11th
Try This on the Road: Lessons 3-4
9/8 The Elbo Room
Chicago, IL
Okay, enough of the dumping on Detroit. We took the scenic route out of town to see if it looked better in the daylight. We tried to interview a local musician who was filming a music video, but no matter how much our off-camera zany antics caught her eye with, she wouldn’t cut. Very professional. See for yourself.
Can’t you see how cold they are? Detroit needs your help, not your derision. There was a Jaguar convertible just sitting in a field. Unlocked. Go find it and it’s yours, and while you’re looking, please support the local economy. If you do indeed discover its whereabouts, buff it’s fenders three times to free the auto-genie and it will grant you three wishes provided you use at least two of them to restore Detroit. Sorry. Sheefy, you’re going to have to choose between 420 barrels of weed ice cream and your own personal porno production company.
Chicago welcomed us with the warm embrace of a traffic jam. The bumper-to-bumper hug was so warm in fact that our engine began to overheat. The five-hour drive left Ron Burgundy suggesting perhaps we had not given him a strong enough name. Or perhaps he just doesn’t appreciate us trashing the good city of Detroit with such abandon. Who knows, the Motor City could very well be Burgundy’s birthplace.
We plied Burgundy with a hefty splash of coolant, but he pissed it straight to the tarmac like a mechanical racehorse. This was clearly something a lot more dire than road burn. Nevertheless, we coaxed Burgundy to the curb outside of the Elbo Room where for the first time since leaving New York it looked like we might have an audience.
Whether watching The Godfather or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre there is one immutable life lesson to be learned that always manages to prove it’s value when playing shows: family is everything. If you’re in a band, keep in touch with that third cousin with the lazy eye, help grandma chew her food, and maybe it’s even worth getting back in touch with that weird uncle who was always trying to lure you and your neighborhood friends into his basement to play Twister with promises of candy and ice tea that tasted like burning.
While friends can be deviously resourceful when mining for excuses to stay home, family bonds can draw a crowd. Hell, even Fredo showed up for Michael Corleone’s parties (of course he might have just been in it for the free fishing trip). Anyway, in addition to producing one hell of a musical grandson, Mario’s grandparents were proactively procreative enough to make sure they also produced an audience of cousins to welcome us to Chicago.
Arguably one of the best parts about going out on the road is all the great music you see from night to night. Of course it can also be a sobering reminder that a band’s work is never done. But in all fairness, the fact that we’ve been playing as a band for only eleven days now instills a certain “No Shit, Sherlock” humility, one that inspires us to accelerate our progress as we consecrate the stage before some truly inspiring acts. There was The Sideshow Tragedy, a two man wild rumpus that lumbered like a Hill Country mastodon of Mississippi and wailed like a bayou banshee, and Jascha, our brother band from Indianapolis whose angular chorales will be heard many times before the end of our tour. Dig them like a garden, fellow aural addicts, as our own musical family tree sprouts a couple more branches.
9/9 Frank’s Power Plant
Milwaukee, WI
Mario rises with the cloud-suppressed sun to tend to the ailing Burgundy while we trawl through Wicker Park in search of coffee and internet, the two necessary amenities for any band on the go. We soon receive word that the van requires the equivalent of a triple bypass heart transplant to replace the radiator along with several gaskets.
Lucky for us, we found the greatest coffee shop ever. No, not Peet’s (I don’t buy coffee from a guy named after Irish moss), not Starbucks (they’ve let me down ever since they covered up the mermaid’s tits), and no, not that hole in the wall with the cute barista that draws smiley faces in your latte foam. Sure, that last place is good and all. But does it have an old school Nintendo with a phalanx of old school cartridges that you don’t even need to blow in to get them to work? Does it have Gremlins and Ghostbusters toys strewn about? Does it have a flux capacitor behind emergency glass? Does it have a menu of espresso drinks named after obscure Star Wars bounty hunters? And here’s the coup de grace. Does it have a life sized Delorean replica with accurate OUTATIME license plate parked just inside the front door? I think not.
