i've done 250 of these
Monday: My wife and I took a mini beach trip for Labor Day weekend. Just the two of us, sitting on the sand all day and eating take-out in a no-frills motel after the sun went down. It was pleasant in a way that doesn't deem much reporting on. Having spent my formative years crashing out in an endless succession of pest-ridden hepatitis cauldrons dotting America's interstates, my standards for accommodations are pretty low. I will call the front desk in a huff and demand a new room if I detect the faintest whiff of cigarette smoke, but basically, other than that, I'm cool, as long as they don't give me a key to a room that already has someone inside it (this has happened me before, and to at least two other Revivalists on separate occasions).
My wife, on the other hand, is a civilized person who expects a certain baseline of quality in hotels. But the funny thing about COVID is that a lot of specs that would normally be deal-breakers are now desirable for a hotel room: normally, a roadside-style motel where you enter your room directly from outside would imply lower quality and less safety. In a pandemic, however, it means no elevators or other chokepoints that force you into close quarters with strangers. Wall-mounted A/C units normally mean noise and a finicky dial system that somehow keeps the room frigid AND stuffy, but now they mean no shared ventilation network to mist your room with plague droplets from the tweakers down the hall.
Smoking rooms are still a nonstarter, though. The entire concept baffles me. I can't imagine wanting to turn one's sleep space into an acrid stink-box. And the smell NEVER goes away. One time I got stuck with a smoking room where the miasma was so thick that it tainted all of the clean clothes in my suitcase. That sucked. It's particularly insane to want a smoking room at a hotel where your door leads directly outside. Like, you can walk THREE FEET and not be stinking up your room. I walk further than that to go to the bathroom.
Tuesday: Speaking of which, how come a dog gets to pee outside wherever it wants, but if I get caught doing it, I could spend the rest of Mardi Gras in Central Lock-up? (This has never actually happened to me, but it's a real thing.) The finger-waggers and pearl-clutchers of the world will carp about “indecent exposure,” but you know what I say is indecent? Income inequality. I'm not advocating for, like, pooping on the sidewalk- words I never thought I'd have to utter. But pee? Outside? On the ground? Where's the harm? #freethepee
Wednesday: I may have buried the lede here a bit, but: a long time ago, I began numbering these entries and saving them on a hard drive, and this is entry number 250! That's kind of a big deal! Only the last hundred or so entries survived the exodus from our previous website- to say nothing of the still-older entries lost to the depths of MySpace. Still, I thought this would be a welcome chance to take a look back at some highlights from these long, bright years:
I can't believe we have to spend $3300 on this fucking van.
“Zero Visibility Possible,” 7/1/13
Something like forty-five minutes or an hour after we were supposed to start, we arrived at the venue.
“Does Anybody Have Any Questions?” 9/22/16
4:05 AM – Indianapolis International Airport. I will be the TSA's first customer today. We checked out of our hotel at 3:30 this morning. We are sitting in black chairs with armrests and we are all very tired. Mike is wearing sunglasses, Ed is on the floor, it's still dark outside, we board our flight in about half an hour.
“First in Line,” 9/12/14
Apparently there's a hot tub somewhere around here. Of course, nobody actually uses the hot tub anymore. One of the guys on Gov't Mule's crew described it as a “roadie bouillabaisse.”
“I Survived Wanee!” 4/23/13
...factory-recall dildo
“Old Joke,” 8/19/17
After a few weeks of van trouble and two overnight pit stops in two deteriorating gold mining towns, we finally abandoned our old 15-passenger Chevy Express (literally abandoned. Like, left in the parking lot of a hiking trail).
“2013: A Year in review,” 1/2/14
You know it's a sweaty week when you play a festival that literally has the word “hot” in its name and it's only like the third or fourth sweatiest show of the week.
“Wringing Out,” 9/4/16
We barely made Saturday's show in Atlanta, and as a result we had about eight minutes to get from parking the van to playing the downbeat.
“From Zero to Tour Mode in Chocolate Cake,” 7/6/13
[The tour bus] also has different rooms, which is nice, because in a van, when somebody farts, you just have to sit there in the fart zone until the smell gets sucked out the window. But on a bus, you can just get up and walk away from the fart!
“Far Away in Rock Star Land,” 3/7/15
After that, it was a long (looooooooong) drive.
“You Can't Be Too Drunk For Country Music,” 4/21/14
We take up entirely too much space.
“They Let Us Keep the Clothes/A Study in Purple,” 4/21/16
From the very back, where I am lying down, it sounds and feels like yet another violently blown tire. It is worse. We hit a deer. Our vehicle looks like it took a shotgun blast to the face. The hood is fractured. The headlights are walleyed. Lifeblood is gushing from severed hoses. This is a problem.
“Part of the Machine,” 11/10/14
I won a t-shirt in a spelling bee. At a bar.
“Check Baby Bar,” 3/17/15
Friday I was recovering from a particularly barfy shade of food poisoning so I really didn't do anything except show up, try not to move around a lot, and then make my girlfriend drive me home.
