It Is Time To Try

I trudge along the draped-off corridor on the wing of the arena floor, tripping the motion sensors in each of the locker rooms as I pass. One by one, the lights flicker noiselessly to life like primordial technology on some derelict spaceship in the cold open of an Alien movie. The only sound here is my own footsteps, which would be great for the atmosphere if not for the fact that I'm wearing flip-flops, so it's this Daffy Duck-ass slap-slap-slapping of cheap rubber soles against lovingly polished maple that reverberates throughout the cavernous auditorium. At the end of the corridor, I find exactly what I came here for: two washing machines, two clothes dryers, and zero face-hugging xenomorphs.

It's day four. Probably a bad sign I'm already doing laundry.

The show tonight is at the McGrath Amphitheatre, located riverside in downtown Cedar Rapids, but our laundry access is across the river and a few blocks away in the Alliant Energy Powerhouse (formerly U.S. Cellular Center [formerly Five Seasons Center]), a 7500-ish seat arena that has been host to live music, pro wrestling, and regional high school sports championships. I decline a ride back to the McGrath and take a seat in the locker room nearest the laundry. I brought my tenor sax, and this is a good a place as any to sneak some practice in. Every few minutes, the lights shut off automatically and I have to lean over and wave my arms to wake them up again. Each time, the part of me that still believes in magic tells me that when the lights come on, there'll be a hideous, barely-human face inches from my own.

I've always liked hanging out in places that are just a little bit spooky. I think there's something about tiptoeing around in the dark- even in a familiar place, like my own home, after everyone else has gone to bed- that can stimulate that dream space when you're on the edge of sleep and your mind is more open to the possibility of the unknown. As a person who has only (mostly) grown more rational and skeptical with age, I am grateful for any opportunity to let my eyes play tricks on me. That silhouette up there in the mezzanine- it's just a painted outline of a basketball player or something. But what if it's something else? What if it sees me?

If you consider yourself as an artist, then an overactive imagination is an invaluable asset.

Hello, friends! Rob here.

Some of you who have been around for a while and are familiar with the concept of "Rob writes stuff" may be wondering: why no roBlog, Rob?

I think the short answer is that I don't have as much energy as I used to. I'm getting older (just me, right?), I think I lost some zest during that world-sized trauma party we had a short while back, and then my wife and I had a son, and the funny thing about kids is that they seem to take up a fair bit of one's free time, and I think, amid all this upheaval and shifting sand, I just didn't know where writing fit into my life. Honestly, I'm still not sure I do. But, at the very least, it is time to try again.

Plus: Video games. Holy shit y'all, have you guys SEEN video games lately? Zelda? Elden Ring? How am I supposed to concentrate with all this free-range dopamine swishing around?

Anyway.

I wanted to start this recap with my spooky arena practice session, because it was also a rare moment of quiet in a very busy, buzzy tour. Usually, when we go on tour with another band, it takes a week or two to break through that awkward, getting-to-know-each-other phase, but in the case of our co-headliners and possible fourteen-way soul-mates The Head and the Heart, it was pretty much "hey, nice to meet you" and then we're all bounding down the stairs to do karate in the garage.

I have to keep reminding myself that I can't say this tour had "family circus" vibes because, despite feeling an awful lot like family and even more so like a traveling carnival, the Revivalists/Head and the Heart joint venture had little in common with the late Bil Keane's wholesome, Christian-tinged single-panel newspaper comic. It was a bit more like this: every day was very sweaty. All of the shows were at "sheds," which is apparently an industry term I had not heard until a few months ago that is used to describe large outdoor amphitheatre-type spaces, usually with a mix of hard seats, open "lawn" seating, and (if the band is lucky) a standing-only pit up front, so it tastes like rock & roll. It's a counterintuitive thing to say about an open-air concert venue, but these spaces have a weird way of confining you. We usually play in theatre-type venues, which are buildings, and are therefore located in places where one might expect to find buildings: a hip arts district, a revitalized downtown, a commercial waterfront... Urbanized, walkable spaces with shops, bars, and restaurants nearby. By contrast, these sheds are often nestled deep in parks and suburban developments. Each is an island unto itself, complete with its own beckoning sirens. We have showers. There's catering. All of your friends are here. Why would you ever want to leave?

Of course, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Ask any of my bandmates, and we'll all tell you that a big part of why Pour It Out Into The Night (available now for purchase and streaming!) came out so well is because we were so fully immersed in the process of creating it at the time. There is a great power, particularly in this age of distraction, in the distillation of presence and attention, and I do think that that degree of focus and connection helped us bring our best to each of those shows. Plus, the geometry of it all certainly contributed to the speed and ease with which we were able to connect to our tourmates and boon companions in The Head and the Heart.

