twitter mentions from the dragon that is South By Southwest, vanquishing foes with exciting rock and roll shows as we travelled through the elven territory of Virginia and the mountainous passes of Tennessee. But generally, it was nothing like The Hobbit.

Our non-Hobbit-like tour started with a stop in Baltimore where, after a hiatus of a few weeks, we were still finding our sea legs on stage. Our set was largely uneventful, but sadly, the evening was witness to the death of the Seedy Seeds' banjo. They were just playing, and the headstock literally snapped right off. I don't know how it happened. It was crazy. It was also the most eventful part of the evening.

In Charlottesville the next night we were privileged enough to share the stage (corner of the bar) with the Better Letters, a fine band from right near where we're from - Brooklyn! If you're looking for a band that is great and wears their love for the Talking Heads even more proudly than we do, you should check them out. The show was cramped and sweaty and great. The kids in Charlottesville were totally psyched to have fun, as were we, and it was fun.

From here we continued our stay in Virginia, setting up temporary camp our friends Joe and Andrew's place in Richmond. We were able to chill out, rip CDs from Joe's extensive collection, take leisurely strolls, and play fun shows both in Richmond and Norfolk. People in Norfolk are especially exceptional folk (get it, "folk", "Norfolk"?) and were a pleasure to play for.

In Richmond - well, it should be said at this point that the Richmond show was the first show of the tour where we did not share a bill with another band using a MicroKorg. Yes. The first four shows of the tour all featured bands, other than us, that used a MicroKorg. That is what you call ubiquity.

Anyway, in Richmond we followed a band of local kids called Face, that reminded me very much of what a six piece band fronted by a southern, 19 year old Beau Alessi might sound like if they all wore Alice Cooper face paint, had two drum sets, and sang songs that may or may not be about Jesus. They were great.

We then had to bid Virginia adieu, not without some shedding of tears, and make our way to Tennessee for shows in Knoxville and Nashville. The Knoxville show was one of the coolest things ever. For one thing you can smoke in bars in Tennessee, which is refreshing, and I think can make for a more old school rock and roll atmosphere, which we happily fed off of. Everyone at the Preservation Pub seemed inebriated in just the right way: openminded, happy, ready for exciting musics, and all on a Monday night! This is a place we will certainly be back to, cause people danced and were cool. We also picked up a block of cement from the alley behind the venue here to use as a weight to plant in front of Taylor's kit, which you can come see in action this Saturday at the Rock Shop!

My friend Angela came to see us in Knoxville and tipped me off to the existence of the world's largest treehouse in Crossville, TN, about halfway between Knoxville and Asheville. Of course, we took the 10 minute detour down a dirt road to see this thing. It may have been the most amazing thing I saw on the whole tour. Built by a guy who was commanded by God to build it, it's got a big chapel in the middle, is 12 stories high, makes no sense, and was extremely peaceful. There were dogs just hanging out, a bonfire going since who knows when, and goodness. If a guy could build this thing, we could get through the tour without ripping out eachothers throats - we thought.

In Nashville we played a stacked bill with the incredibly talented StereoFidelics and the frighteningly entertaining Rock City Bird House (featuring Tom Pappas of Superdrag). This marked the first, but not last, instance of a future Craig sighting - as in Tom Pappas's gesticulations we saw a very possible direction for the evolution of Craig's stage moves. The show was a seat of the pants type thing, but we met a lot of cool peoples and kept our spirits up with good $2 local beers.

We also ate Prince's Hot Chicken, which is really hot.

From here we trekked backwards up into the mountains down I-40 to Asheville, NC, where we hooked up with our friends from the Broadcast for an amusing night of YouTube videos and conspiracy, following our show at the LAB. I think James broke something in a liquor store.

By now we're pretty deep in the mud of touring, and we faced a 20+ hour drive from Asheville to Denton for our show at the 35 Conferette, and about 36 hours to do it. Armed with Sam's iron will behind the will, and the promise of cozy lodgings in Little Rock, we hit the road early from Asheville and wound up in Arkansas. Having passed a very pleasant and restful evening there with our illustrious host, Amber, we moved on to Denton and got our first taste of Texas.

The Conferette had a bunch of stages all over town, but our set took place right in front of the courthouse on the square in the center of town. We were all "5 pm in the center of town? We'll get all kinds of rush hour traffic stopping by to see the set!" As it turns out, rush hour in Denton is a little different than we imagined, but it was still tons of fun to play our first outdoor show since last summer in front of some very chill and appreciative people. We drank fully of everything else the festival had to offer, attended a house party, met some local bands, and watched Japanther and Dr. Dog. I may have shared a mosh pit with Michael Cera? A very good evening. By this point we were wearing T-shirts with no jackets.

