i feel a little stupid now, seeing as how we are leaving for tour again at the end of this week and i havent finished my punk rock homework of writing about all these places. i still have Denver and Omaha to hit, which I’m really hoping I should be able to bang out in a few days here. luckily, the longer tour goes, the worse my notes get and the more pictures i forget to take, allowing me to pretend that less happened than actually did.
i dont think any of us had ever spent time in Salt Lake City, Utah. I’ve driven through Utah maybe three times, including the time myself and a few friends were driving to Los Angeles from Minneapolis and got pulled over in Fillmore, Utah. the cop claimed to have smelled pot in the car and the incident ended up putting my two friends in jail for the weekend while i slept in a Honda Civic. i spent most of my time hanging out with a girl from Fort Collins, Colorado, whose friend was also in jail for a similar thing. she had whatever that skin condition is that makes your hands look all spotted. it was charming.
but, as many bands as famous and important as Brain Tumors will tell you, Salt Lake City can be a difficult place due to…the lack of alcohol. Not because you cant buy alcohol there anymore, but more because of the prevailing attitude towards alcohol. whatever, lets just cut the shit and say we played a sober space and no one had enough to drink because of how wrecked people got in Reno.
on the way to SLC (an abbreviation i hate due to that fucking SLC punk movie), i recorded that we stopped at a McDonald’s. as we had seen in many places, there were some leftover shitbags from the Burning Man Festival hazily flopping around and a freckle-faced girl hooked us up with extra food. i think Pat chatted her up or something.
also, Joel almost lost his keys because he left them in the door when he was unlocking the van and we drove off. innocent mistake.
we drove through the salt flats, which is some strange shit. here are pictures that someone else took:
i wonder what satanic advertising bullshit is embedded in that url.
we stopped and looked at some other stuff.
we got into Salt Lake City and struggled to find The Underground. probably because it was located in a fucking storage facility amongst a whole slew of makeshift auto repair shops.
i can tell you that it was nearby a Hardees where i saw a man hassling people to let him use their cell phone. he did not ask us. so we showed up and looked around and felt nice about the place we were playing. whatever the show would turn into, at least we could say we played there in a storage garage of some sort.
we met the guy who set up the show, Jared, who is a good dude who you should contact if you stop in Salt Lake City (email us for his contact info). SLC. bro. we didn’t know shit about the bands but we were grateful to play with them. JAWWZZ was a two piece that i noted “should drop the reverb, make the guitar harsher and would be good”.
Gnawing Suspicion were fucking weird. in a way that i personally enjoyed, giving me a stupid grin the entire time. pretty clearly a bunch of older punks who have decided to do whatever they fuck they want to do and recruiting dudes to play drums on gas tanks and use grinders to propel sparks into the crowd. then play reggae. then all switch instruments.
Even weirder, Gnawing Suspicion is Aldine Strychnine, known for his work on Poison Idea’s “Feel The Darkness”. i think unanimously, Brain Tumors are more of a “Pick Your King” kind of band.
i encourage you to click their other links, too. also, im sure my father would like it if you watched this performance of Canned Heat from 1969.
singer kinda looks like he could’ve been in Poison Idea at one point. anyway, shit was pretty interesting and people were very nice to us. i don’t think we played our finest set, but then again, it’s hard to say what a “good” Brain Tumors set really is. us breaking shit? pat rolling around on the ground and not playing any of our songs? me and joel fighting? dan throwing his drums into a crowd of people?
anyhow, we sold merch and got paid enough to keep moving. and keep moving we did off to my cousin Bo’s house in Park City, Utah. he gave us his last beers and made some macaroni and cheese. Cousin Bo is a nice fella. make sure to check out this note his kids wrote him (look in the lower left corner)
Namaste, internet punks
the look of glee on the face of the princess scares me.
John E. Scott says,.
Salt Lake became a different place for all who are having visiting ,It remains silence in accordance with the alcohol policy,.
-So scary !!!!!
storage salt lake city ut
, an utter cock, but not as much of a cock as those that pay to listen to his luacny.Quiet Man,Take no notice of him, no one else does. He has delusions about being the only enlightened one, and gets all frustrated when others cannot ‘see it’, or are ‘asleep’, then he starts swearing and threatening, like he was a big man, when we all know he is sitting in his stained pants, thrashing away at a keyboard in impotent rage, disgusted with himself.BTW Harby, the Bible says that one of the chief attributes of Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, whatever you want to call him, is that he is a liar. But I suppose you don’t give much stock to the Bible, as it was written almost exclusively by Joooooos, eh?