So yeah, good tour. Day-by-day lightning round? Why not?

DAY ONE: Kansas City, MO. I think we were all kind of looking forward to getting out of New Orleans during a particularly brutal stretch of our new forever summer, but the joke was on us, because it was literally a hundred degrees out during the show. Please stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.

DAY TWO: Minneapolis, MN. "The water right by the venue has leeches, but there's a great, leech-free swimming hole just a short ride up the road." I love me a good quarry swim.

DAY THREE: Cedar Rapids, IA. Day off. Michael had some friends in town who kindly hosted the entire tour (us plus The Head and the Heart, who will henceforth be abbreviated as THATH) for a lovely backyard cookout. Burgers, cocktails, and bocce ball, and a lot of broken ice. We all got slightly traumatized (in a team-building kind of way) watching our host's dog nab a squirrel and absolutely ruin the poor thing's day. Later, Ed went to a bar with some of the THATH folks, and when he walked in there were like two other people in the bar and they were listening to "Catching Fireflies" on the jukebox. Just a couple of fans who drove in from out of town, went for a drink after checking into the hotel, and BAM IT'S THE DUDE FROM THE BAND. I love that for them. Their heads must have exploded.

DAY FOUR: (See intro)

DAY FIVE: Cleveland, OH. Day off. Kind of. Sometimes, on bus tour, you get these fake days off, where you have not reached the location of your next show, but the bus driver has to stop driving for legal & safety reasons (apparently it's kind of dangerous to drive a 20-ton vehicle nonstop for sixteen straight hours???), so you get off the bus for a while, and maybe you get to get into a hotel room, but it's all kind of a big tease because here's how they get you: at night, you have to go back on the bus, and sleep on the bus. Doesn't seem fair to me.

This was one such day. Honestly, I kind of fucked this day up. A bunch of folks went to a Guardians game, but I figured I'd just chill in my quiet hotel room and rest up and oops never mind the hotel is throwing a 4th of July party with a bunch of not-very-relaxing music so loud that it sounds like the party is in my room. Plus, on every long tour, usually around a week in, I hit a little hump of sadness about being away from home, and this was it. So there I was, moping in a hotel room to the invasive soundtrack of an LMFAO/Adele mashup (AdeleMFAO?) when I could've- nay, should've- been at the ballpark, basking in American sunshine and housing an inadvisable number of hot dogs and Bud Lights (WOKE BEER). Oh well. Saw some fireworks. Got the sad part of the tour out of the way early. Enough of that, here's a conspiracy theory about the Cleveland Guardians:

Many internet takesmiths more consistent and talented than I have already written at great length about how bad pro sports teams are at picking new nicknames when they finally ditch their old, problematic ones: Guardians, Commanders (who I contend were better off as the Washington Football Team), etc. I think it's a fairly non-controversial statement to say that these names stink like wet ass, even if they are less offensive than the ones they replaced. But my hot take is that this is not entirely by accident. Changing the name of a sports franchise takes time, and it costs money, and then you have to deal with the inevitable, drooling backlash that comes from doing anything remotely woke-adjacent. It is a huge inconvenience to ownership, and sports team owners represent a class of individuals who are deeply unaccustomed to being inconvenienced. So I think there's a bit of that "I'm taking my ball and going home" saltiness that comes with the renaming process: everyone is yelling at me, and I don't even want to be here, and why can't you just leave me alone, okay FINE here's a name that's almost just as embarrassing to wear on a ball cap as the old one. Now go away. It's Paul Rudd cleaning up the cafeteria in Wet Hot American Summer.

DAY THE SIXTH: Selbyville, DE. No, not Shelbyville, no matter how many lemon tree jokes I made. This show was a surprise, because, to me, felt like the hottest show of the tour. Although we're talking about the difference between boiling and molten.

DAY SEVEN: Raleigh, NC. This was maybe my favorite show of the tour. The crowd was with us all the way. We busted out an "Upright" that went over very well. This was also the first time that we all got up on stage during THATH's set, and they came up for ours. We did it every show for the rest of the run, and it always felt fresh and special and gave us a nice jolt of electricity. Our tour manager, Samia, ran an inter-band pub trivia after the show. My team won.

DAY EIGHT: Washington, DC. Day off. Real one this time. Samia had a friend who had access to a lovely home with a lovely swimming pool in a part of DC that I can only think to describe as "the embassy district." We had to show our IDs to a guard in an SUV just to get onto the block. The next-door neighbors were some sultanate or another, and the Obamas have a house down the street (didn't get to say hi to either). Later, we had some ramen that was way too spicy. We had the night off, but THATH was doing an underplay (an industry term I did already know for when a band plays a much smaller room than normal, usually either to shake off some rust at the beginning of a tour, or for a benefit concert or some other type of special event) at the Atlantis. They had a list of upcoming concerts posted on the wall and that was where I encountered a new contender for best band name in the world.

