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Day 8: Las Vegas, Nevada

06/11/07

We begin another ‘long ass drive’ to Vegas to recuperate for a day after the past couple of days of insanity. I’d personally like to play Salt Lake, but the promoter still hasn’t been in touch. My throat is officially blown as well, I can barely speak above a whisper. It hurts to talk and swallow, something about the mountain air really did me in. I am medicating myself by swigging cough medicine that leaves me drowsy, and by eating honey on tortilla bread. The cough medicine tastes of nasty menthol but I have to do it otherwise I will be screwed in California. I feel like a hobo with a hipflask as I take infrequent sips of the stuff. As the defacto book keeper I am totting up the sums of the tour so far and it’s not looking good, the drive across the Mid-West has killed us financially. Hopefully we will make some of it up in California.

We head to the Grand Canyon as it’s on the way to Vegas. It’s a real long drive, Rob is quite the trooper and cheerful about the whole thing. As we drive towards the park the sun begins to set, and we have to race it lest we get to the Canyon while it’s dark. It’s $25 to get in for the car, I’m on a tight budget but I figure it’s worth it, I probably won’t see this again for a while. We pull up to the park as the last light is fading from the skies. I see the extent of the canyon through a gap in the treeline and it is breathtaking. We head left onto a rocky outcrop to view the canyon proper. What hits me at first is the almost complete and utter silence of the place. I think most visitors are just stunned into observance upon seeing the scale of the canyon. The far lip of the canyon sits neatly on the horizon line, with jagged canyons streaking into the distance. The main canyon stretches off to our right into nothingness while below we can pick out outcrops in the surface of the canyon trench. Concentrating for a few seconds, I realised that the rocky outcrops were the size of sky scrapers, and it was only the fact that their triangulated distance from my viewpoint was a mile or so that made them seem small. We are very high up, but the opposing canyon ridge is higher still, a difference of 2km or so if memory serves. The light illuminates the bed of the canyon, but the miniture canyons are filled with inky blackness and sit on the floor like a web of veins. We change to a rocky outcrop to our right to get a second look at the canyon. At this point the sun is almost disappearing gone, leaving purples and blues in the sky above us. Despite being surrounded by friends I feel incredibly alone. I try to talk and reconnect a bit, but it is no use, so I marvel at the sight in front of me. The canyon bed is almost completely black now, as darkness falls across it’s length. There is a thin band of yellow to my left that denotes the last of the sunlight, and then we are left in it’s reflection from the atmosphere. The sight has had quite an effect on Sam, I wouldn’t say it was a religious experience, but he is definately affected in some profound way. I leave him be.

We return to the car. Some of our tour party pisses over the edge of the canyon, continuing the grand Frightener tradition of travelling the world, seeing wonderful things and urinating on them. I’d join them but I don’t need to piss right now. And now, onto Las Vegas. Along the road there PT’s van gets pulled by State Troopers for a busted tail light on the trailer. We then pass through a police checkpoint heading to the Hoover Dam. I always get freaked out by this shit because we’re carrying a car full of records and so on, but Rob is excellent at dealing with cops. PT get pulled again at the checkpoint, so we head down to the dam and wait for them. The Hoover Dam is kinda cool, not much to see at night though. We carry on heading to Vegas.

You can see Las Vegas from well beyond the horizon because the city emits so much light at night it creates a false dawn for miles around. We wend our way downtown and find a casino Alex knows to stay the night. Alex and I head into the casino to check the place out and see how we can sneak people in to hotel rooms and stuff. It’s pretty simple, no-one really cares about the rooms here, all they care about is getting you on the gambling floor. We get three rooms and head back out to everyone else. Six beds, eleven people, again my snoring comes in handy because no-one wants to share a room with me haha.

Vegas is a shithole. A great big undeniable shithole. I imagine if I had money to burn and fancied living the highlife, I’d avoid Vegas. Forget the charm of Ocean’s 11 and all that crap, these casinos are like Holiday Inns stuffed with gambling addicts. There are no red carpets, no black ties and sharp suits, just fat guys wearing Hawaiin shirts losing the money that is meant to send their kid to university on a roulette wheel. The carpets are worn down and filthy, probably because they are in use 24 hours a day, non stop. The entire strip lives in some weird timeloop where the outside world does not exist. There are no clocks inside the casinos. We head down to the main strip and see the building site face of the town. Because casinos are so profitable, they keep building them, bigger and bigger. This means that half the town is making cash while the other half is a perpetual building site. Las Vegas is not built for humans to walk around. There are no shops, no community, not even a 7-11 or something similar, just an endless line of Casinos with tacky facades and themes and shitty bars for marketing executives. The place is totally lifeless, like Leicester Square on crack, minus the restaurants.

We have to walk an hour to find some food, and eventually we settle on Dennys. The waiter is pretty cool and gives us some free food, but then messes up the assignment of a couple of things on the check which a few people query, which then gets him into trouble. Kinda sucks. I cannot be bothered to argue the point as I am knackered, I pay my share and leave hoping it doesn’t go badly for him.

