Jack McDonald dot Org

Here’s the start of my write-up of my diaries from the Frightener USA tour, which happened on October/November of 2007 with Pulling Teeth. I’m taking this stuff straight from my diary, so if I say thanks and don’t put your name down, please don’t take offence, I just forgot to note it down afterwards. I am crap at remembering names at the best of times. Anyways, here goes:

Day 1: London, UK

29/10/07

Couldn’t sleep last night, three hours tops. Bad dreams, sweating too much so I woke up early, maybe 5.20 AM. Had a shower to get going. Me and Rhys caught the slowest train to Gatwick. Saw the sun rise over the Thames. Always good. London is up there with Barcelona at dawn. Went through East Croydon and Purley on the way to Gatwick. The memories of countless two hour slogs home at 11.30 PM come rushing back. Many good memories from the Cro’s Nest though, have to go back in December to record the next LP.

Flying is modern day purgatory. We arrive at Gatwick and head to the check in. Rhys realises he is on a different airline. ‘See you in Cleveland’ and we say goodbye. I check in and enter Gatwick. Lots of shops selling goods at high street prices but purporting to be tax free. An idiots paradise. At a loss for something to do I walk the length of the shopping arcade twice. I buy a first aid kit, it is cheaper than a box of bandages.

The flight itself is bleak. I am sandwiched between a grumpy teenager and a man on his way to Florida to build an online gaming room for a poker player. He buys lots of shots of brandy. I begin to wish I had flown Virgin so I could knock myself out on free alcohol. Later on the man tells me that one American Indian tribe controls lots of online poker in the States. Ten grand registration, ten grand hosting fees per year, five thousand sites. Good maths.

In between sleeping I was a Harry Potter movie which is risible. It says something that this shit is bigger than Jesus every time they release a new one.

As always there are screaming children on the plane. I take comfort in the fact that one of them screams until it physically cannot scream anymore. I have ear plugs, others are not so lucky. As it tries to strangle out some last breaths I wish a painful death on whichever harridan pumped it out but refuses to control it. Fucking kids.

No one here wants to fly. Flying represents a 2-16 hour delay in whatever you want to be doing with your life at any given time. Everything about the experience represents this. The airlines make no bones about your condition, they simply go about making life as barely tolerable as possible so they don’t have to deal with a rash of in-flight suicides. As always the airline has fucked up and not sorted a vegetarian meal. The hostess’ question of ‘why don’t you just pick off the chicken?’ underlines the attention that American Airlines pays to its customers. I end up with eight teaspoons worth of salad bar glop and two bread rolls. Fuck these people. Six hours later they serve tea which is a mushroom pizza. no tomato sauce. It is the first hot food I have had in 24 hours and I devour it.

We land at Dallas and I am delivered from purgatory to hell. The queue for border control is about 500 metres long. It takes well over an hour. I am now stressing about missing my connecting flight. In the end I calm down, whatever happens, happens. There is no way to fight the system at an airport. Those that do get slowed down to a standstill and stripsearched. Baggage reclaim. My bag has been unceremoniously dumped on the floor in front of the next customs queue. Ten more minutes gone, my connection to Cleveland is in 45 minutes, boarding in 15. After making it through customs I dash round the corner… And hit the next queue for checking back in to customs. Because Americans are still worried about everything, we have to remove our shoes. There is something oddly soothing about the fact that everyone passing through has to jump through the same hoops, no matter how important they are. To these customs officials we are all convicts unless begrudgingly given a temporary reprieve. We certainly look the part wandering around stunned with no shoes and no belts.

After this I dash for the skytrain. Dallas airport has decided that instead of qualified staff giving directions, they will instead have volunteer OAPs to fulfil the role. No, seriously. Some dumbfuck grey haired sock and sandal wearing tourist fucks are blocking the escalator. Cunts. 35 minutes to go. Get the skytrain and then dash to the boarding and make it just as it opens. Wolf down an overpriced slice of pizza before getting on.

The internal plane is small, probably the smallest plane I have ever been on and it flies incredibly smoothly. I can understand why people want to fly a plane. Unlike 747’s it turns on a pinwheel. From above, Dallas mutates into a green and brown sprawl. I cannot tell where the city begins or ends. This is much like most of America.

