Washington our home, wherever we may roam. It never looked so good.

The final week of tour is always the most bizarre as everyone has a pretty volatile combination of losing their minds, missing their friends, not wanting to go back to work, and needing to get sex. All of us were definitely feeling all of these things as we left New York on our way to a series of house shows on our way back west, and it showed.

Our first stop was Buffalo, NY, where it was colder than any of us had expected to encounter on this tour. Luckily the house we played and stayed at had great people, food, and heaters to keep our balls from freezing off. The folks we played with in Buffalo were also playing the same party we were the next day in Columbus, so we sort of caravaned down and made buddies along the way. After three weeks in close quarters with the same dudes it is pretty great to take a breather with some new friends, and Columbus was great for this. Right across the street from the Stink House (where are show was) there was a liquor store that provided us much ammunition for a living room love-in that really made us feel awesome. Whenever someone jumps off the trashcan to crowd surf and then comes back to drink spilled beer out of the top of it, you know something’s going right.

Continue reading "Beer, Corndogs, Emergen-C: The Trashies Tour Diary, the Final Installment" »

Basement shows tend to unleash our spirit animals.

I am going to blow you away. I don't give a fuck about your brother, either, I'll blow his ass away after I blow your ass away, motherfucker. That's the theme of our third week of tour. From Chatanooga to New York, we got our assholes rocked by a jumble of crazy folks, crazy shows, and crazy parties. Chattanooga, Tennessee, much to our surprise, was filled with sympathetic scum who were out to party on a Tuesday night—apparently getting fucked up during the week is what the South is into. You can't get trashed every night when you're on tour--your body just won't put up with drinking 27 beers a night, bong rips, and seven hour drives everyday. Your shit will break. Luckily, we are able to get the occasional fifth of whiskey to split before we play, and Chatanooga was one of those nights.

Chatanooga knows how to party.

By the time we went on, we'd already played intense games of Frisbee, drawn marker masks on our faces, and told some local friends that we were going to blow their asses away if they didn't get us drunk later (by this time that was already a moot point). Somehow after the show we ended up at some crazy Southern Sparks and Thin Lizzy-fueled punk rock porch party that raged on until the wee hours of the AM. You know you're in a town you'll remember and love when an awesome topless dreadlocked hippy chick with her floppy pancakes hanging out who won't stop telling you "I'm a dyke, I eat pussy" wakes you up by blaring Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak while trying to figure out if she should kill her dog and eat it.

Continue reading "On the Road in a Mystery Zone: The Trashies Tour Diary, Week Three" »

This is what freezers look like in hell.

In the dark of night we left Las Cruces, NM and headed for a hotel somewhere in West Texas so as to ease the brutal drive through that Horrordome of a state. All was well until around 1:00 am when we approached one of the fucked-up middle-of-the-road border patrol stations and got told that our van was going to be “randomly” searched for drugs by dogs. Obviously we were profiled as being dopers—a van full of tie-dye clad zoneheads from Washington with music equipment in the back is constantly suspect, and they were right to profile us as such because we were holding onto a few marijuana cigarettes. Needless to say we’re all shitting our pants. We didn’t have time to eat it, as any smart touring band should do, because we were all asleep except for the Wolfman, who was driving (never carry more than you can eat, or you’re fucked).

The border patrol dudes asked us if we had drugs and so we figured it’d be easiest to just give ‘em the stuff. It wasn’t much, and we thought they might just kick us in the ass and let us go. Instead we got fucked. There were four Adderall in the weed bag and we ended up having to sit in a cell, waiting for the sheriff who didn’t show ‘til three in the morning, and then took the Wolfman to jail for the pills after writing weed tickets to some of the rest of us. What a fucking nightmare. We had to go to the neighboring town, which probably had the most (too much) character of any place I’ve ever been. We got a $30 hotel with a door that didn’t close and slept until 8:30 am, when we went to the jail in hopes of this whole thing blowing over and getting straight to Austin (the only beacon of sanity in all of Texas) but we needed to get the Wolfman out of jail first. Little did we know we’d be in for trouble.

This is the desert hellhole hotel we stayed at. Seriously, it's right out of the shining.

Continue reading "Animal Guts for the Dog to Eat: The Trashies Tour Diary, Week Two" »

(Local rockers the Trashies are currently on tour. So far their van has broken down, someone has been arrested, and they've taken some, uh, pills. They'll be checking in with us every couple of days or so, letting us know how it's going—it's sure to be hilarious. Here's installment number one of the Trashies' tour diary, a recap of the band's first week on the road.)

Here we are with Out of Order recordhead Heather Klinger just before leaving Davis post-van breakdown.

This tour has been a real pain in the ass to get together. Being on our fourth tour, we had a few contacts in some cities to help us book the shows, but we’re mostly going to new places on the East Coast and in the South so it’s really taken a shitload of planning. Not to mention the fact that we didn’t even have a van to tour in until two days before we hit the road, and we have a new record and two new 7”s that we had to get together right before we left... but nonetheless, it has begun!

It was really killer to see our friends Blackout Drunk in Seattle falling down at the Funhouse, haven’t done that in months. And the Unnatural Helpers destroyed with their new three-piece line up. Talk about shitrock, those guys murdered my mind with radicality.

Portland was pretty dynamite also. We were greeted by our former roadie who adorned us with many joints of skunkweed which, at the time, seemed radikiller but later would come to bite us straight in the asshole. When we got to the club it was a bit weird as a bunch of our parents and family showed up from our hometown of Longview, WA. They got to see us wasted while we spit fart sounds out of our instruments. I elected to not ask my mom what she thought of the show while she drunkenly blabbed about how much better we’d gotten at our instruments.

One thing that consistently sucks about Portland, though, is the day after—that fuckin’ 10-hour drive to the Bay Area that begins in the netherhours of the morning is always a crusher. We opted out this time and decided to drive to a buddy’s house in Ashland, Oregon after the Portland show. Unfortunately that’s still five hours, and when you leave at 2:30 AM in your van that, at this point, still has no stereo, you’ve got a lot of tired silent driving. Fortunately for us, our drummer is a robot driver and can be programmed to stay awake with trucker speed and sugar coffee.

Continue reading "Get Trashed: The Trashies Tour, Week One" »