We take one look at the sprawl back to our casino, think ’sod this’ and hop in a cab there. Seeing as ‘It’s Vegas’ I put a dollar in a slot machine and win $3.95. Better than losing your shirt I suppose. I quit while I am ahead and crash out in my hotel room. Fuck Vegas.

Day 9: Reno, Nevada

07/11/07

We leave earlyish, because Reno is at pretty much the other end of the state. Mike and Rob have to be dragged away from the blackjack table. Well, not really, Rob has figured by now that every early start involves about an hour’s worth of faffing about and is happy to sit there and lose money while various people do so. They both have the same story of ‘Well, I was up $40, but…’, Vegas wins again!

Reno is a long drive, but a good one. The route takes us up into the Nevada mountains and we pass three different types of scenery on the way. I like Nevada, the hinterlands are completely empty. We wend our way along roads that stretch for hours without passing a town or feature of note save for the imposing mountains flanking us on our left and right. Most of the drive is spent on a plateau slipping through passes between mountain peaks. The small towns we pass through are completely isolated from the outside world, you’d have to drive 3 hours or so just to reach one of the ubquotous Wal Marts. There are many derelict truckstops and burnt out buildings on the way. Passing through one town a State Trooper begins shadowing us, I’m tense about it, because we are still carrying a car full of merchandise which would blow our “We’re tourists” cover story if the cop bothered searching the car. He tails us for about ten minutes, dropping off before accelerating to pull us over. At this point we pass another patrol car pulling someone over on the oncoming lane, so our tail stops to help out instead of giving us twenty questions.

We eventually stop at a rather tiny petrol station. In actual fact it is something of a corner shop/convenience store that happens to have a petrol pump outside, that’s how remote we are. The old lady who runs the place is real nice and quite suprised about having a bunch of English folk in the place. Just opposite is a truck loaded with rocks with the sign ‘rocks for sale’. I have no idea who buys rocks off the back of a lorry, but obviously someone does. This town, like all others we have passed through, contains the sign ‘No Explosives Allowed Through’ which perplexes us until an hour or two down the road we find a real big town, which turns out to be a naval base. They must have to fly their ammunition in, because all towns on the roads leading out of the base have enacted local laws to stop them trucking bombs through. Makes sense really. The base adjoins a very large lake that sits between two mountain ridges. The road we are driving along snakes along the base of one ridge and we stop for a few pictures as the sun is setting.

After the lake, the land takes on the quality of prarie land, glistening gold in the fading light. The tiny towns contain rail crossings and it feels like we are beginning to near civilisation again. Eventually we get to Reno after dark. Reno is a real nice city, quite clean, almost clinically so, but it has some nice old buildings and so on that are a welcome sight after the corporate hell hole of Vegas. The bar is real nice, and adjoins a decent pizza parlour where I snag a good salad (good salad is really hard to find out here, and always good between ‘road food’). We get free drinks tokens as well which is always welcome. My throat has recovered slightly but is still pretty wrecked. Jensen from Iron Lung shows up with the guys from Agents Of Abhorrence in tow. Gehenna flake the gig because no-0ne in the band bar Jensen turn up. All of us are bummed about this, as well as Jensen. The bar turns out to not be letting underage kids in, which also sucks. We work out a solution of playing a second set down the road at a guy called Jeff’s house. Our set is pretty good, but short so we have time to play the second set, I am thankful to be let off playing the extra songs and have to knock back a couple of generous whisky shots after we play to keep my throat going in the interim. PT slam through their set and we shift gig locations leaving Rob to snooze in the van.

Jeff’s house is the apparent epicentre of the Reno hardcore scene. The gig is happening in his garage and though it is down the road we all manage to snag rides from generous people. We set up quick, I am chugging tea because my throat is hurting bad. Then when everything is ready they pile up matresses on the garage doors and hit the lights, leaving a dim one still shining so we have a chance of seeing. We play a five song set and kick off with the Metallica intro for a laugh. Utter chaos ensues. The set is one of the best times of my life, Chris Kuhn moshes and ends up knocking a girl through a doorway which has everyone in stitches after. PT hit the nail on the head again and everyone leaves grinning. After our set I go and fetch Rob, which involves picking my way back to the bar on the completely deserted streets of Reno. It’s quite placid, a good way to get my head back together and around what just happened. The carpark next to Jeff’s house was a crime scene earlier because someone found a dead body in a van, but all the cops have left now. Crash out in the front room for some well earned kip.

Day 10: Redding, California

08/11/07

Wake up, check email and find out my Grandma has broken her arm. I have no way of getting in contact which is a problem. Jeff and friends show us around Reno after everyone is finished getting ready. The town itself has a laid back vibe, but unlike all the Mid-West nowheresvilles we have encountered in the last week or so the architecture is real interesting. The post office has Swastikas of both directions all over the interior. It was designed before the Nazi’s ruined the symbol for everyone else. We get coffee and tea and then head to a casino which has a pretty nice diner tucked into the back. I thought Vegas casinos were depressing, but Reno casinos are for the people that can’t afford Vegas. The whole place feels like a back street betting shop writ large. There are people stuck in front of the slot machines who look like they have been there all night. It is quite a depressing sight, particularly since it’s such a wonderful day outside.