We fly straight into the sunset against the grain. The sky develops into a singular line of purple and then disappears into an inky blackness. Below I can see cancerous growths of light on the landscape. For all I know I may be at one of them in a few days.

The man next to me is a businessman. He reads promotional material about nutritional supplements. He has a colour coded calendar that is encased in a perspex folder. It denotes every hour of his life for the next seven days. The folder hints of other folders that likely organise every segment of his life for the medium term future. I am glad I am not him. He has a shiny gold signet ring. College athlete as they say out here. It is very intricate and probably worth a lot of money but is also ugly as sin.

The lights down below are coalescing. Maybe we are near Cleveland. It turns out we are still an hour away. Toilets in the plane are tiny. I cannot even stand up in the walkway and have to fold myself to fit in the cubicle. The guy before me is obese and I have no idea how he managed to fit in the thing at all. America has a lot of fat people, but very few overweight people. Overweight would denote that they were unable to do something because of how much they weigh, but this entire society is built around accomodating people who routinely eat and consume twice as much as they should, just because they can. In this sense of the word there are very few overweight people in America because to be so overweight that you are unable to sit in an American plane seat or 4×4 is to be so far beyond unhealthy that it would blow the minds of 9/10ths of the world’s population if they found out. Such excess will probably tear this country apart. Two hundred years ago this was a country where freedom meant a daily battle for survival. Now freedom means the ability to consume whatever food and products you think you need with the swipe of a credit card. Freedom means gluttony and death. I cannot help but think of the last few paragraphs of ‘The Sheep Look Up’. Sci-Fi writers saw this coming 30 years ago. I think they understood the capacity of humans to utterly destroy themselves and call it progress.

There are grown men examining an order book for SWAT gear. Armoured vehicles, sniper scopes, the works. They are not built like cops or soldiers, they lack the rigidity. These men drool over the magazine like it is gun porn. They probably buy Soldier Of Fortune magazine and imagine themselves as mercenaries in sub-saharan Africa. They shell out thousands of dollars on hunting equipment and shoot deer from the safety of their night-vision equipped, temperature controlled hide. These men are weak.

There is a city below me now. Five suburbs radiate outwards towards satellite towns. It has two hearts, bisected by a river with a number of bridges. It sprawls like a malignant octopus over the surrounding landscape. I am running on fumes now. It is about 18 hours of transit so far. Going backwards over timezones I transversed a few hours previous is probably bad for me. I need a cold beer and some company. We reach Cleveland, the moon is blood red and hangs like a noose. Fuckin’ A. The hunters next to me are excited. ‘I’m gonna get me my bow and arrow and whack something’. Dickheads.

I run into Rhys at baggage claim. He was meant to be a couple of hours ahead of me but got locked in a room at customs and sweated by immigration. No water in the room, heat turned up and surrounded by sketchy mexicans and so on. The mexicans got illegal cockfighting dvd’s pulled out of their bags. Gnarly.

We head to Lakewood in a battered taxi/people carrier. The driver is a dick who keeps complaining that the fare will make him nothing. I tip $5 to shut him up. The guy at check in says all the others have arrived, total relief sets in. The guy says there was fire last night. Eventually everyone turns up which is great. ‘We fuckin’ made it’ is the sentiment of the evening. Unfortunately the moon looks pretty poor from the ground. Shame.

Only drawback is that Steve’s new guitar somehow hasn’t turned up which he’s understandably freaked by. Everyone is knackered and flakes so me and Rhys head to Now That’s Class to meet Paul who runs the place. The entire town looks like something out of Halloween. With suburbs like these, that film ‘clicks’ a little more.

Now That’s Class is awesome. Paul is drunk when we get there. There are a few people here and a dreadful indie band playing. We close the door and switch on the incredible jukebox: Crucifucks, Raw Power, RKL and Zero Boys. We start a tab and begin working our way through the good beers. Julia, the barmaid, is nice and recommends some blinders. Paul tells us stories of people setting the floor on fire at Cleveland gigs and throwing bricks while moshing. The gig tomorrow starts late and we’re on at 10 PM.

