8th
Try This on the Road: Lessons 1-2
Staging a national tour is a much like plotting a military invasion, only less bloodshed and a lot more body odor. Also, we collect less federal funds and a lot more Walmart coupons. In such respects, Napolean really was a 19th century rock star. Granted, he could fit more comfortably in a van than our lanky asses, and if our own campaign fails, we don’t have the luxury of being exiled to a pastoral Mediterranean island.
Covering 6,000 miles is one journey with many destinations. Our performance at any given destination remains largely consistent from night to night, but it is the time between our exit from one stage and our entrance to another when we rock to fresh themes and variations. Our new EP Try This At Home (download it for free here) is perfectly suited for consumption within the comfort of your own domicile. Our live show, however, requires a lot more leg work which will be documented on this sight for the duration of our tour. Try This on the Road will be an account both confessional and educational to those who want to meet up, or just follow along.
We’re the kind of DIY band that is so DIY that we have trouble conforming to conventional acronyms, so we came up with our own. We’re a WOOOSPBOM band: We’re On Our Own So Please By Our Merch.
The first thing you’ll need is a means of conveyance. Private jets and buses are likely still a few years out of the budget, so a van will have to suffice. Make it comfortable, and become friends with it. Give it a name. Something strong and endearing that infers a certain mechanical fortitude. Do not, for instance, refer to your van as Wheezy, the Incinerator, or Tandori Oven. Also keep in mind that it should be reputable if not regal. A bohemian trek can draw some unfortunate attention if you need to shout across the bar for your band mate to pull around the Shaggin’ Wagon.
Our particular crimson carriage is named Ron Burgundy. Its name rolls off the tongue as smoothly as it’s cantankerous frame rolls down the road, provided that certain tongue belonged to a stutterer. Seriously, we accept fuel injector fluid as currency at our merch table.
9/8 CLEVELAND, OH
To those of you who joined us at Brother’s Lounge in Cleveland, tonight you became the envy of Finding Fiction fans (or Fie Fee Fas as our Wikipedia page will someday call them) around the world. You heard the world debut of two new songs. Actually, one was the cut “Them or Me,” but to the person writing this blog, it was just as new as the yet-to-be-titled ditty drummed up in Cleveland. If engineers hold necessity to be the mother of invention, then to a hapless rock band with a set time on the skinny side of an hour, it is the mother of inspiration as well.
And thus, a new song was born on stage tonight, swaddled in synthy goodness, nursed by cymbal splashes, and spanked for good luck by the applause. Thanks for being a great midwife, Cleveland. In a related note, since you were the first to hear that song ever, your eardrums have quintupled in value on the black market, so you might want to get them insured.
But don’t worry. To the few of you who don’t live in Cleveland, I have a feeling we’ll be nurturing this dewy newbie in towns further down the road. Unlike a white trash high school girl at prom, we don’t just leave our babies in the dumpster when we go to the next party.
For us, the next party was a birthright pilgrimage to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It doesn’t resemble a hall so much as the Louvre being dragged into the water by a cement octopus, but shoddy facsimiles were thankfully left to the exterior. The inside houses a staggering collection of genuine artifacts: John Lennon’s coat from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, original stage props from The Wall, and even – wait for it – Britney Spears’s on stage outfit from the days when she had yet to shave her head and wage quixotic flights of crazy. You know, the good ol’ days. The days of classic rock Britney Spears. Wait, what? Those of you playing Road Trip Bingo’s “What the Fuck?” Edition, scratch off your “Undeserved Veneration of Pop Culture Cancer” square.
Still if you do indeed plan to try this on the road (and if you’re in a touring band, your really don’t have an excuse not to), bring as much irrefutable evidence that you are indeed in a band, and you can get in for free. CD’s, t-shirts, posters, discarded bras from groupies, actual groupies, stage blood, real blood, etc. You should go if only so you can stand in the lobby and call everybody who ever though you were wasting your time making a cacophonous racquet and trying to pass it off as music. Call up every naysayer and shout into the phone that you’re “in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame” and then quickly hang up before they have time to challenge your semantics.
9/9 DETROIT, MI
Woe to the weary travelers who set their sights on the burning lantern wicks of Detroit for respite. Is that a wick? Oops, my bad, its just a tire fire.
We’ve all heard the campfire tales of Detroit, of the city’s glorious history as the automotive titan of the 20th century, a blues Mecca, and the birthplace of Motown and how it’s now rusted to a hunchbacked, hollow husk of it’s golden days, its boarded up spires now reduced to dilapidated mausoleums in which the gilded memories of yore are entombed behind an epitaph of “Post No Bills.” Well, it’s all a lie. The truth is much, much worse.
Just how depressing is Detroit? No matter when you drink and no matter how much you drink, it is never happy hour in Detroit. Dememtors, the guardians of Azkaban with an insatiable hunger for hope and joy, have become extinct in Detroit having all died off from starvation. The Detroit City Council just amended an initiative to dose the local reservoirs with Prozac. The original bill, which received overwhelming support in the public polls, called for cyanide.
A couple things we’ve wisened up to since spending some quality time in Detroit: don’t park your car out of sight, and don’t, under any circumstances, ask a native what they do for fun. There is no fun here, and you are a sadistic fuck for asking and may the beetles of a thousand dung piles infest your genitalia, you insensitive prick. You’re not actually laughing at this, are you?
Given the mirthless wash of this prototypical blueprint for the post apocalypse, it speaks to the durability of the human spirit to meet such kind souls as bar maestro Karen or lord of the soundboard Trevor. It also begs forgiveness for the likes of Sheefy McFly and the Deloreans. Consider these sad souls, treading water in the overflowing gutters of a city with no one to pull humble artists to dry land. Of course they have no soapbox greater than Twitter to disseminate their rapturous sermons for hope and salvation in 140 character doses.
Poor Sheefy, like a motherless Grendel, bellowing and moaning for a euthanizing Beowulf to descend upon their stage. Sheefy bleats petty tweets, calling us, his support act for the evening, “so corny” while the motley Dash Jr. professorially postulated “Finding Fiction blows.”
But can you really blame them? I would dump my rage on any innocent souls in tweeting range as well if I was in a local band that was unable to bring a single soul out to support them. To be fair, Sheefy’s profile makes the bold claim that he is the “hottest nigga in Detroit.” The denizens of Detroit most likely avoid being in the same room for fear of spontaneous immolation through proximity. Thankfully, Sheefy has twitter so people might drink down his wisdom from a safe distance. Don’t worry, Sheefy. It gets better. Somewhere outside the chicken wire fence that divides Detroit from the rest of the world lies a pint of weed ice cream with your name on it. ~LD