We leave Reno and head to Lake Tahoe. The landscape switches from desert to alpine forest in the blink of an eye as we make our way up. I can understand why fuck all Americans have a passport, their own country contains pretty much every climate and environment you could want to visit. Lake Tahoe is very pretty, but not really a patch on the grand canyon. Steve is excited to be here, I think he has been watching too many episodes of The O.C. or something. Tahoe strikes me as a nice area to come and relax that has been tranformed into a rich playboy’s sandbox. Gimme the coast anyday. We head up and out, stopping for a view of the valley that the lake sits in. It’s a great view but not much else going on. We end up backtracking to find a Wal-Mart to find some food. While parking Rob prangs a car which doesn’t damage the other vehicle but scratches our minivan. We decide to leave it and hit the road to Redding. Me and Rob jokingly pray that we get pranged by a driver in between here and New York. With the amount of Americans that drive drunk it will probably happen. Getting to Redding takes a hell of a long time, the road is essentially a single twisting mountain pathway. We get stuck behind an endless stream of shitty camper vans whole insist on going at 40 miles per hour on the sole straight bits. In frustration Rob ends up doing some hairy overtaking with the rest of us egging him on and swearing at the slow pokes holding us up. As night falls the drive becomes quite intense as tight corners begin appearing out of nowhere. I think we took more turns on this one drive than we have since we left Chicago.

We arrived at Redding just in time to set up and play. As we pull up to the house and get our head round the place me and Rhys realise we are playing a California Ramp Party and high five each other. There’s a bunch of people on the backyard ramp, we’re playing in the garage. There are a couple of old biker dudes keeping an eye on everybody, one of whom turns out to be the promoters dad. We get a good reception. People are circlepitting and falling over, except that the garage is still in use so theres tools and stuff everywhere. Somewhere near the start of our set I stack it completely and land backwards on the drumkit. I look up to see Rhys pissing himself laughing. I immediately know that everyone will be laughing at this for the entire tour, lighten up and pick myself up off the floor. My throat is still hurting from the two sets yesterday, probably not the best idea in hindsight.

After the gig some acoustic band plays inside the house, but they kinda blow so I go and chill outside. We start loading everything out and a cop pulls up and begins asking questions and so on and so forth. Alex is in a wisecracking mood and just shuts the guy down completely. The cop stands by as we load the last of the stuff into the trailer trying to look somewhat authoritative after being told to shove it. I end up chilling on the porch with the promoter’s mum who is a real nice lady. Apparently the last party here got out of hand because the bikers weren’t there. Funnily enough kids don’t fuck about when theres a couple of aging hell’s angels kicking about!

The plan was to crash at some guy’s house here and then hightail to SF in the morning, but everyone wants to get a motel in SF so we have the day there. I haven’t really got the cash but agree anyway because the room should only be $40 or something. We head to San Francisco and pretty soon everything starts going wrong. I wake up and we’re cruising around the downtown area surrounded by junkies and homeless people. People are eyeballing our car and it’s about 2 AM or somesuch. Eventually SF is bailed on and we head back over the bridge to Berkeley to try and find a place. Everywhere is closed, or full. Everyone stops at a hotel, somehow a 1/6th share in a $40 hotel room which I was sold on has become a 1/5th share in a $100 room. I’m fucking pissed off at this and Steve offers up the golden line of “It’s nothing, you can afford it.” I snap and sleep in the minivan instead. I lounge the seat backwards and sit there alone. At this point in time I feel completely cut off and separated from everyone. I am over 5000 miles from home. I sleep under the glare of an orange safety light.

Day 11: San Francisco, California

09/11/07

I wake up with the cleaning lady peering in the window of the minivan. It is swelteringly hot and I feel like a dog that has been left to die in a supermarket car park. Fuck it. I get a shower then try to explain snapping at people last night. Everyone says it’s okay, but I’m pretty certain that deep down it’s not. Once again I am in the role of band dad. After the UK tour it is the role I swore I would not take on again, but I appear to have done so by default. I am stressed and strung out.

We roll into San Francisco again and head to the Golden Gate Bridge like the snap happy tourists we are for the day. We take a route that drags along the San Francisco piers. I can remember coming here with my mum ten years ago and seeing a bucket load of seals. All I can see now is one big honey pot of a tourist trap. In short, the area blows and I’m glad we don’t stop there. We eventually pull up to a park on the beachfront with a nice view of the bridge and get a couple of snaps. I read in the papers a couple of days ago that there was a huge slick in the Bay Area due to a tanker colliding with a bridge. I can’t see any oil, but the slick prevention measures are in full effect and I can see multiple floating yellow things lingering on the water.