We get real drunk. Some girls hear our accent and tell us we will be ‘drowning in pussy’, we laugh it off and drink more. Rhys gets cornered outside by some chick. I introduce Julia to the concept of ‘ruinses’ (EG: ruining your friends chances for nothing more than a laugh), I think she kinda gets it.

Some crazy guy walks into the bar. He is old, slightly grizzled and has a burning stare. I endure ten minutes of his shit before palming him off to Rhys in a completely mercenary fashion. Paul gets annoyed, he’s had a bad day. After about twenty minutes of hinting, Paul tells the guy to leave and he does so before Paul kicks him through the door. We pile out of the bar at 4.30AM and catch a lift home. I swear if I wasn’t blind drunk it would probably have been the scariest ride of my life.

Day 2: Cleveland, Ohio

30/10/07

Woken up by the door to the travelodge opening and Rob mumbling something about ‘No fit state.’ My head hurts a bit, not too hungover and jetlag free. Result. Grab some cereal, it is so sweet I feel the sugar burning my teeth. The milk tastes odd as well.

Go to collect the van with Rob and Steve. The old lady at the til tries to hawk us an upgrade but ends up giving us a bigger people carrier for free anyway. Dodge a bullet on one way rental fees and splash it on breakdown cover, just in case. The lady takes an age and a day to process the order which sucks. Once we get the thing we are giddy like kids in a candy store, it’s huge, like some sort of moving ice truck with a CD player. I take a quick picture of the miles on the clock for a laugh. Rob sets about figuring out how to pilot the spaceship and quickly works out that he will have to do little, if anything, once we are on a straight road. We go to the airport to find out about Steve’s guitar, which still hasn’t turned up, which puts a dampener on the whole situation. We leave Steve at the airport and head back to the Travel Inn to pick up the rest of our mob and our bags.

Driving through Cleveland takes ages. All the streets are the same but the buildings are different. They are going all out for Halloween, Americans love that stuff out here. Sam is trying American houmus for the first time, frankly, that shit sucks. We pack up and head back to the airport, after a short wait, Steve’s guitar appears and I have never seen him more happy in my life. We head downtown, see the football and baseball stadiums. Downtown kinda sucks, no shops, all the buildings are soulless office crud.

We head back to Lakewood along the Lake Eerie shore, it’s really beautiful. Cleveland-ites take offence to this display of nature and have converted the shore into a dumping ground for decaying construction materials. We find a shopping strip in Lakewood and pick up a GPS system and I pick up some bonjella type stuff for a mouth ulcer. The stuff is absolutely lethal, I put a tiny smear of it in my mouth and a minute later I can barely feel the right hand side of my face and tongue.

We turn up at Now That’s Class early, I help move some wood they have lying about in the venue section of the bar. Paul’s planning to build a ramp inside the building which is pretty rad, but yeah, wood lying around at a gig is recipe for disaster. Pulling Teeth pull up outside and we have a big ol’ reunion. Chris Kuhn has shaved his head! It’s fucking awesome to see them all again. Get some vegan ‘Sloppy Joes’ for $3. It’s some kinda mince stuff inside a toasted sandwich, constructed so that no matter how you try and eat it, it goes everywhere. Afterwards we begin sorting stuff out for tour, after all the months of hassle trying to sort stuff out, we have 2 shirt designs, an LP, CD and split 7″. As a result we look marginally professional. We replace the torn LP covers with the tour covers and up pissing about on the mound of cardboard, doing belly slides and the like the length of the hall. Some people start filtering in for the gig looking bemused at the whole situation.

We play to about fifty people. I am still pinching myself that this is happening when we do so. Funnily enough, everything is pretty similar to London. There are the crusty types, crazy types and fucking retards and so on and so forth. Pulling Teeth play a real good set, tight as hell. The songs off the new record veer between blazing fast and some real heavy dirge numbers. The Inmates fucking rule. The crowd is pretty dead, but a few people are causing trouble and chaos. Julia throws a glass at the wall and it shatters everywhere. She follows this up by throwing her shoe at the band and carrying on moshing. Class. Ringworm play a pretty decent set. Human Furnace’s vocals are still fucking nails.