DAY NINE: Columbia, MD. The legendary Merriweather Post Pavilion. Like the Atlantis, Merriweather is part of the I.M.P. venue group, which also runs DC upstart The Anthem and the legendary 9:30 Club. I don’t normally spend much time talking about promoters or managers or business folks because I assume it’s not terribly interesting to the reader, but I want to mention I.M.P. because I really like playing all of their venues. We’ve had some incredible times at 9:30, and when they opened The Anthem, it was clear from the jump that they took everything they’d learned from running their other rooms and said, “how can we make this place perfect?” They got damn close, and the Anthem very quickly became a top-five room for us. Merriweather is incredible, too. Backstage has a swimming pool! They have these luxurious Turkish-style pool towels, in case you forget yours! And they let you keep the towel when you're done with it! OR, MAYBE: a bunch of us stole towels from Merriweather Post Pavilion! Either way! Great! MOVING ON.

DAY TEN: Asbury Park, NJ. With a storm front looming in the nearby Atlantic, we spent much of this day wondering if we were actually going to get to play. We were first on this one, so we were able to start early and get out clean. Before THATH took the stage, the promoter took to the PA to make a very ominous announcement to the effect of “we are NOT evacuating at this time, but just in case we have to, please take a moment to find your nearest exit…” We both had to cut our sets a little shorter than usual, but the crew really did an amazing job getting everything in and out quickly, and we were just able to pull it off and give the audience the show they deserved. About ten minutes after THATH finished playing and the space cleared out, the heavens parted and we got hit with this biblical downpour.

DAYS ELEVEN AND TWELVE: Philadelphia, PA. Rest days. Mostly just ate and hibernated. For all the times I've ever been to Philly, I had never tried Pat's or Geno's, the two famous cheesesteak stands situated across from one another at a weird, X-shaped intersection. Ed, PJ and I housed multiple whole sandwiches from each establishment, in the name of science and social media engagement. So who took the top honors? Who makes the best cheesesteak in Philadelphia? Well, here's the thing.

I believe that one of the worst things to happen in the last twenty years is the popularization of aggregate user ratings.

To be clear, I'm not just talking about numerical scores, letter grades, star ratings and the like. While I do think that a review along the lines of "such and such album showcases the band's virtuosity with lengthy and intricate instrumental sections, but the lyrics are not their most inspired work blah blah and so on" is more instructive to the consumer than "7.5/10," I can recognize the utility of the latter, particularly when it comes from a single reviewer whose preferences and prejudices are well-known. I think Robert Christgau can come off as a stuffy prick sometimes, but he is very upfront about his own turn-offs, and so if, say, you’re really into prog rock, you know not to be dissuaded from buying King Crimson's latest effort (The Power to Believe, released in 2003. This is a terrible example) just because he gave it a D-minus.

What I think has broken our brains is the aggregate consumer scores found in online cesspools like Metacritic, Yelp, and Rotten Tomatoes. I cringe when the Tomato-meter pops up in a movie trailer. I do my best to ignore Yelp scores when looking for food on the road- if I'm in the mood for Thai, I'm going to find the nearest Thai place and shovel some glass noodles into my face and be happy about it. Some folks would rather starve to death than eat the second best falafel in Topeka.

Which brings me back to the cheesesteak. I believe that cheesesteaks occupy a certain class of regional dish that is so simple and satisfying and so deeply understood by its city of origin that it is harder to find a bad one than a good one. As a longtime resident of New Orleans, folks will sometimes ask me where to get the "best" po-boy in town, and my answer is always the same: do not, under any circumstances, pay anyone to drive you to a place that you saw in the Zagat guide. Instead, find the nearest unassuming corner deli to your current location. If it's a liquor store with a weird kitchen nestled in the back, even better. Food is culture, so the best meal is going to be the one that gives you a cultural experience. In New Orleans, this means snatching your po-boy from the back of some fluorescent-lit hole-in-the-wall, hunching over a picnic table, and eating it right off the paper it was wrapped in. The best po-boy in New Orleans is almost always the closest po-boy. I believe the same is true about slices of pizza in New York, and I believe the same is true about cheesesteaks in Philadelphia.

In summation, the answer is Jim's.

DAY THIRTEEN: Philadelphia, PA. Still in Philly, but this time with a show! There was a crossed wire that left us scrambling to find an opener for the show, and after a series of frantic phone calls, an amazing young singer-songwriter named Julia Pratt was able to step in on very, very short notice, and she knocked it out of the park.