We head up to Haight Street to do shopping and whatnot. I have a couple of bucks my mum gave me to buy records with, I think when she saw my budget for tour she was worried I wouldn’t have any fun at all. In Amoeba Records I run into Dom who introduces me to Mike Cheese. Mike apologises for the Gehenna flake out in Reno but swears that they’ll play Gilman by hook or crook, even if it means just him on stage! After this I start flicking through seven inches because albums are way outta my price league. Seven inch buying in Amoeba is completely thankless as their record bins are literally stuffed with records no-one wants and no-one cares about. All the same after last night it is nice to take some time out and just flick through records. The method on rhythm is almost meditative and it takes me a couple of minutes to scope that there’s a guy standing next to me covered in hardcore patches and whatnot. I say hello and it turns out to be Josef, the guy responsible for the gig tonight at Gilman. I chat to him a bit about promoting gigs there and so on, it’s nice to get the inside scope on how the place works. Josef pulls out an unopened Pg. 99 7″ one row ahead of me thats worth $35 or something. It costs him a buck. I curse the gods of record collecting and head off to get my first decent burrito in America. Decent burritos do not exist outside the South and West coasts, just like you have to go to New York for a great slice of pizza. I sit in the burrito place on my own and ponder my situation. I still feel completely disconnected from everyone and it sucks. In the end, time runs out and I head back to the car and we head to Gilman.

Getting to Gilman takes a while due to our crazy Sat Nav which takes us in all sorts of directions, for the millionth time on the trip. I’m getting pretty excited to play. It’s weird that I get to play Gilman before I’ve played at the 1 in 12 in Bradford, but them’s the breaks. We pose underneath the sign and load in. The place is still as I remember it from the Super Sabado Fest a few years back. Last time I was here people were hurling sofas and firecrackers to Municipal Waste. I pop down the road to a coffee shop to get some tea for my throat with a couple of kind Gilman folk who show me the way. I have become quite the caffeine addict. I suppose not drinking the stuff normally means it has double the effect on me. I don’t really drink tea though, I put so much milk and sugar in the stuff that I may as well leave out the tea component. All that’s really important is the hot liquid.

Finally, it is time for the gig. Graf Orlock play first. They’re pretty decent but I think they could have done without the lead singer because the rest of the band are strong enough to carry it on their own. I am sitting behind merch table catching up with Brian from California Love who also plays in Look Back And Laugh and chatting to Tobia who turns out to be the singer. This throws me slightly as I’ve been caning that first LP for the better part of two or three years and I always thought the vocals were done by a guy. That’ll teach me to not bother reading the lineup on a recording.

Then comes our turn. Fuck. Before I know it I’m standing on stage with Steve looking out at something like 400-500 people pinching myself to check this is happening. ‘How the fuck did we manage this?’ and other questioning expletives are the order of the day. We are uneasy, listless and twitchy as we set up because this does not feel real at all. Then the first notes kick in and it all disappears in my head. Everything clicks: the anger, shame, self-doubt, derision, loneliness, despair and all the other gamut of emotions I’ve experienced over the last 24 hours just explode outwards. The last couple of gigs have been fun to play, but for these twenty minutes I feel like a human claymore mine with “Face Towards Enemy” stamped on my forehead. Quite a few of the songs we sing I wrote about other people, but the more I sing them and think about them, the more I identify flaws in myself. It feels like a black hole, tearing chunks out of my self esteem every time I do it. This time I do not care, I revel in the thoughts that have plagued me all day. I am cut off from the world in a tornado of self loathing and all I want is for it to go faster and destroy as much as possible before it burns out. And just like that, it’s over.

Pulling Teeth play to a big reaction, Mike rails at the kickboxing and stuff. By this point in the tour, I’ve seen enough of it to last me a lifetime.

Then Look Back And Laugh hit the stage like a whirlwind. It’s amazing to see a band of people pushing 30 put every other bunch of whippersnappers firmly in their place. The energy and intensity of everyone in the band is overpowering. They crack straight into ‘The Cost We Absorb’ and the crowd goes mental. Brian plays bass without a pick so his hands are just flying across the neck of the thing, the guitarist with a skinhead is jumping around looking like the hardest bastard between here and Ohio whilst Moses is pounding the kit to pieces. The second guitarist is also jumping all over the shop and his dreadlocks are flying all over the place in a blur. To top this all off is Tobia, who is no longer the short well spoken lady I was chatting to previously. On stage she cuts and menacing figure and exudes anger through almost every pore in her skin. And yes, her voice still sounds hard as fucking nails. Unfortunately mid-way through the first song Tobia leaps into the air, falls backwards into the kit and twists her knee badly. It says something that she doesn’t quit and carries on screaming into the microphone when physically unable to stand. She carries on with a kneebrace borrowed from one of the guitarists and a mic stand as a makeshift crutch. Even hamstrung and unable to fly across the stage she’s got a stage presence that beats anyone I’ve seen on tour so far. It’s over too quickly. Afterwards I’m left to muse how such a cocktail of ingredients is so rare back home. I dunno, there’s something to LBAL, that cascading rush of anger that cuts across boundaries, and I’ve only witnessed it in a handful of UK bands. Musically it is precise as a scalpel but it hits like a sledgehammer. I certainly cannot remember any singers in the UK pushing themselves beyond their physical limits like Tobia did for twenty odd minutes. And yet it is more than just that, it’s the drive, some deep rooted vehemence at the status quo that is emitted from the collective group from the first bar to last note. I can’t put my finger on it, but there is a primal element to it, like stripping back the last chains of civilisation to unleash a caged beast.