Afterwards I end up chatting to the security guard who’s a pretty burly guy but a friendly one with a big smile. There are two types of bouncer, the guy that wants to fight, and the type that doesn’t, but will quite happily break you in half if you want him to. This guy is definately the latter. Cops show up at the end built like brick walls. I think they’re here because some guy got mugged outside. I pass them carrying a massive box of merch which is quite a heart stopping moment.

Head back to Paul’s after the gig. I like Paul, he is one of the most honest people I have met, he just does not give a fuck about people’s opinions. People like that are hard to come by. Crash out on the hard floor.

Day 3: Columbus, Ohio

31/10/07

My back hurts in the morning from the floor. Go to the market and grab some awesome home-made fudge with Rob, after which we all head to a middle eastern cafe. Great food, incredible houmous. Say goodbye to Paul and hit a record store and guitar shop. Rhys hooks up some half price cymbal and sticks due to the manager liking us last night.

The drive to Columbus is pretty sweet. American autumns rule because unlike England the trees turn bright shocks of autumnal shades before the leaves fall off. As a result the forest lined motorway surrounds us with all hues of red and yellow. We pull off the freeway to the venue door. Luigi greets us. No shit, the promoter is dressed as Luigi for Halloween. That rules. There are other fucking cool costumes as well, some girl is dressed as Zelda replete with Master Sword and Shield, another guy has come as Casey Jones and the barman basically wins with a full black metal getup including greaves made of two inch spiked nails. He makes a clunky/shimmying sound as he walks around.

The crowd is pretty sparse, but it’s fun looking at all the costumes. First band that plays is called Absolute Magnitude. Pretty good. The singer is wearing some camp biker getup and they have Papa Shango on guitar. Next up is Triceratops. Paul warned us they were “wacky” and well, they did plan to bring the party. The crowd has fun and it is always oddly soothing to watch idiots knocking the shit out of each other. Balloons, handfuls of sweets and firecrackers start going everywhere. The promoter takes out the singer by barrelling into the back of his legs. It’s real funny but kinda gets old fast. I think someone broke Zelda’s sword around this point.

We play to maybe 20 or thirty people. Pretty good set. The neanderthals trash each other and then the bar. I look up at various points to see people collapsed on some tables and chairs. Afterwards some guy gets thrown over the bar proper twice in a row. Being so far from home gives me some perspective on all this. It’s not really crazy, it’s quite posed. It looks and feels forced. They move, damage something or someone and then stand still. I want to fuck with these people and something tells me I will have many chances to in the coming weeks.

After the gig I chat with a guy caled David who’s heading into the military. He’s a pretty funny guy, studying languages to get into the intel side of things. he got thrown out of the American equivalent of the Officer Training Corps at university for drinking heavily and getting arrested too much. Someone comes up to me and says ‘When you guys play Birmingham people are gonna lose their shit.’ Great. We stay at a guy called Scott’s house, he’s a real safe guy and designs for Abercrombie & Fitch. Colombus is a university town so he’s probably responsible for dressing half of it. I get sectioned off in the front room because I snore like a motherfucker. This means I get a decent sofa and everyone else crams themselves into a room the other side of the apartment. Suckers.

Day 4: Chicago, Illinois

01/11/07

Leaving Columbus, we hit our first Wal-Mart, and the uninitiated members of the band get to marvel at the cathedral sized shopping city. It must take a small town to actually staff these damn things. I bought an ‘organic’ apple the size of my fist.

We drove through Illinois listening to UNKLE, never really bothered with them before, but it’s quite good and trippy. Some time into the drive I realise I cannot remember the last time I saw a hill. Like Belgium, the land is incredibly flat, but unlike Europe, these people have cleared alot of the trees so half the time it feels like you’re driving in a grass sea. The road is dead straight and at times it feels like we are not moving at all. I buy a copy of the Chicago Tribune at a service station. It’s a decent enough paper, only half a page dedicated to celebrity crap, more than can be said for most of the UK press. I cannot imagine life here, marooned in a sea of farmland. We filled up the petrol tank of an american sized people carrier for $22. Totally insane.

