1/14 – milwaukee

here it goes – a rundown of whatever bullshit we did for four days through the midwest, a land i’ve often admitted to hating. i suppose it has its charms, sure, but overall its a snowy mess of mentally regressive shitiots. ha ha ha, get it? shitiots? like that song of ours?

yeah okay

anyway, it all started with some sort of bad idea from Andy Peterson, the Fashionable Idiot and undisputed king of making bad ideas work.

hold on, let me sign into my AOL account and i’ll just pull the fucking thing up.

Alright, as far as a mini tour goes I think we should totally do it, be a fun weekend of male bonding, ha! A two month notice/approval to get the ball rolling would be best. Winter sucks cuz of the cold but honestly nowhere is as cold as here right? Id say the week before or week after xmas is the only bad time cuz every stupid band with one college student is trying to cram 19 days of touring into a week. Ill bet Joel has a good portion of January off and what better time to get the hell out of here? An idea or two to bounce off everyone……

Scene 1:
Thursday – Milwaukee bar show, dont have to leave till four/five so all you day jobbers wont have to take the day off
Friday – Cleveland, a long drive but fuck it, the sooner we leave mke the better all our lives are, worth the effort
Saturday – Chicago, obviously gonna sleep in at Cle, but with the hour time change in our favor should be no prob to show up in time for show
Sunday – Appleton, makes the drive a lil shorter, shows suppose to be cool there. Honestly it could be an early evening show and we could still make it back to mpls by bar close
Monday – Memory Lanes, fuck it. Set up yer own homecoming show with three bands yer friends with. Take $250, everyone else get $50. Thee end, lets retire

Scene 2: (if the shit streets of Cleveland dont excite you)
Thursday – Kansas City, long drive but easy. Would have to leave in the morning though. Probably a great show
Friday – St Louis, you already know cuz you already been, good time
Saturday – Chicago, same shit. Get a good gig on Sat in Chi and everything is paid
Sunday – Milwaukee or Appleton – options are good right? Just somewhere to stop on the way home. 6pm house show gets us home late, but not too late to take Monday off work
Monday – Memory Lanes – same shit, fuck it. milk the cow for all its worth, play air hockey, watch Paddy, weird Mexican crusties, and Mem Lanes bartenders blow lines together behind the dumpster

So yeah, thats my idea. Id be happy to drive. My car isnt the greatest, but its reliable. Five people can sit very comfortably and the trunk is huge. Aside from a personal tote and sleeping bag you should be able to fit records, guitar and bass head, guitar and bass, and some drum breakables. Everyone that sets up a show will be a personal friend so sharing gear wont be a problem, honestly just need the guitars, cymbals, and snare. If you guys make some money and can throw me a few bones for wear and tear on the car thats awesome. If ya just break even or everyone loses thirty bucks while still having a good time, fuck it. Thats fine too. Chances of remembering anything Tuesday morn? Slim.

SPACE LORD MOTHER MOTHER! MOTHER!! OOOOOOOOOOHHHHH YYYYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!

andy

So somehow, probably due to the deadly effective combination of Andy and drugs at 4AM, this thing got booked and we piled into a 2002 Dodge Intrepid on a Thursday afternoon. Each of us threw our backpacks and gear (guitars/head/some drum shit) into Andy’s trunk and somehow made it fit, even with a few pillows, sleeping bags, and blankets. We brought a box of granola bars and Dan left some blow pops his uncle gave us in my kitchen which are still fucking there because no one eats blow pops. except for Joel, who throughout the journey, probably bought 10 blow pops because he eats like a child who also likes thai food.

we drove out of Minneapolis and hit a bit of traffic in St. Paul listening to whatever CDs Andy had that were given to him from other people. there was no tape deck and the cigarette lighter was burnt out, so we were forced to listen to a bunch of wacko shit that dudes like Tony from The Sinks/Cozy/Retainers threw together. we hit a snowstorm and talked about spraying Faygo on kids at our sober show in Chicago while i jotted notes every hour or so in a notebook i originally bought to help me learn to be more “appreciative” of my life as part of a therapeutic exercise. i used it for one day and i still dont appreciate shit.