So I head outside, chat to Nick from California Love, and afterwards end up chatting to John from Iron Lung just prior to the Gehenna Set. So far Mike Cheese is here, as is Jensen. I have a feeling Mike is about to make good on his promise of ‘I’ll do something, we’re not ending up a no-show’. I ask John what they’re planning: ‘From what I’ve heard, it’s going to be special’ is the reply. The lights dim. Mike and Jensen are standing at the side of the stage, the drum kit is not set up, there are no other instruments here except a CD player hooked into the PA. Mike walks over to the microphone: ‘We’re Gehenna’, and then it’s dropped. He presses play on the CD player and rap starts booming out of the Gilman PA system. With a mischievous look on his face, Jensen unwraps and begins to chow down on a burrito while bopping to the tune. The Gilman crowd watches in amusement and bemusement as Mike smokes a blunt and Jensen eats a burrito. Anyone who knows either of them is in utter stitches and pissing themselves laughing at this point. The tune ends and they walk off stage, it takes the soundguy about ten minutes to figure they’re not coming back and to switch the lights back on. Surreal, yet hilarious, the man is true to his word!

After this comes 108. I’m not a fan. One of them gives a masterclass in how not to deal with hecklers.

Clearing up, Sam goes and sits in on the meeting to divvy up cash for the night. He comes back speechless and hands over a large wedge of cash for us. How it works at Gilman is that each band gets allocated money depending on the door take at the end of the night, then all the band representatives sit down and essentially donate cash to the touring bands. Every band on the bill bumped money towards us and Pulling Teeth, and it goes some way towards filling the black hole in the tour finances that the mid-west leg caused. For me it underlined the fact that you can disagree with people, not like their music, attitude and so on, but that it doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person. I speak my mind about religion and so on whilst onstage, and 108 still donated money to us.

I am packing up the merch and so on, chatting to Brian and Tobia (whose knee has doubled in size or something crazy), when a couple of people stagger through the door beside the stage. My throat is tickling, and starts to itch, I cough. As I open my eyes again, they’re starting to burn, I suddenly realise that everyone else has started coughing. ‘What the fuck?’ says someone, and by now I’m doubled up in coughing fits, my eyes are streaming. Someone else says ‘Mace’ and we stagger outside the venue. There’s more people out here coughing and spluttering. Some dude drove past the entrance and sprayed the crowd with bear mace. It’s tear gas you use to dissuade a 600kg brown bear from eating you and on humans it’s pretty vicious. A girl is throwing up over the road from side effects, another person has been dragged into the toilets to hurl. The stuff is lingering in the air here and it’s inside Gilman too. Gilman staffers are handing out water and performing first aid duties on the worst affected people. Luckily for me, my mum was a protestor when she was younger, so somewhere in the back of my head, one of her stories about getting tear gassed by police clicks. I pour some water on a tshirt and put it over my nose and mouth. My eyes still hurt like hell, but at least breathing don’t cause me to retch involuntarily. Me and Mike grab our remaining stuff from the van and we get the hell away from Gilman. There are rumours that it could be someone who was actually at the gig, which would suck if it was true. We say hasty goodbyes in the chaos and confusion and hightail it to Kim’s place where we’re crashing for the night.

It was a crazy night, but we’re all laughing about it in the car. Rhys has a video of the set on his camcorder and we’re looking at it, still not quite believing that we just played Gilman street. THUNK! We all shout, say ‘What the fuck?’ and check that everyone’s okay. We were stopped at a red traffic light, the car behind us ploughed into the back. We all pile out to inspect the damage, dented fender, a few scratches. Hey, the perfect cover up for our prang yesterday. The lady is saying she’s fully insured and so on. The perfect crime. That’s when we realise that this woman is actually blind drunk and at the wheel of a car. The perfect crime becomes the dilemma. I don’t want to call the police because I hate calling cops in, but immediately Rob snaps me out of it with the line ‘She’s driving drunk, she can’t even stand up’. I’m about to call the police when a cruiser rolls past us anyway. The lady is hysterical now. We just resign ourselves to the fact that it’s her own dumb fault she drove drunk. We get the police report and head to a supermarket to stock up and head back to Kim’s house. Kim works at Amoeba and has a good record collection. Writing this up reminds me that there were a few things I wanted to trade but I stupidly forgot to note them down, damn. Somehow all 11 of us fit on the floor, I am wedged somewhere in the kitchen which does wonders for my back.

