THE INEVITABLE BACKLASH: MY TWO BROOKES LP OUT NOW

the 5 best shows of the "To Maine and Back" US tour 2009

5.Seattle, WA The Funhouse

im pretty sure i want to be buried at the funhouse. maybe not buried but at least my ashes strewn in the green room, parking lot, or about center right in the viewing area. everytime we play here its exactly the same. its the show of the tour that gives everyone confidence for the remainder, my love for seattle is reaffirmed, and the nicest people in the world are crammed into that dark lovely room.  we started off things nicely with a little pbr chugging contest with some of the other bands. it turns out the contest works better if you empty it into a red cup. i beat the girl but lost to the guy in the band. our actual show was great, excellent flow and the crowd going crazy. the sound is also fucking great there. i love seattle and i love the funhouse.

4.St. Paul, MN Big V’s

we cruised into minneapolis with the second half of purple rain playing on the fm station. how perfect? sadly it was the radio edit which wasnt cool and cut off my personal favorite portion of the song. we went to Adult World which I recommend to anyone, if only to truly find out how horny you are. Three red blooded pervy dudes came running out of there feeling pretty scared of girls in general. Diablo Cody told me to go check it out. on to the show…we picked up our good friend John from his new digs in Minnesota which he had relocated to after getting robbed pretty bad in his hollywood apartment along with drumming legend Jason St. Andrews. St.Paul/Minneapolis is a pretty weird area. The opening bands were all pretty good but 3 of them, playing super long sets it wasnt till about midnight till we got on. mike had already left the bass in seattle and my parker was still getting fixed so we were both borrowing shit. mad props to homey homey who basically gave us both his entire guitar rig. sigh. by the time we finally wandered up on stage it was late late late and felt super intimate. I knew that our friends Aids Wolf (aka my favorite band of all time) had played there a week earlier so i knew we would need to step up our game and kill it. we brought John up on stage for the Diego Rivera jam, St. Andrews switched to bass, and Mike grabbed a second guitar and just did feedback stuff. we stretched it to about 12 minutes and it was pretty great and St. Paul didnt really know what hit them. Little did they know we had a full other set ahead of us. Once we got to Liz-Moscow-Academia I was in the zone zone and left it all up there and it was done and loading stuff into the van. trading merch for beer and what not. oh, minnesota. 

3.Iowa City, IA The Picador

it was my triumphant return to iowa where i was here on a much different rock n roll tour. it brought back a lot of pretty intense memories and what an honor to be playing the mighty picador. some pretty amazing bands have played here so once again even more inspiration to bring it hard. this might have been my favorite crowd of any gig (next to jackson ,MS). we just got up there and started playing and the groove was THERE!! fucking there. tons of people and everyone started moving! during one of the stranger songs “My Two Brookes” and the groove was contagious and before you knew it the whole place was dancing. it was a beautiful moment and it never really stopped. i remember playing academia and just slaying and once again it was all over and loading stuff out. some kid gave me a can of pbr he had snuck in. how sweet. 

2.Washington, DC The Red and the Black

this was the mike “the edge” barrett homecoming show, and it was pretty damn triumphant. we ended up crashing at mikes parents and friends houses for a few days. alexandria, va so fucking beautiful. lots of good whole foods trips. somewhere around boston i got this throat infection that was just unreal. lauren at barnard can attest that i was pouring advil and tylenol bottles down my throat because nobody could find me any vicadin (damn ivy league). it would be almost 3 days after that hell that I could find a dr to take a look at my shit. and i would still have to get through one show at the red and the black in dc, because I couldnt let mike down. mike brought out the old-school homeys and he didnt disappoint. i was DYING. i fell asleep in the bar, then fell asleep outside the venue, went to another bar and slept there. we got up on stage and everyone was ready for a show and we opened with Diego Rivera and opened up a few skulls. once again we made it to academia and they told us we had time for another song. i handed the parker to the man of the night jumped off the stage and they launched into a beautiful rendition of Janes Addiction’s classsic “Whores”. which was a perfect song for some of the lovely people we met on this tour. the DC crowd was pretty amazing, one girl bought two of everything including 3 posters all FOR HERSELF. enough gas money to make it halfway to north carolina the next day. 