The venue is good, we have a wild time getting there that includes taking a detour around a sketchy block and getting stared at by a crackhead. The venue itself is combined with a pretty sizeable record store up top, but I’m knackered and not in the mood for shopping. The first band on is called Harm’s Way, decent enough at what they do. The notable feature is the singer, who is built like a brick wall shielded tank. The second band was Weekend Nachos who were fucking great live, so hard. The singer, John, was intense. He’s got a kinda geeky look wearing a Screeching Weasel shirt but once he hits the stage he’s on fire. Frontmen like that make this music worthwhile. WN’s are seething with the anger that comes boiling out after being pushed around your whole life and it fucking rocks.

We play, it’s a sloppy set. I manage to smack my head on Steve’s guitar stock on the first song. The pain snaps me out of a daze I’ve been in the whole day and I push through the set. Much as I like the venue, I hate being on stage, it feels too disconnected. PT play their alternate set showcasing some other new songs. I am stoked, people go wild. Afterwards John is losing his head at a friend in front of the march tables. Apparently the guy threw a custard pie in the face of some metalcore kid outside and humiliated him. I know the anger, and inside I feel a bit ashamed because I’ve bitten my tongue at times when faced with similar situations.

After the gig we head to a 24 hour diner that serves vegan french toast. Dearlove absolutely devours it. It’s like 5 12oz steaks of toasted vegan stuff. Gnarly. I have an omlette which is rammed with way too much cheese for my liking. Nick from Third Party Records kindly lets us stay at his house. Like many people in Chicago, he knows Ola from back home in London which is kinda cool. He also has an awesome (though totally excitable) pitbull puppy called Ian. I curl up in a corner and try to go to sleep, but Ian almosts eats my head when I do so.

Day 5: St. Louis, Missouri

02/11/07

We get up and head to a vegan bakery down the road from Nick’s house. The place rocks. The look of suprise on Dearlove’s face when he asks for the vegan brownie and gets the reply ‘Which one?’ underlines the difference between the old world and new in terms of vegan cooking. Anyway, it makes me wish we had a place that did that good food back home. Fat chance of that ever happening though. Back at Nick’s we get an email from some guy claiming the gig in Springfield is off, which turns out to be a lie. Idiots.

St Louis has a big fucking arch. Really. A really really big fucking arch. We rolled up late to the record store we were playing due to a traffic jam. We spent most of the jam listening to Metallica at full volume. Rhys says ‘Why is it that when we’re on tour we always end up listening to Metallica and Slayer?’, ‘Because we rule’ is the reply.

The record store is pretty decent, it’s got a lost and found vibe to it as it also sells books and horror movies. I picked up a Heroin 7″, Voorhees 7″ and Neurosis LP for peanuts. Also found some colour reprints of Process Church flyers, but they were a bit too expensive. We’re playing in the basement, it’s cramped, full of concrete dust and has a beat up PA that is precariously wired and balanced. Perfect. First band is stock-riff central, second band is called Slingshot Dakota, a two piece keyboard/drum indie band and a nice change of pace. Tom, the drummer, used to be in Rain On The Parade and is a real cool guy. We keep meeting good people on the road.

We play the best set we’ve played so far, people are right up front and there’s a good vibe. I bang my head on the ceiling a few times as we play because the ventillation duct is so low. Really able to cut loose and let go at this gig, probably the first time I’ve done so on tour. We open with the slow version of Guillotine which always gets me going. It’s nice to be able to talk to the crowd without a microphone. I can barely breathe because of the dust, and water is absolutely no use. In the end I just scream through it and the pain fades after a while. After we finish I am exhausted. There is a dull ache on the top of my head and I think I hit it badly on something, I have a headache to boot.

I recover and start selling stuff. Some drunk jock dude buys a shirt. He bought $11 and spent it on our shirt. He only likes hip hop, missed our band, yet he buys our shirt. I am bemused, but only walk away once he starts rabbiting on with the phrase ‘No homo’. Rob gets punished by him for ages. [If you don’t know what that means, it’s when someone keeps talking at you and you are unable to extract yourself from the conversation for whatever reason] I end up talking to Carly, the other half of Slingshot Dakota. Her and Tom are doing a tour in between seeing friends get married, which is a pretty cool way of doing it. I head downstairs to see Pulling Teeth, and they’ve finished. Blast.