Day 12: Los Angeles, California

10/11/07

We wake up and a few members of Pulling Teeth get introduced to the holy grail that is Trapped In The Closet by R. Kelly, who may fuck way too many underage girls, but knows how to cast a midget when he sees it. The trip to LA is now part of the daily grind. We listen to John Joseph’s spoken word in it’s entirety. I doze off to sleep when he starts harping on about Krishna but luckily re-awaken once he returns to stories of hospitalised fans and fights with Harley. Definately worth the cash you might part for it. There is a tailback on the motorway. A couple of us dash to the brow of the ridge to see what’s up, hell, it’s only and armed standoff between some crazy guy and the cops. I call PT to tell them to take an alternate road, but get ahold of Mike just as they pass the turnoff that could have saved them. So we’re left to stew on a hot California road with the doors open. Some folk just cut across the dirt intersection Blues Brothers style, but that would take us completely out of our way. The cops get their man and we’re on our way. California’s nice enough, we make our descent into the LA basin and pull up at Chateau Harder just as the audio book finishes.

People in west coast suburbs really don’t give a fuck. This is the third house we’ve played in four days. The place is nice and neat with a pool out back. Joe Harder, who lives at the place and I think is responsible for the nickname, greets us. He is not quite a dead ringer for Rob from Abandon Ship, but is well on the way there. As befits a lookalike for such a great guy, he too is awesome. He drops that we are in hispanic gang turf and that there is a drugs house next door. No wonder the neighbours don’t call the cops on the racket!

We walk down the road to the road to the 7-11 to grab some beers with Grant from Gut Instinct who decamped to California a while back. I marvel at the palm trees up and down the streets. I remember how huge they looked to me on Venice Beach when I was 14, and they still appear insanely tall ten years later. Grant gives us the scoop on what it’s like to live out here. Students getting housed in gang turf and so on. At one point he was an empty chamber away from death at the hands of a stick up guy. Gnarly as hell. How he has been through all that and still manages a sunny-side up sorta attitude on life beats me, but fair play to him for managing it!

We return to the party and stash our beers, I figure I will probably lose about 50% of them, and I’m about right by the end of the night. I wasn’t too much into the first band, but Pressure were tight. Our set goes down like a lead balloon. It is pretty much the story of our band, so we don’t mind much. We opened up with the Metallica intro and no-one even headbanged, how does that work? Party, beer, Metallica - perfect combination right? Oh well, I barely ever take anyone’s response to the band to heart anyway. PT go down a total storm. I am sat at the front trying to tape the thing on Alex’s camera and get knocked around like a rag doll and covered in beer for my troubles.

After all that we head to the pizza place for some food and I sober up a little. I buy a 40 I have little intention of finishing, but most of my beers got nicked at the party. Hell, it’s a party. Unfortunately the party is dead when we return. The tv is on with America’s Next Top Model. Alex and I heckle it a bit, but really with shows that dumb, they’re beyond comedy. Crash out.

Day 13: Tijuana, Mexico

11/11/07

We have a lazy morning and end up grabbing a road lunch at the taco place down the road from Joe’s house. We’re crashing back here tonight so there’s not much to pack. Dom realises he’s left his green card at home in Baltimore which inspires a mini-debate over whether he should attempt hopping the border to Tijuana, a quick phone call to US Immigration dissuades him so we say goodbye and head down to TJ one man down. In a sense, we are doing the reverse of what thousands of people do every year in order to get into America. We pull up in a car park in San Diego to meet the promoter Renee who gives us the venue address and points out where we should go to cross the border. The plan is to ditch the car, go across on foot and return on foot. It is raining the sort of pissant rain that is enough to make people’s lives a misery but just too little for people to consider showstopping.

We dump the car and make our way to the border. This involves walking in a roundabout route, arguments over directions and me being a smarmy bastard when proved correct. The border between San Diego and Tijuana looks like the sort of things that zombie movies use to ensure hermetic seals between survivors and zombies. In effect it is boulder of grey concrete and steel jaws that separate the haves from the have-nots. We walk around this post apocalyptic car park surrounded by lots of hispanic types going in both directions. The actual crossing to Mexico is as simple as pie. There is a massive rotating gate with many interlocking fingers that rotates on a creaking axle. You push it and walk. It clacks with a deadbolt type mechanism that prevents anyone coming the other way. The fingers fit tightly together, if they could have designed it so that there was less than a micron between them, I’m sure the would have done so. After this gate there is a short path. It is brightly lit by the halogen lights that flood the entire complex and thus the alley has the feel of some sort of killzone in between industrial slaughter houses. There are a few mexican cops inspecting someone’s suitcase as well as an entirely un-needed information point. There is absolutely no way back from this alleyway, Tijuana looms over the walls. We walk through a second of these revolving gates and we’re in Mexico.

The first two things to hit me about Tijuana were to be it’s two main motifs: drug stores and people trying to fleece me. There are at least as many drug stores in Tijuana as there are bars and strip clubs. There is something of a squabble at the taxi rank for our custom, we try explaining to the guy that there’s six of us, so we’ll need two taxis. He says something like ‘No worries’ in Spanish and squeezes two people into the front seat and four of us into the back. We are literally packed like sardines. Though I would have liked to put a seatbelt on in such a situation, the fact that I was immovably wedged between the door and my bandmates meant that even if we were to crash, I probably wasn’t going anywhere.