“What are those, your memoirs,” Andy asked.
“Something like that.”
“Have you ever seen Under Siege 2?”

from there, somehow we got on the topic of Dan spending a lot of time drunk dialing Burger King when he was younger. we kept flying through the snow and eventually stopped at some shitty gas station after being unexpectedly detoured off of 94. of course after getting out of the car, i asked a state trooper for directions.

“hey pal, how many times tonight has someone asked you how to get back on 94 because of the detour?”
“none – i dont stop long enough to let people ask me questions.”
“alright, then i’m just gonna follow you and yell my questions then.”

turned out to be pretty nice guy. Andy bought a meatball sub from some overly tan pizza clerk of undetermined age (15 or 50) while I ate an apple and drank some water due to a stomach ache. I also grabbed some Nyquil so that if i died on the trip, i would be blacked out and would have something useful to pass to people to consume during my funeral. i also bought some bum wine because the shit was called MACHINE GUN MELON and some fuses to try and fix the cigarette lighter so we werent listening to The Electric Prunes for 30 hours. the woman at the counter had high gums and an outdated sense of fashion and made flirty jokes about being old.

maybe that was two gas stations – who cares. i think by the third gas station someone had bought some beef jerky and there was some goofball foreign dude asking if we were in a band. Dan told him we were punk, like Blink 182, and the gas station dude told us some band called Hollywood Ending was just in their store.

 

anyway we got to Milwaukee where we were playing a show at this fucking rad place called QUARTERS. the streets were dead quiet because of the snow but there were a good amount of people inside the bar probably because we were playing with bands that people actually like. It was The Olives, Dharma Dogs, and Uh Oh – all rock bands. so there were a bunch of decent looking girls and kind people milling about under some blue lights.

we were late and there were five shots lined up for us. ran into Brian (formerly of Enabler) and then we immediately loaded our shit on stage and set up records. on the box of records Andy had made some super retarded image that said, “BRIAN TUMORS IS HERE” with a picture of some woman

“is that The Great Kat?”
“is that the name of the chick from The Adverts? then yes.”

i mean, c’mon, it looks like her if youre fucked up and cant tell its a bass.

after talking to andy i found out that there was a swaztika in the picture he used and people at our Chicago show got all freaked out. oh well.

we played a fairly awkward sober show which consisted of me terrorizing 30 or 40 people for 15 minutes, hitting drinks out of people’s hands, trying to grab some chick’s phone after noticing she was texting during our set, and standing in front of some dude who was trying to leave to go smoke. there was some wide eyed freaky fuck standing in front who kept headbanging or something and giving me beers which i would take a drink of and immediately throw across the room.

but mostly people just threw their hands up in that, “FUCK FUCK FUCK DONT TOUCH ME” kind of way, which is what we all get regardless of if we’re playing our set or just standing around. it was good, though. nice turn out thanks to Eric from Uh Oh and Aaron, who kinda turned Quarters into a decent punk venue.

the bartender was this long haired aggro-metal dude who liked us a lot. he was the kind of bartender who would give you a beer simply because he felt like it, or would ask you to hold on while you were ordering drinks because he was too busy playing Mortal Kombat on the TV above the bar to get you whatever you were trying to get. a great man, indeed.

“wait, i’m in the middle of something!”
“FATALITY”

we watched Uh-Oh while oogling their bassist (sorry) and spent some time talking to some locals including some drunk dude who drives a forklift at Costco and once got bit by a raccoon while he was wasted. joel and pat spent their time smacking each other in the face and then some black dude showed up and started harrassing dan to buy him a drink, insisting he was barack obama.

we scrammed outta there and went to Bryan’s house with him and his ladyfriend. i was hoping to see Worthless Bubba but he is worthless, so he wasn’t there or some shit. i slept under a sweet Imperial Leather poster while people got stoned and Bryan told us about how he has mice, but the cat catches most of them.

 

woke up early the next morning – or at least tried to. definitely heard Andy hit the snooze button around 6 AM and somehow i ended up with this note:

“DWB – DRIVING WHILE BONER”

we all got up and Andy said he slept in because he woke up at 4 AM with this freak, Tanner, a dude who dodges child support and is trying to change his identity through the mexican mafia, calling him on the phone.

“Hey, do you still have that hook-up on those benzos?”
“Fuck you”, said Andy, hanging up the phone.

we ended up at a Cracker Barrell where i yelled about how shit was made in China in the gift shop to the soft, sullen faces of 66 year old women in rural wisconsin.