Sunday, June 22, 2008

quick check in

hey all,

so i haven't been able to really keep up on this because my access to a computer is limited. 
but heres the quick skinny.

played atlanta, knoxville, nashville.
swam across a section of the mississippi.
drove through some serious ghetto today to fix a flat that we got in atlanta.  fun but intense.
still don't have a computer.
did a tv performance, and a bunch of fun radio performances.
i have good pics but cant upload them yet.  will try later.

love

Thursday, June 19, 2008

bummer

as many of you know my laptop got stolen out of our tour van this afternoon.  window got broke and all my lifes work was stolen.  so....
  it might be awhile before i get to blog regularly, so be patient.  i'm trying to figure all this out right now, but keep posted, and i'll check in with everyone when i can.  
i still have some great stories from memphis that i'll try to get up on the blog.

love you all.

nate

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

memphis: day 1













today was the first of two days in memphis.

we were supposed to have a radio spot earlier in the afternoon, so we left really early in the morning, only to get almost there and get a call that it was canceled. so....
we DID however, perform the live video session at Sun Studios. That, my friends, was an experience. We went on the tour earlier in the day, and i learned so much about the intense history of the place. Cash, Elvis, Jerry Lee Louis and tons of other classic artists all were either discovered by Sun, or made it big with Sun Records. After getting the gear all set up, it was overwhelming to look around the room and just see so many of our heroes that recorded their classic hits in the exact places we were set up to jam in. sometimes during a song, i'd open my eyes and see the pictures of elvis and johnny cash staring me right in the face, and it was almost distracting. really amazing experience. it hasn't even completely set in yet, i don't think.
when we got done recording, we started loading gear and across the street a huge group of 'thugs' started messing around, and the cops came and broke it up.
my arm is doing better.
gotta lot of pics for todays blog.

Goodbye Texas/ Houston





On our way to Memphis.
We played our last show of the Texas leg last night in Houston. It was a pretty cool show. We played really well, probably the best we played so far, although there weren't very many people there.
We've been playing some pretty legit venues. The Roots are playing the night after us, and Rancid played the night before.
It was crazy coming into Houston, seeing the huge skyline, and seeing the city of my birth for the first time, (that i can actually remember.) Its a beautiful city. I've been so used to telling people that i was born there, without any idea of what 'there' was. The city looked a lot different than the mental picture i've always had.
i found some weird bug bite on my arm thats bruised and pretty gnarly. i'm sure its some random thing that probably got me whilst asleep on the side of the road somewhere. i'm gonna keep and eye on it for a couple days, and see if my arm falls off or anything.
we're in Baton Rouge right now, in the parking lot of a motel. we crashed here last night. our manager bought a room for himself, but was too tired to make it all the way here last night, so a couple of the dudes slept in the room while court and i slept in the van.
we have a couple performances today. josh and i are doing a radio performance, and the band is being video taped for a Sun Studios performance. its where Elvis and Cash recorded albums and stuff. lotta history. should be cool.

Monday, June 16, 2008

austin

We played the famous Stubbs Bar-B-Q last night. Way cool venue. The crowd was way cool. one of the Joshua James fans bought us a hotel room to crash in that night and thats where i'm typing this from, on a real bed, after a real nights rest... it was amazing. Kissle was so happy that he danced like MC Hammer AND the chicks at the Cowboys party in Dallas!
The venue gave us all free food. i couldn't eat any meat but the chicken because of the deal i have with josh. the chicken was awesome! had some fried okra. it was awesome as well. great food. way cool city. there were like 5 other music venues within a couple blocks from stubbs, all playing bands at the same time. austin has a big music scene. the band Rilo Kiley is playing stubbs tonight. i looked at their tour, and they're following us around to a lot of the same venues, the day after us.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

dallas




we are on our way to Austin today. Played Dallas last night and then hit the road.

The venue was cool. pretty city. We got into town early so we hit the local library and then chilled and watched tv in the club for a bit. we got a free meal at the place we played, and it was incredible.

we met up with Justin Townes Earle and Lex Land, who are going to be touring with us for a bit. They were both amazing last night.