Yes, road runners, when stopping through Chicago, be sure to drop into the Wormhole for a cup of joe and a couple rounds of Bubble Bobble. Your inner child will thank you. Just try not to cross streams when using the urinals. Total ionization would rob the town of such a nice café.
But even caffeine and 80’s nostalgia can get stale after a couple hours, so we retreated to the domicile of Chris, the college buddy of Finding Fiction’s keyboardist and honorary math whiz, George Chen. There we watched tennis and became the target of his yapping canine ward, Peanut. This particular pup corroborated the old adage that the smaller the dog, the bigger the yap.
As the tennis broadcast gave way to Thundercats the zero hour when we could leave and still make to Milwaukee drew perilously apace. Burgundy’s surgery had been further complicated by a dubiously installed part. Evidently the resident mechanic sympathized with our need to hurry, so they installed a radiator with a crack in it, ostensibly to reduce the amount of wind resistance. But just as we were about to resign ourselves to another night in Chicago (and perhaps another trip to the Wormhole for some more Metroid action), Mario swooped in with a healthy Ron Burgundy to swoop us off to Frank’s Power Plant.
Ahhh, Milwaukee. The native Algonquins called it “Mila-wah-kay,” meaning “the good land. That’s “Mila” (as in the actress who gave Natalie Portman a most phantasmagoric fuck in Black Swan) “wah” (as in one half of every guitar player’s favorite pedal, the wah wah), and kay (as in “white people should not try to pronounce Native American words, okay?”). We made it.
Unfortunately, our van seems to have merely traded ailments. A shrieking rattle now threatens to drown out our feeble stereo. It sounds as if the mechanic replaced our radiator with two velociraptors fighting over a chipmunk. Still, the engine stays dutifully cool, and regardless of our sub-hood din, it’s time to make some sweet music of our own. For those of you playing road trip bingo from home, “Inconvenient Car Trouble” is the freebie square in the center. If you haven’t already, scratch it off now.
Milwaukee was the ideal destination in a time of automotive troubles and not just because of its close proximity to our city of departure. After a stressful scramble to a load-in, nothing paves the way to the stage like a frosty beverage, and the brewers of Milwaukee both provide and abide (though word on the street is that they suck at baseball). I was expecting to have to wait till at least the Rockies to get a proper IPA down my gullet, but the fine folks at Frank’s kept the local IPAs flowing like wine.
Here’s a fun fact! Many people think IPA stands for Indian Pale Ale, referring to the ales carried over between Britain and colonial India. Sailors would dump extra hops into the casks so the ale would continue to ferment, keeping it fresh for the long voyage. These people, while elevated in the ivory tower of historical fact, are full of shit. It actually stands for Inebriation Probably Ahead. You don’t need a history textbook to understand that acronym.
Once again we were joined by our friends Jascha. Filling out the bill was a group of young blood locals named Animals in Human Attire, their raucous anthems recalling Television by way of TV on the Radio. The centerpiece of the percussionist’s array was a discarded propane tank plastered with stickers that read “DO NOT USE.” Can they not read? Perhaps their name may be more accurate than I initially thought as they guy was wailing on it like the monkey from 2001 on a tapir. Revision Text, the bearded and bespectacled hosts of the evening, ushered the Friday night towards last call with a breakneck set that took no prisoners and left only earworms.
While the evening’s ceremonies proved sublime, the drive home was all too sobering. A garrison of flashing lights held parliament on a downtown corner while a flood of sirens chased us past a scene we did not expect to see, especially in Milwaukee. Being in a rock band, bodily injury and blood are not strangers to our ocular faculties, but never before have we seen so much blood in so much quantity from such a fresh squeezed source. Coming from New York, you become desensitized to homeless people masquerading as corpses, but this poor soul was the real deal.
Before embarking on our tour, we all staked our (sure to be astronomical) earnings from the tour against each other in a band pool. Simply put, we waged bets on what we would see where. While we have yet to see if Mario will successfully shoot the moon with his “naked midget riding a moped in Phoenix” wager or if George will make enough to avoid having to go back to work with his “albino chainsaw juggler in Omaha.” Still, we all lost money in Milwaukee. We all thought “dead guy in Detroit” was easy money.