We load out and make plans to head to a pizza place. Chat to a guy who does BJJ and a couple of girls. They drove 5 hours for this gig because Springfield is ‘full of rednecks’. A great sense of foreboding washes over me. The pizza place has a challenge where if you and a friend can eat a 28″ pizza in half an hour you win $500. Me and Rob mull it over then bail on the idea. The pizza is damn fine though. We stay at a guy named Shadow’s house, which is pretty spacious and he is a fine host. I crash out and manage to get 8 hours uninterrupted sleep. Great.

Day 5: Springfield, Missouri

03/11/07

We were going to get some thai food, because it’s Rhys’ birthday but we get a text saying load in at Springfield is at 4pm so we hightail it out of St Louis. We get slightly lost thanks to the GPS system not knowing where the hell it is, and arrive at the venue at 6. The venue is the back room of a good ol’ boys pool bar. Pints are a few dollars and the smoke hits you like a brick the second you walk in the door. Me, Rob and Steve play some pool. I jammily win a dollar off Rob but Steve levels everyone. The jukebox is connected to the internet, so some random goths playing a few tables down from us stick on Dragonforce. The combination of power metal and a bunch of cowboys playing pool is definately odd.

A bunch of us head to the local supermarket (local being a relative phrase) to get some salad. By the time we get there the salad bar is closed for the day. We all end up chipping in on some bread, salad and ubiquotous chemical houmous. The bread turns out to be quite stale. American bread is so pumped full of chemicals that it doesn’t turn hard, it just crumbles to a powdery substance. No doubt returning to it’s initial state. I am still yet to find a simple sandwich without ten lines of ingredients and chemicals.

We return to the venue and catch the last thirty seconds of the opening support act. Seemed okay, but the next band blows my mind. Two singers, Pharoah Monche cover as an intro. Oh boy. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry but they are literally the worst band I have ever seen. I can imagine them going down a storm in London. They take the stage talking about ‘bitches’, ‘faggots’ and ‘cocksuckers’. At times they were painful, at others, unintentionally hilarious. The look on Mike Riley’s face while they play is worth enduring it.

We play to about ten people, as everyone has fucked off to a party, reminds me of home. We open with the slow version of Guillotine again just to alienate everyone still standing that little bit more. I change half the vocals to ‘fuck the homophobic pricks’ and variations on a theme, but it’s obvious no-one’s really paying attention. Some of them mosh. Fuck this place. PT play and Mike calls Hitlist on a bunch of shit, they pointedly load out halfway through the set. Real hard.

After the set we have a quick discussion, the two options for the night are heading to the party, or heading straight to the promoter’s house in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We choose to get the hell out of dodge. We drive well into the night. The great thing about the midwest is the night sky, it is full of stars you don’t get to see back home because of all the light pollution. As we near the promoter’s house, the car in front of us pulls up alongside us as a guy sticks his head out of the window. ‘Say, are you boys in Frightener?’, turns out he’s the promoter.

The next hour of my life is possibly one of the most surreal experiences I have had to date. We are staying in a place that’s one notch more permanent than a trailer park. The place is swarming with animals and pretty messy. We move our stuff in and the guy starts showing us stuff like an overexcited kid. With a grin and ‘You boys are gonna hate me’ he pulls out a Sheer Terror last gig tshirt. He explains he didn’t go to the gig, but his friend bought it for him. We are non-plussed, after all it’s about 2 AM. I am bewildered with tiredness. Tracy shows off his bird, Zoli (yes, named after Zoli Teglas), when the budgie moves about it his hand he motions to flick it, and it stops dead. We are starting to shoot looks of ‘Oooookay then’ left and right between us. Around this time Pulling Teeth arrive, who we all greet with worried looks. I think they were slightly puzzled, but the promoter showed them why we were worried by proceeding to introduce us to his dog. Out from the back garden he drags Hoya the pitbull. Unlike the loveable puppy Ian we met a few days back, Hoya is a full grown pitbull and a pretty agitated one at that. Hoya can also count about eleven strange men standing right in the middle of his turf, and he’s pissed. If you could read glances, the one Alex and I immediately shot each other read ‘If that thing comes for us, it’s us or the dog, no in between’. The promoter is holding this thing back with a massive chain, no wait, that’s my mind playing wishful thinking, he’s actually holding back the full grown pitbull that wants to eat me alive with a couple of fingertips on it’s collar. My whole body goes on edge and I try to remember if any of the martial arts I’ve ever studied taught me a class on ‘Dog defence 101′. My mind draws a blank on that one. Eventually the dog gets put outside to bark death threats at us. At this point I quit mentally. I find a small strip of carpet next to the wall, move some pet food bowls out of the way and I crash out, drawing my sleeping bag over my head and hoping I wake up the next morning.