After the show we found out that the Dallas Cowboys were having a dance party on the bottom floor of the same club we were playing in. So we went and got some video of all the nice cars and the skanks that were wandering around the place. it was pretty funny.

Saturday, June 14, 2008

road rollin'


So.
I haven’t had any access to the internet for the past couple days, reason being, we’ve been sleeping in the middle of nowhere and driving all day.

I’m typing this up on the way to Dallas. I’m gonna try and remember the important details and catch up on a couple days worth of fun. We have a show tonight and the venue said that they’re gonna feed us fish tacos. We’re starved, so we’re really looking forward to it. I made


a deal with Josh that if I didn’t eat any red meat, and only ate fish or chicken 3 times a week, and wouldn’t drink any soda, he’d give me an extra $125 at the end of the tour. This is nice and all, but we’re playing a show in Austin at Stubbs BBQ, and they’re giving us free food. So I get to watch everyone else enjoying they’re amazing meat. Hopefully I can lose a bit of fat by the end of the tour and it’ll be worth it.

Court wanted a Slim Jim and I told him I’d buy it for him if he’d let me slap him in the face with it first. He was hungry and broke, so he agreed. Hope it was a good Slim Jim.

New Mexico was really…… (hard to describe) Dave Chappelle has a little piece about New Mexico. He said that he saw an Indian one time, but thought they were extinct, until he saw a gathering of 1500 indians. It was called Walmart in New Mexico. Dave was pretty accurate. We must have found that EXACT Walmart that Dave went to. We stayed the night off the side of the freeway next to a reservation. We had trucks driving by us for awhile, scoping out the situation. We ate our gourmet dinner of 1.5 tuna fish sandwichs and a carrot. We saw some rabbits, so we hunted them. Rabbit meat sounded good, but they were too rascally. We also realized that we camped right on a huge sulfur deposit, so of coarse we lit some in fire.
We also happened to park right next to some active railroad tracks…and that got old, fast. Literally, every 15-20min there’d be at least one, if not two trains driving by. No one really slept much that night. We got up and had our daily ration of one Poptart for breakfast and hit the road for Texas.

I started reading this great book by Ernest Hemmingway called Islands in the Stream. It’s a book I’ve been meaning to read for awhile. It was one of his last works. It was published posthumously, as well as another great book I’ve already read call The Dangerous Summer, about dueling bullfighters. Islands in the Stream was recommended to me by Sainsbury awhile ago. I’m glad to finally start getting into it.

Texas has been great. Humid as ever. REALLY humid. At first I was a little skeptical about the place. The only towns we’ve seen so far have been tiny little Podunk places. We stopped to get gas at this little station where the two ladies working were pretty classic. One was smoking right there by the counter and they were talking in these really heavy accents. It was almost a bit surreal. We drove around awhile trying to find a place to stay. We came to an RV park that had a bunch of old-timers sitting on lawnchairs by the lodge area. We chatted with them a bit, and then walked around the park to see the little swimming pool, and the fenced fields with horses, the mountain-less horizon with the clouds billowing in from the Gulf. It was the first time Texas felt genuinely sincere. The old folks there were just passing through on their way back home to east Texas. We told them that we were a traveling band, and they were excited for us, and excited to hear that we were a Country band. They were so nice and polite. I’m now a full believer in Southern Hospitality. When you can go somewhere and be this at home with complete strangers, it’s a pretty worthy note. Everyone that drove by us as we walked around the broken roads waved. Pretty endearing. Pretty hard to describe.
We found a cool little place to camp of the side of an old road. It was right next to an abandoned shack, (and some other trash people have dumped there in the past.) The owner of the land, an old farmer named Weston Johnson, came to see what was going on, and was really nice to us, and warned us about all the rattlesnakes. Kissle and Josh went out looking for the snakes, but didn’t find any.
We all stink pretty bad. None of us have had a shower or changed our clothes in a few days. We’re all smelling fairly ripe. Court continues to remind me of my stench, but if he only knew that we can SEE his odor radiating off his body… (I just showed Court this line, and he’s mad that I’m throwing him under the bus on this. Now we’re now having an interesting conversation on smell. You know that you smell bad when you can smell yourself. It’s like when you rip one, on the ride home from the Renshaws in Alpine, and YOU think it stinks, so you actually feel bad for the others in the car. It’s like that.) ( I just read Court that last bit in parenthesis, and now he’s not so mad that I threw him under the bus.)
There was a killer storm blowing in when we were going to bed, but it never really materialized into anything. The sky is so big here, that you can watch the whole lightning storm as its coming from miles away. Never even reached us, but it was amazing to watch it in the distance. It didn’t rain but it was so humid that we woke up wet anyway.
We got up this morning to a new friend. A random dog had wandered into our camp.
Kissle named him “brroommm brrrooommm” (you gotta say it like the sound of a car starting?)
Skinny dog. Looked hungry. I bet Brrooommm Brrroooommmm would have let me hit him in the face with a Slim Jim if I’d buy it for him to eat after.