As we drive it becomes quickly apparent that Tijuana isn’t just a dump, it is a total dump. Everything here appears aimed at the hordes of rich Americans trampling over the border to get drunk, pop prescription pills and fight on someone else’s turf. I make a mental note never to come back. To it’s credit, the cafe we are playing is actually rather nice and nestled five or six streets away from the tourist strip. We check the place out, outside toilets, always a good sign. We are playing a small room in the back, the roof is leaking from the rain. I grab a bite to eat at the cafe at which point everyone abruptly says they’re heading into town. I scoff down the bagel and head on up.

The Tijuana strip is eerie. Imagine every tourist hell hole you’ve been stuck in, combine it with Camden market and then pepper the product with enough drug stores to keep a medium sized city happy. The streets are pretty deserted because it’s raining, though I can envision in my mind what happens here every weekend when California’s yuppie offspring hightail it down here to party. It must be carnage. We walk down the street and all eyes are on us. I can see people scoping us out trying to figure out good ways of prising money from us from begging through to sizing us up for mugging. The main strip reaffirms my snap judgement of TJ. I don’t want Xanax, I don’t want to get wasted on tequila, I don’t want to go to a strip bar and I don’t want tourist tat made in China. In short, the place has nothing to offer me. We make our way to the venue in short order, Mike Riley grabs a mexican wrestling mask on the way back. We get soaked walking back, the streets are a mix between potholed road, dirt track and river.

The gig kicks off late because they have to move half the equipment on stage due to the ceiling leaking, no, really. There’s about thirty people there, which I’m quite suprised at and this makes the back room pretty packed. The support bands are a bad modern hardcore band (second Carry On cover of the tour so far I think) and a bad Madball type band (Sick Of It All cover). I think that a band that sounds like Madball is probably hardcore’s gift to the Esperanto project. Whatever punk or hardcore scene you end up in worldwide, there will inevitably be some band that is having a tenth rate stab at Madball’s Epitaph material. They will suck. They will either be a bunch of skinny runts who have never been to the streets outside of their mother’s SUV or they will be a bunch of fucking meatheads who take that crap seriously. Either way, they won’t be ‘hard’ in the sense of having lived on the streets, spared for change and dodging drug dealers and hoodlums like all those first wave NYC bands. They will be ‘hard’ in the sense of having big muscles, no brains and people being scared of them because they react aggressively at the slightest criticism. After those two bands is a powerviolence-y band called Dasein whose singer Colin randomly knows Stu from Newcastle. Yet another weird connection to the UK in the middle of nowhere. Wonders will never cease. We go down like a lead balloon again except to a couple of the Americans who have jumped the border for the gig. PT hold it together as a four piece and have some intense reactions to (as Chris Kuhn put it) ‘Side A songs’.

We walk back to the border, traipsing a circuitous route through the half shantytown that is Tijuana. Actually crossing over the border is a doddle. We just show our passports and wander through, the border cops don’t seem to care because we’re white. Earlier I thought there might be a problem because the Mexican immigration people didn’t even speak to us, let alone take those green visa waiver forms which are meant to be handed in when you leave the US. I suggested dumping them, but everyone else kept them, the wisdom of the group seems to have saved my hide because if we had dumped them, we’d apparently have gotten into a lot of trouble. I get laughed at hard once we’re across.

We pull out of the car park and begin to head back to LA when there is a confrontation on the turning we need to take, some guys are out of their cars and fighting. Rhys shouts ‘He’s got a gun’ and slight panic sets in, Rob our faithful driver cuts straight through the argument and debate by putting his foot to the floor and taking us away from the scene and possible shooting distance. Unfortunately this takes us straight onto the ‘You Are Now Entering Mexico’ ramp. We pull a quick U-Turn in front of a bemused customs official and scoot back to LA quicksharp.

We grabbed yet more fast food tex-mex and I slept for most of the journey back to LA. I wake up to the sound of Radiohead’s Amnesiac album. I feel like I am floating while half asleep. In fact I am floating because we just went over the crest of a hill at 100 MPH and my bodyweight is yet to settle again. We are on one of LA’s arterial motorways, as such it is six lanes wide in our direction and six lanes wide in the other. There are no cars as it is 2 in the morning or so. At this speed it really does feel like flying and we slip along the road like Rob is playing Outrun or another old driving game. I remain half asleep for the rest of the journey and it feels trippy to say the least. We get back to Joe’s place and I put my headphones on and listen to the rest of the album while I wait for PT to arrive so I can let them in.

Day 14: San Diego, California

12/11/07

I wake up with Steve in full ‘Pep Talk’ mode because today we get to explore LA. I take some time out and do some exercise by the poolside. It feels good to get a little time and space to do some Wing Chun forms.

Hollywood is Hollywood. Nice day, see some sights, and some hollywood stars. Afterwards we head over to Amoeba LA. It’s alright, nothing on San Francisco’s though. Again I head straight to the 7″s and rummage for some dollar finds. The box is choked with about 15 Neglect 7″s which is a cause for mirth. Afterwards we head to Santa Monica which is a real nice yuppie paradise. We end up shelling out for a real good meal at a vegetarian place, it puts my affordable diet back to peanut butter, salad and pita bread for the next couple of days but it’s worth it.