Spending the night in a fantastic apartment in Dallas lent to us by our sight-unseen benefactor, Andrew, equipped with all kinds of fashion memorabilia and cool shit, we made the drive to Houston. Here we hooked up with Sippycup's Mike Caulo and the Young Mammals before getting some cracking tacos at El Rey and heading over to our show at Super Happy Fun Land. What a space that was. I was later informed that Houston has no zoning laws and this place is basically the embodiment of "we have no zoning laws". It's a sprawling sort of post warehouse space that I imagine people thing exists in New York, but doesn't. It theater seats imported from an AMC, clothes for sale, places to sleep, a backyard next to some train tracks, lots of painting on the walls, and cool people. Shout out to anyone who was there - everyone seemed really cool and really into it, whatever "it" is.

With two days in Texas under our belts it was time to turn our attention to the apparent focus of the tour, SXSW and Austin. We lent some meager space in our van to Andrew, the genius behind the Big Changes artwork and did some excellent hanging out, eating barbeque at Stubbs, and casing Emo's prior to our show which would take place the next day.

The next day we played at Emo's for a Gigmaven showcase. This was our earliest show ever (someone check and make sure this is true), at 1pm. Luckily the noontime beer sat well with us and we belted out our tunes at a velocity we rarely reach. Thoroughly exhausted/envigorated we got to watch a couple great Australian bands do their thing, including the Vaudeville Smash. We all had glued smiles stapled to our faces for their entire set. Imagine everything you like about music, plus a trombone, from Australia, and you've got this band. Like a cool warm breeze wipping through your chest hair. We then did an interview with Tremble Tremble, took naps, returned to town, got drunk, watched bands, and I think I may have made a couple fools of myself.

The next day, which was Wednesday, we hung out behind a bar, drank free beer (a recurring theme at this SXSW thing) and watched some music in the sun - some good, some bad, some terrible. We also shot the first installment of what at the time we thought would be our SXSW opus: "South By South Walls", in which Sam jumps off of walls. We'll be posting these incendiary videos somewhere soon. The show on this day was put on by Jacob, who we had met up with in Charlottesville. Despite some PA problems (which were also a recurring theme), I rolled around on the floor and I think we put on a pretty good show.

(More about the PA problems. Get this - there were two stages in the venue, one downstairs and one on the roof. The soundsystem was wired so that when mics were live downstairs, they were also audible through the speakers on the roof. This is crazy! This means that people upstairs could hear our vocals, but not our instruments. The mind boggles.)

Thursday we attended a swanky meet and greet brunch at the the über upscale Driskill Hotel. We felt out of place, ate eggs, and left, apparently passing very close by Aziz Ansari as we exited. More shows were seen, another show was played, and then we did the whole thing again. SXSW is sort of a blur of eat, play show, watch show, play show, drink, drink, drink, see show, eat. I won't get into all the specifics here, but you can fill in the holes yourselves with, "oh I guess here they saw an awesome band." Or "this afternoon where he's not saying exactly what they did must have been spend eating tacos." Along the way we saw many other friends (some from bands like Ava Luna, Bozmo, La Big Vic and Dream Diary, others from our personal, non band lives), which was very good and an essential part of the whole "wow there's so many people here" kind of thing that SXSW has going on.

Friday's show took place in a field, down in the flood plain (flood basin? what do you call the area that's sometimes underwater by a river?) next to the river. This was pretty far off the beaten path, but it was cool to play in such an idyllic setting, and the people putting the thing on were very cool. We ate some strange couscous sandwiches, followed by more beer and things.

We had to get up early on Saturday to head over to our final show, which took place in a parking lot behind the "best burger place in Austin" (the quotes are just there cause I only had one burger while in Austin, so I can't really judge. The burgers were actually really good.) It was hot - did I mention that most of the time we were in Austin it was like 80 and sunny? Yeah. It was. But Saturday was especially sunny and hot, so we got sweaty really fast and played a fun set which included a few older rarities. We stuck around afterwards to see the new 4 piece version of Dinosaur Feathers, and to watch a junkie almost put a syringe in Sam's beer, before downing some free "relaxation shots" *not alcohol* and leaving Texas.

[For easy reference, here's a brief list of some of the other bands we saw during SXSW:

tUnE-yArDs

Mi-Gu

The Carnivores

Lower Dens

Grass Widow

Megafauna

Thee Oh Sees

A Place to Bury Strangers

Parts & Labor

Prince Rama

Moon Duo

Bikini

Wild Flag

The Hood Internet

Keepaway (Keep Away!)

Brahms]

We then made our way back to NY via Little Rock, Memphis (where we took in the Stax Museum and some good barbeque), and Lynchburg, VA. The eminent folks of Lynchburg were good enough to let us play at their pizza place, Rivermont Pizza, which was a wonderful way of ending to tour. Crow and the Murder Machine were extra-special good as a final band to close the tour by seeing, and we even got to play our first ever acoustic session on the street corner afterwards. Keep a keen lookout for that one.

So, yeah, there was all of that, and apparently there were fireworks at some point. Maybe it was more like The Hobbit than I thought. Huh.

Finally, a big thanks to everyone who saw us, booked us, housed us, and put up with us on this tour. See you next time!

_Doug