Even though we've been back for a month and a half, it seems like we aught to have some parting thoughts on the experience of our first tour... here are some of the highlights for me.
-chris!
It seemed more like a wine blind and wild road trip than a "tour" in the conventional sense of the word. The shows were fun and "successful" (whatever that's supposed to mean), but the trip was much more than a collection of shows.
In three weeks we played 11 shows in 10 cities, drove exactly 7,601 miles and managed to buy only three or four tanks of gas out of pocket... we only got into one fight.
We watched a man covered in streaky white face paint writhe screaming on the floor of a Best Western Barroom in Tuscon wearing nothing but a peculiar object strapped over his dangling genitalia. Then, we escaped from a tambourine playing woman's house for San Diego at 7:00am because a certain band mate (who shall remain nameless) woke remorseful next to an author with wild curly black hair and futuresque shaved sideburns.
We chanted like pseudo shamans in the middle of a drain pipe beneath California's Highway 1. We sat on a redwood tree trunk throne and climbed a rocky mountain river bed. On Pismo Beach we drank 9 bottles of wine and swam next to naked in the freezing Pacific while West Coast hillbillies drove by in dune buggies and ATVs.
We crept beneath underpasses and through wire clipped fences in Oakland and smoked joints on the sidewalk in San Fransisco. We watched seals play in the deadly undertow off the black sands of Shelter Cove and cooked corn and bratwursts on a ramshackle grill built of sticks and stones.
I screamed at friends and strangers on a residential street in Olympia, throwing beer in their eyes and calling them assholes... some of them didn't know why... I apologized. All was well.
We drank wine, slept in tents and watched the sunrise for more than 7,000 miles. People were good to us and we thank them for that. Since we've come back, two far flung friends have visited and we look forward to sharing more of them with the city and the people we love.