Day 6: Tulsa, Oklahoma

04/11/07

I wake up and immediately realise that I am in a meth house. Whereas last night there were three adults and a kid here (excluding us), that number has now doubled. Breakfast is being served and someone randomly pops the question ‘Is salmon vegan?’. Within about ten minutes of waking up, my stuff is packed and piled on the front lawn, as the other people wake up, everyone independently comes to exactly the same conclusion and does the same.

Of course, it has to get worse. I head back in to grab something I forgot and find Dom in the back room where we all slept. ‘We gotta get out of here man’ I say, ‘Dude, I know’ is the reply. Then the promoter comes in. ‘Wait you guys, there’s something I gotta show you, I had to make sure none of you were African American before I pulled it out because they don’t get the humour.’

Dom and I turn slowly towards each other while he starts rummaging for this prize. Our faces are a mixture of dread, ‘I have to see what this is’ and outright laughter at the situation. So, out comes the home made potato cannon. It has ‘Nigger Gitter’ written down the side. Dom and I mouth ‘Oh my god’ then cover our mouths in shock and to try and hide the barely concealed fits of laughter. This shit is so off key I cannot even bring myself to be offended right now. Dom makes me take a camera phone picture of him with the cannon just so we have proof this is not some crazy fucking LSD induced trip. The promoter’s wife makes one of the other guys around the house show us how it works.

For the uninitiated, a potato cannon is a length of plastic piping, with one end that is able to be sealed in some way. This one was sealed with a screw cap. They had sealed an oven igniter into the thing and a firing switch on the outside of the chamber. You force the object to be fired down the tube until it creates a tight seal, thus sealing the firing chamber completely. You then open up the screw cap, spray in any sort of aerosol or other explosive gas and reseal it before the gas escapes. Line up your target, press the switch, and the gas ignites and forces your object out of the pipe at whatever it’s being aimed at. These guys took a couple of potshots at the tree in front of the house with a wet rag, it still looked fucking nasty. They stopped because someone might cause the police, it is after all a cannon and thus makes a hell of a racket.

So, we are now all gathered around on the neighbours front lawn in a huddle, figuring out what the hell we’re going to do. Some friends of the promoter have now showed up so we split for Wal-Mart. ‘Aww guys, aren’t you gonna hang out?’, ‘We’re hungry’ and we leave. We recuperate in the parking lot of Wal Mart, trying to recover from the last 24 hours of utter insanity. PT collectively laugh at the fact I cannot jump rope. It is rather funny in hindsight. We’re about to head off to a park but get a call that Ruiner have showed up at the venue. So off we head.

We hang out in the parking lot for the rest of the day, my bandmates figure out For Whom The Bell Tolls as an intro for a laugh, but we decide against playing it. The guys from Ruiner are pretty cool, though one of them is kinda bummed because he managed to crack his guitar headstock on tour. The show starts, it is poorly attended and from all accounts, poorly promoted. ‘But hey’ the promoter reminds us again ‘at least you guys got weed right?’. Because I know full well that weed is an appropriate replacement for petrol and will in fact magically allow us to travel to Alberquerque, I don’t argue the point.

Enter Josh, the tattooist, first encountered right before we split from the promoter’s house. The guy has brought his 14 year old son to the gig, and then proceeds to get drunk as fuck and try to fight kids barely older than his kid. Way to go Josh. I pretend to fall asleep in the van in order to avoid being punished, I think he corners someone else in my band. It is every man for himself in these situations.

Drop The Hammer open, featuring Chad from Brother Inferior. Musically they’re quite good, but I’m more impressed by the passion and intelligence of Chad, who as an older chap still manages to carry a sense of urgency and focus that is sorely lacking in many of the younger folk these days. I end up having a long conversation with the guy after they play, he’s dead into football and sports an Arsenal tattoo, much to Dearlove’s disdain. Funnily enough, he also knows Sned, which is a strange coincidence and a half. His explanation of our situation: ‘You know the Bible Belt? Well, right now you’re in the buckle.’