and finally……the best gig of the entire tour

1.Los Angeles, CA Ghetto Gloss

the dream for this show was to have a THE INEVITABLE BACKLASH FEST at a venue that we had total control over and could pick a dream band to open for us. i looked at a bunch of places to do this at and found it all pretty hard, until Fiora from the great Ghetto Gloss came into the picture and made this all happen. so we had the venue, now all we needed was the dream band. WOW! Jetpack my favorite band ever agreed to reunite for one night only and play one of the best sets I’ve ever seen. even better? Legend Johnny Vatos from Oingo Boingo was sitting on drums!! AY MI!! what an honor. we showed up to Ghetto Gloss and the thing about doing your own show is you need to bring your own PA. Brother-Man legend FRANK resident soundguy from the Troubadour and one of the most beautiful people i know offered his services. however, we built the PA from scratch borrowing gear and speakers and mixers from all across california and from lots of kind souls. what a nightmare!! never doing that again. I decided to hit the Jack and make my worries go away, and boy did it help. It was great seeing all the friends coming and representing. Jetpack gave us a lot to live up to. We walked up there and hit HE NEVER LEFT which sounded terrible because my guitars volume was turned down. Mike came over and turned my shit up and launched into Diego Rivera and never really looked back. Highlights of the set including Fox playing bass on ABBY’S FACE and of course Academia. what a night, what a tour. see u soon. 

chico

chico was the perfect place for the tour opener. nice mellow town. we had just rolled out from sacramento where sweet amazing cool-cat jill let us stay with her. we drove up listening to this little band from dc called the pity party with one of the finest songs ever “lead singer”. we get to chico and try to find paradise lost. we get lost  three times and are convinced the wrong address made it onto the flyer. we find paradise lost and its kind of amazing. everyone else in the band called it the porn shop for the rest of the tour which is bullshit because it totally wasnt. it was vidiots, it was cinephile, but in fucking chico. its this big cavernous place and in my opinion the guitar never sounded better the rest of the tour. we decided to hit the college and flyered like a motherfucker. we were in the schools newspaper we had been interviewed. flyering is weird. you would think a town like chico would be desperate to get a flyer of some weird fucked up punk band that drove from LA but apparently the beatles were reuniting because these kids didnt seem too interested. one particularly nastly little brat made a scene of taking a few flyers from jason and then laughingly throwing them on the grass. fucker. we headed back to paradise lost and were a little bit scared because i hadnt heard from kids with head lice who were not only opening for us but letting us crash with them. we decided not to think about it and set up our gear. i was fucking around with my new mxr carbon copy which is kind of amazing. god it felt like we were in paradise lost for years. just killing time. we decided to go out and flyer some more still no kids with head lice. we flyered and jason offended some girls as usual. time to get some beer, who even remembers what we got. all i know is i did the first show sober, you almost have to. we got back to paradise lost and tons of people were there, so happy. including cody who is a beautiful soul. it turns out kids with head lice drummer was in europe on tour so cody took over and did a solo set to open. a bunch of other great people came out for the night and played killer and we went back to codys and drank pbr till we passed out….

so we made it back...

its been about a week since the crazy tour ended. it ended up being about 35 days, playing gigs most nights, 16,000 miles on the van, zero hotels etc etc. the title of the tour “To Maine and Back” was fitting, and we did just that. we had excitement:got robbed in new york, stayed with nudists, drove through a tornado. drama:the usual stuff that comes with spending a month together with three musicians excitement:we stayed with strangers every night, so you never knew what you were going to get, the good, the bad, or the ugly and of course bliss:getting to play every night and meet amazing people, oh and we got ridiculously tight musically as a band

a lot seems to have changed since the last tour we did, probably for the better, but some for the worse. our best shows were clearly the non-traditional venues that were made and cared for by music fans and where profit wasn’t the bottom line. interestingly enough, we made some of the biggest paydays of the tour at these gigs. at times it really did feel like we were in the wild west of music. i know the eagles tried to make this parallel in the 70’s but I’m speaking more from an industry perspective, nobody quite knows whats going to happen with the music industry and it really doesnt matter when you’re doing it from a level like we are. it made me happy that whenever we want we can mount a tour like this, play to amazing music fans who dig out stuff, not really need to get anyones permission and come off *somewhat financially unscathed. oh, and do it completely off the radar. 

if I could give advice to a touring band at a similar level who wants to do something similar here is what I can offer. never-mind actually. I was going to instruct on what to do if you want to tour, but if you get the balls to do a tour chances are you dont need any advice and your aces when it comes to skill. aside, from a certain southern oregon town that should never be visited by anyone, every “touring” band we played with was pretty unbelievable.

these are some scattered thoughts, more soon 

*this is a relative perspective