“I Speak Giddyup,” 5/6/15
First, we got a little stuck on the highway . . . And then it got cold . . . Sure, it's sort of unpleasant hauling band stuff in and out of a trailer at 9000 feet above sea level and six degrees below zero (this happened multiple times), but it made for good exercise, the roads got safer right after we spent $200 on snow chains, and the trailer only froze shut like, twice.
“The Things That Started Happening,” 2/24/14
Pee? Outside? On the ground? Where's the harm?
“I've Done 250 of These,” 9/12/20
In one 5-day span we'll be traveling from Toronto to Los Angeles with a brief stopover in the northeastern United States. In another, we will go from Indiana to Michigan by way of southern California. Note that this means we'll be making two distinct trips to California in the next three weeks.
“First One's Usually the Hardest,” 6/10/17
The Second Annual Cold-Time Revivalists Van Disaster was, like the first, the result of a kamikaze attack on our vehicle . . . The only casualty was our trailer.
“Burgers and Sandwiches,” 12/8/15
I still have yet to shower today.
“Radio Can't Smell!” 2/4/17
Strictly speaking, shouldn't the phrase “a dick-measuring contest” refer to a competition to see who can most accurately assess the dimensions of a given dick?
“That's a Fact, Jack,” 4/7/18
We were parked next to [a guy towing a 30-foot-long horse trailer] and he pulled around in front of us too tightly and clipped our front bumper clean off. Eleven days after Paul Reed Smith, posing as a mechanic for a practical joke, told Dave that our vehicle needed “a whole new back end,” we found ourselves unexpectedly in need of a whole new front end. [LATER IN THE SAME DAY] The only set of keys. Locked. In. The van. I’m almost-but-not-quite stupid enough to write a detailed report of how to break into a vehicle that I own and post it on the internet, but suffice it to say that there was a bit of MacGuyvering involved, and that The Revivalists were definitely not meant to be car thieves . . . And that’s the story of the worst day of banding ever. The show technically started after midnight, so literally nothing good happened on Friday, September 20th, 2013. Sorry if it was your birthday or something. Your birthday sucked. The end.
“Let's Cook,” 9/26/13
I attempt to roll out of my bunk, become entangled in a web of headphone and power cables, and utter a stream of compound profanities.
“Time to Split,” 2/15/17
Everyone was talking about the mud at this year’s Jazz Fest, and how, seeing as it was racetrack mud, it was actually mostly horse poop. Someone wrote a very nice write-up of our performance that spent two paragraphs talking about how everyone was walking around in poop before they even got to the music. Fortunately, lots of kind and resilient individuals braved the mudpoop and came to the 'Fest early enough to see us.
“You Can't Blow The Roof Off Of Outside!” 5/22/13
Anyway, that was probably the best sixteen-and-a-half-minute version of “Soulfight” we've done in a while.
“I'm Not Crazy; I'm Just Wrong,” 6/4/19
It’s moments like these that make me appreciate just how truly fortunate we are- not just to be doing something we love, but to be a part of this wonderful patchwork community, this extended cross-country family of musicians and crew and managers and promoters and professional appreciators.
“One Big Family,” 9/2/14
This band has spent a lot of time in cars and vans and buses.
“How Lucky Are We?” 6/27/17
Thursday: Okay, for real though. It was fun digging revisiting all of those older entries. All of the long hauls, the sleepless nights, the setbacks, the milestones, the mistakes, the triumphs, the vehicles (and tour managers) we ran into the ground, and all of the friendships- what if the real band was the friendships we made along the way? So much love and pain and joy and wonder.
So much weird, too. This brought back some weird memories, like in 2015 when our Facebook page got hacked and was briefly taken over by some spam factory called “I Love You Media.” Or the two Super Bowls I've watched at Buffalo Wild Wings in the midst of cross-country drives. Despite the enduring trope, I'm not sure if I have ever actually signed anyone's boobs, but one time this girl got us all to autograph her math homework. One time a guy asked me to write a snippet of lyrics from one of our songs on a piece of paper so he could bring it home to his sister because she wanted to turn it into a tattoo. I thought was weird that she had specified MY handwriting since I wasn't the one who wrote those lyrics in the first place. I'm not sure what (if anything )ever came of that. And we really did have that much van trouble- maybe more.
It's also just interesting going back and reading my old writing. The tone of whatever I'm reading at the time has always had a tendency to seep into the way I write, and I can definitely go back and say “this must've been when I was reading Catch-22,” or “that was when Cracked was my go-to time-waster.” And I use way more commas now. The one constant throughout the years? Too many words.
Friday: Here's a jam:
Should I do jams EVERY Friday??? It'll increase blog efficiency by twenty percent. I think. It will REDUCE the amount of time it takes to write these by twenty percent. Does that mean I'm twenty percent more efficient? Twenty-five? Actually, yeah, I think it's twenty-five. Shit yeah. Anyway, here are some words (not mine) about this jam. Enjoy the weekend!