Leaving LA we have to endure the legendary traffic. Suddenly all twelve lanes are rammed full of cars. It is complete madness, like a cross between Falling Down and pre-holocaust Terminator 2. We clear the traffic by taking advantage of the car pool lane and speeding out of LA flanked by thousands of cars with one driver. As the sun sets we pull over to a random beach to catch it. We have to walk back over a long wooden bridge which stretches over the beach. It’s taking ages and the sun is setting so we end up jumping from the beach to the sand halfway along. The sunset itself is grand. I think we are still within LA’s sphere of environmental devastation so there is a background haze that reflects a golden yellow. The same haze has probably shortened my life expectancy by a an hor or two by being exposed to it for three days, but the sunset is nice anyway. We piss about for a bit and then head on to San Diego.

I don’t get to see much of SD, the venue is in the student campus so we basically get to see the innards of an American University. The place is nice and manicured but it is also a complete maze. The venue itself, The Che Cafe, is a student run counte-cultural sort of oddity in what is otherwise a haven for rich folk. It is a cafe by day but unfortunately the kitchens are shut as it’s Veteran’s Day. Bah. I set up the merch box outside and chill with a few odds and ends papers and zines I grabbed from the cafe’s zine library (a heap of read and unread paper literature of all shapes and sizes heaped in a corner). Everyone wants to head to some student bar or something but I stay to watch the stuff. I can do with the peace and quiet anyway. What started as an itch has now become a desperate fight to find some sort of peace and quiet on a daily basis. Besides, I’ve been in enough student bars to know they invariably suck balls.

Whilst reading a paper on the University of San Diego’s ties to the US Military, a guy sets up a distro box next to me. This turns out to be my lucky break of the tour as he’s selling off a load of good old 7″s for absolute peanuts. I make the snap decision and blow the rest of my tour budget for records on some gems. Then I return to the paper at hand. It’s quite interesting finding out things like this, I mean, our very own MOD is now hiving off R+D lef, right and centre, but it’s still all quite connectable. On the other hand the American military is the direct product of a business culture, alot of what it does is done through defence contractors and research programmes that it funds at the University level. Whether Universities want to take them up on this is up to whether the University itself cares for the attention it brings. Obviously UCSD isn’t in league with Berkeley and other left-wing US universities.

The gig kicks off and a band called Waco Fuck open, pretty damn good, even if I am listening to them through a glass window. The others are back and the bar was closed due to veterans day. Next up it’s Agents Of Abhorrence, who play an absolute blinder of a set. Grant, the singer, is limping because he’s recovering from hip or leg surgery (I can’t remember) but still looks scary as fuck. Then after them is the almighty Iron Lung. This is the first time I have seen Iron Lung with their own rig. John’s guitar is plugged into a full band’s worth of equipment and some heavy duty amps and mixers. When they kick in it is a physically gruelling experience. As always, Jensen on his sideways kit becomes something of a focal point for watching them as he pounds away. Jensen has an odd combined style, he swings his arms and strikes like a caveman pounding away with every inch of strength he has, yet at the same time his hands are working like lightening and playing stupidly fast fills. It’s quite hypnotic to watch until he starts shouting the intense low end bursts of IL’s sound. His posture throughout theset is that of a war-damaged marine sergeant who is half a second away from wiping out a shopping mall with an assault rifle he calls “Betty”. John is shredding away through an amp setup that’s producing an incredible din from just one guitar. This wall of noise just pulverises, and it is one of the few sets on tour I remove my earplugs for to experience the whole thing as it is meant to be heard. No messing around, no dialogue, just a curt acknowledgement that the crowd even exists and then a colossal twenty minute wall of noise. ‘We were Iron Lung’. Then it hits me that we have to follow that.

We strip our set of any mid-paced or long songs, set up and slam through it one after the other. I wouldn’t say that we showed anyone up, but we did manage to follow Iron Lung and not look like rank amateurs. Life’s all about the little victories. We are tour-tight now. Being cooped up in a van feeling steadily alienated and claustrophobic gives me an edge on stage. I suppress everything for 23.5 hours a day but those twenty minutes keep getting longer and longer in my head. My throat is now beyond destroyed, I no longer talk or shout in the same voice I had a week ago, and I know that it will remain this way for the rest of the tour. I can handle that no sweat.

After our set I return to the merch table and read a guy called Chad’s zine. It’s a hasty affair, but worth it for the combat stories. Chad was a marine combat photographer out in Iraq so there’s a bunch of fucked up shit in there that’s worth the time. Other than Mindless Mutant there hasn’t really been any good zines, just the same old drivel regurgitated over and over again. We end up heading to Colin from Daein’s house after the gig. Heading over there a cop car pulls into the middle of the road and slows us all to a standstill for a snap border inspection. Again our skin passes us with flying colours. We get to Colin’s place late. Sleep.