Our set is pretty raging though my throat is fucking raw from yesterday. I feel relaxed even though the stage is tiny and half our set is spent trying not to fall off the edge of it. At the end of the set, Josh grabs the microphone and berates the crowd for not ‘representing’. More on that later. PT play well and then Ruiner set up on the floor. First song in, Josh ‘represents’ and drunkenly falls into the drum kit whilst simultaneously managing to knock the bass guitar out of tune. Rob publicly shuts him down for being an idiot and he skulks at the side. Because the room has laughed at him, he then randomly picks the kid standing next to him to start eyeballing and tries to start something. After this he publicly defends his actions, blaming the entire crowd, at which point Rob just says ‘Shut Up’ and Ruiner carry on playing.

We get $25 for the gig and a promise of ‘I’ll paypal you later’. Yeah, right. Ruiner being the kind folk they are bump us some money out of their cut and we hightail it overnight to Albuquerque. As we pull out of the parking lot Josh is stumbling everywhere chanting ‘Anarchy in the uk’.

Day 7: Albuquerque, New Mexico

05/11/07

We wake up shortly before dawn to see the sunrise over the midwest highways. I gotta say, the sunrise and sunsets out here are fucking insane. You can see the horizon literally set on fire as the sun crosses it and the clouds are ablze with purples and reds. We have breakfast at Dennys, where a rather nice waiter gives us some free coffee and so on. He hit Albuquerque around midday, and immediately find a car with a ton of pro-life bumper stickers in our parking lot. Albuquerque is pretty barren, I remember there not being much to do here when I came through with my mum, but jesus, it’s insane. Bars and bars and bars, nothing else. We settle in for some lunch at a cafe and run into Pulling Teeth. In the queue for the restrooms I end up chatting to a dude who is an actor out here. Apparently Albuquerque is trying to establish itself as a big movie hub outside of Hollywood, and there are lots of productions on the cards. The guy is a burly hispanic dude and has worked with Steven Segal and a few other early 90s notables on the late90s/early 2000s action B-movies. He is playing a gang leader who gets his arse kicked by the hero in his current role, and the last one. ‘So you’re not type cast at all then?’ I say with a cheeky grin. ‘Naah,’ he laughs ‘they never typecast guys like me in films’.

Albuquerque reminds me of Coventry with marginally better architecture. We decamp to a park to chill out, I do some exercise as I have been cooped up for a week without any. Most people head into town, me, Rob, Chris Kuhn and Mike head to another where the Yanks introduce us to Frisbee Football. A contest ensues to see who really should have won in 1792. Team USA go 2-0 up before the redcoat grit swings the game back so we win 3-2. Now of course, Americans can never lose, so the game is extended to first to five. Again, we lose two points but then level and win. At this point we are all incedibly tired. Like, absolutely KO’d. We find out later that we’re playing about a mile above sea level, which is why we’re so fucked after a burst of activity.

The gig is sparse, but not for lack of effort on the promoter’s part, total dude. A few local bands and a band called Scare Taktic from LA. One of the ST guys knows what a joke the promoter from Tulsa is after recognising him from one of Rhys’s artistic efforts. My throat is totally screwed. I shout and I cannot force anything out of it, just blowing air over broken chords. I feel weak and impotent at the fact. Getting anything at all feels like I am choking up hot coals. On the plus side, with the door open to the venue we can be heard from a two block radius, and have some local bums looking through the windows as an audience. PT play, and I think Mike suffers similar to me, the air up here is so thin and dry. It feels like you have done a 10k run after about five minutes of playing.

The promoter gives us some money out of his own pocket. I’ve been in his situation many times and we say our thanks, not least because I don’t think it’s the ‘done’ thing out here. Back home I think it’s the sign of a good promoter who will actually put their money where their mouth is. We head back so some kids house and crash out all together. The promoter from Salt Lake hasn’t been in contact for two weeks so we make the decision to skip the stupid amount of driving for a gig that might not even be happening and head to the grand canyon instead.