Also, now is probably a good time to talk about Jaime Wyatt, who was first-of-three on most of these shows. She is an absolute beast, and she has a great, hard-driving band behind her, and while I didn't get to know them as well as I did the folks from the THATH camp, they seemed like a bunch of lovely people. If you like outlaw country that's heavy on the "outlaw" with more than a few tablespoons of straight up rock & roll, you'll like Jaime.

DAY FOURTEEN: Connecticut. (Connecticut is a whole dang state, and it comprises many different cities and towns, but they're all twenty minutes away from one another and they all sort of bleed together such that I never quite know which one I'm in. Please do not email me about this.) Day off. Home cooked dinner in the backyard at George's parents' house. Kids running up and down the hill. Firefly lanterns. Greek lasagna. Beer & wine in the cooler. Lovely.

DAY FIFTEEN: Still Connecticut. If you see me eating barbecue within twelve hours of the start of a show, please tell me to stop. The tunes went well, but BOY did I feel greasy out there. I recently learned that “crapulence” is a real word, and it’s the right one to use here.

DAY SIXTEEN: Guilford, NH. I have a new favorite venue, and it is Bank of New Hampshire Pavilion. Where to start? The mini-golf course. I'm gonna start with the mini-golf course. They have. a fucking. mini-golf course backstage. The whole backstage area has the feel of a summer camp. There are bikes. There's a pool. There's a lake. Dinner is a mountain of shellfish. On your way out, be sure to grab a complimentary hip flask. Or a coffee mug. Or socks. Or a hoodie, with a custom patch commemorating tonight’s performance. In addition to the usual cultural exchange, we had Jon from THATH up for "Baba O'Riley" and he crushed it. There were inflatable saxophones all over the place. Great last show.

After the lights went down, we sat around the fire pit (oh, right, there was also a fire pit), roasting marshmallows, joking around with friends old and new, sweating a little under the blanket of a clear summer night, feeling ten, twenty years younger, recalling that youthful thirst for romance, for subversion, for independence, for horizon after glowing horizon.

And then, out came the jello shots.

UNRELATED:

The other day I was watching Peppa Pig, because I have a two-and-a-half-year-old, and I noticed something... weird. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, Peppa Pig is a British children's television series that follows the lighthearted, low-stakes adventures of the title character as she learns, explores, and jumps in a few mud puddles (she is a pig, after all).

So here's the weird thing: In S1E20, "The School Fete," Peppa attends her school's carnival. At first, it's all very normal- all of her friends are there, they have balloons, there's a bouncy castle. Great. And then, the children all gather around the face painter. The children deliberate over their choices of face paint. Peppa's friend, Suzy Sheep (Meg Hall), steps up and says, with confidence, "I'm going to be a tiger!" The children are all impressed by her choice and soon they all are wearing orange-and-white stripes on their faces.

So what? Well, Peppa Pig takes place in a modern, industrialized society not unlike our own, except that it is inhabited by bipedal, anthropomorphic mammals- ponies dogs, rabbits, and of course, pigs, to name a few. There are animals in the show as well- like, animal animals, which behave like animals in our world- but those are exclusively non-mammalian. We see worms wriggling in dirt, butterflies emerging from chrysalides, spiders spinning webs, and frogs hopping on lilypads. The rules of this world, as far as I can tell, dictate that all mammals are essentially human, while all non-mammals behave and cognize in the same way as their counterparts do here in the real world. But tigers are mammals, and so it seems likely that there are actual tigers in Peppaworld- bipedal and sapient like all the other mammals. Which means that a bunch of non-tiger children painting their faces like tigers, as a costume, for a laugh, is, uhh, kind of problematic?

I mean, I know it's just a silly children's cartoon where pigs walk and talk and drive cars and make flapjacks in the morning, and I'm mostly just doing 2010s Cracked.com schtick here. But the more I think about this, the darker it gets. Peppa and her friends all speak with English accents and appear to live in a facsimile of the English countryside. The bengal tiger is an official symbol of The Republic of India, a country that suffered generations of withering abuse under the yoke of British imperialism and continues to cope with the after-effects of that oppression. Depictions of Asian people in western media have long been fraught with stereotype, caricature, exoticization, and fetishization. A bunch of British animals masquerading as tigers- in world where, in all likelihood, tigers are fully sapient creatures, with thoughts and feelings and inner lives- feels like a twist of the knife. It is deeply disappointing to see a benign and at times educational series like Peppa Pig uphold this ugly tradition of cultural insensitivity. PEPPA PIG MUST APOLOGIZE. Do better. Children are watching.

Okay, great. On that lovely note, let's have our new best friends play us out, shall we?

Love you guys.