Thursday, June 12, 2008

day 2 in vegas

i'll be putting up photos tomorrow. we didn't take a ton of photos today, but the ones we took should be cool.

we didn't have a show tonight, so w3 spent the day hanging out with josh's sisters here in vegas. we went with his sister and her kids to the neighborhood pool. so....its a bunch of bearded dudes in jeans and cutoff shorts hangin out by this pool with a bunch of kids and their moms...... imagine that scene.

josh and i played some basketball. one on one. it was pretty intense.

we'll be leaving tomorrow to head to dallas.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

day one


so, you'd think that the first day wouldn't be too eventful....right?
here is it.
1. ran out of gas on the side of the freeway outside of nephi.
2. almost hit a semi with our trailer.
3. played a show in the middle of a alphalpha field.
4. slept in the shed of ex-Victim Effect guitarist.

the trip was nice, but i'm still wondering how we ran out of gas before we even got to Nephi. we nearly ran out of gas when we were coming back from Denver a couple weeks ago, so i was thinking that Josh would have learned his lesson about making sure theres always plenty of gas in the tank. nope. so josh and kissle hitchhiked into nephi and got some gas and hitched back. if the FIRST DAY of the tour is this adventurous, i can only imagine what the rest of the trip will be like.

the show was pretty cool. the wind was blowing WAY hard. we were lucky and it calmed down for our set, but when Kalai started playing the wind was almost impossible to play through. the dust from the huge field we were playing in was terrible and was blowing in peoples eyes and making everyone miserable. But Kalai's a pro and played a killer set, even with the overwhelming wind storm. he showed us a rare peak at his hand that has a birth defect. he is an incredible guitar player, especially considering he has his hand issue. he wanted me to post the pic to prove that he's legit and doesn't just wear the bandage to use as a chick magnet.

enjoy the pics.

Saturday, June 7, 2008

everybody need to calm DOWN!

reminder that:
i'm leaving next tuesday (10th of june)
for all of you sending me messages and calling and telling me verbally that you're mad that i'm not keeping up on the posts....
i haven't left yet, and when i do, i'll begin the daily blog.
please be patient.
please love your friends.
please brush your teeth and kiss your mother.
please don't mind my wife sneaking up on me right now to try and spy on what i'm doing and then saying "it smells like poo in here" because i've had some serious stomach issues today.
please don't buy everything you hear and read.  especially about politics.
please read my blog when it starts for real.
please leave encouraging comments after my posts so that
1. i know your reading
2. i know  you care
3. i know you have nothing better to do than read my stuff
4. i can feel your sweet vibe and mojo?  what?
please buy Rockin' Rob's cd because i feel bad that he spent money to record it and he keeps dropping the price cos no one will buy it.  i know he's nuts, but don't you kinda feel bad for him?
please don't get married unless you know you're in it for good.  (byu students, this means you)
please go to shows.
please write more tunes.
please don't mind my wife again asking me to stop this list.  
please bye for now.