Instead of playing the Waterstreet Music Hall, a hearty intimate venue with microbrews, a cozy balcony, and a lovely riverside restaurant right next door, tonight we’re playing in The Armory, a giant frozen castle ready to take on thousands of hurricane refugees should we need it to. It’s where “everyone plays in Rochester now.”
Bring your coat, wear your coat. Watch the drummer’s hands shatter like concrete even though the inside temperature (42 degrees) is warmer than the outside temperature (38 degrees). They had delicious soup for lunch at the Armory.
Adam just walked into the front lounge of the bus and asked me and Scooter if we’d tried out the showers in the basement of the Armory yet (Adam bathes on tour). I said I’d been down there for a minute, but it was really cold. Instead of asking the usual “are the bathrooms like Trainspotting” question, Adam followed up with “I’m picturing the bathrooms like that movie ‘Saw’ — is that what it’s like?”
And for those of you who’ve made it through that movie, the question is a punch line in and of itself.
After the Cincinnati show the other night, we watched the Yankees win the world series on the bus, and unwittingly watched 11 unbearable Jorge Posada interviews before the channel mercifully got switched to a movie station where “Marked for Death” starring Steven Seagal was just starting. Usually I’d take my cue to brush my teeth and go to bed in a situation like this, but with like 9 of us watching and the volume down, it turned into a Guster version of MST3K… there was plenty of witty commentary and clever imposed dialogue coming out, but it mostly piled on top of each other in a blur of eager horrible Seagal impressions. Scooter and Seth thrive in environments like this and actually landed a few solid punches. I didn’t realize movies that were made in the 90s could feel so dated. It probably felt dated the day it was released.
We’re out of Washington DC after a two night stand. DC was good to us, and we were good to DC:
If you didn’t know, Ryan’s been giving away a pair of tickets (maybe two pairs of tickets?) every day via creative Twitter video. I hope whoever got the pair from under the bench near the building-that-I-recognize-from-the-five-dollar-bill chewed the gum for a minute or two (while it still had some flavor) before they threw it away.
So we’re three shows deep into the tour now, and probably hitting our stride just in time for D.F. Yonkman to film Halloween at the Orpheum in Boston for a possible live DVD. Two Points For Honesty and Rainy Day, once bastard children of Lost & Gone Forever and banished from the live set, are now major players in the set. We’re inside them. They’re powerful.
Here’s a clip from last night in Washington. We’ll miss you, cute children’s choir from a suburb of D.C. whose name escapes me:
It’s been almost ten years since I’ve put my fingers and hands under the kind of duress they’re about to be under for the next two weeks. We’re starting to rehearse today for the Lost & Gone Forever anniversary tour, which will mean over two hours of playing a night, with very little in the way of stick breaks for my mitts. Waah.
I figured it’d take about three shows for the blood blisters to appear, the callouses to begin to form, and the krazy glue to come out, but last week I was in Columbia MO playing home run derby on the 85mph batting cages at Perche Creek with my brother in law and in the final round, the one that counted, I wanted to use his bat because it had a bigger barrel. Little did I know there was just athletic tape where a foamy rubbery grip usually is, and by the time I lobbed my third decisive home run over the pitching area (but under the net), I looked down to see the skin on my left thumb shredded up and blistered and bleeding. A week’s gone by but it still stings when I bend the thumb, which only means that we’re starting the tour with the glue and the ibuprofen and the wads of band aids covered in tape. It’ll be a true Guster show circa ‘99-‘01 right from the get-go.
I want you to know this experience in no way affects my excitement about our impending tv commercial debut on Sunday nights between midnight and 5am, when this ad will air in the greater central Missouri area:
At this point, I’d like to address another matter of tremendous personal glory, which is my cameo in a New Yorker article over the summer about HBO’s new “Bored to Death” series, a show that’s filmed in my neighborhood in Brooklyn. Specifically, Ryan’s “tweet” on the article which said something like: « CROCS? Why Bri Why?»
I’ll have you know that what I was wearing, out of the house, was worse than merely Crocs — a functional shoe that doesn’t exactly hold up to NYC standards for fashion. I was wearing Crocs’ Next Step Campus Tour 2007 Crocs, that had my own band’s name printed on the side of the shoe. As humiliating as it is to run into a reporter for The New Yorker while wearing rubber shoes with holes punched in them for breathability, the whole thing could have been a lot darker if she’d noticed the fine print. My career might never have been able to recover. I am also grateful that Schwartzman remembered me. It’d been years.
Looks like a beautiful night under the arch in St Louis. 78 degrees and clear according to my WeatherEye app.
I remember in 2006 when we toured with Ray Lamontagne over the summer, there was a show in Charlottesville VA where the temperature was 100 degrees and the humidity was like 97%. I drank eleven waters on stage, barely got through The Fa Fa Fa Song, and then stumbled off stage in a stupor, 15 pounds lighter than when the show started. Both of my socks were completely waterlogged and I could ring the sweat out of them. My boxers were soaked through too. There were no showers.
This is the summer touring I remember and the summer touring that Joe Pisapia dreads. So far this season we’ve been really lucky. With the exception of a typhoon that swept in and cleared the crowd between Peter Bjorn & John and Guster in Philly last weekend, the weather has been super accomodating. Warm enough to require some post-show deodorant, maybe, but nothing approaching the evil we encountered in 2006.
But then superfan Jeremy P., the guy that won our hearts and our Scooter for a Day contest in 2007 with his charming version of The Captain on melodica, sent me a series of photos from our show in Jackson Mississippi back in June. Swamp country! This was the first show of our summer tour and it was muggy and disgusting out. I had forgotten about it.
Jeremy’s four photos, in order, tell the story of a man who still thinks he is my drum tech, who thinks our bus is his bus, our beer is his beer, and my hamburger is his hamburger. Jeremy has entitled this photo exhibit “Wearin’ out my welcome!” — enjoy.
I’m back! You missed me! Smile for the camera Brian!
Man, that was like the hottest show ever. I’m eating your burger, Brian!
I can’t believe this is all that’s left of my hamburger.
I drew this for you with my crayon at The Ground Round, Brian! It’s you!
Road Journal slowly dissolving into a bunch of videos with unnecessary words inbetween. We just played at the Rothbury festival in Michigan, which was fun, even if we felt a little out of place among the gypsies in the Sherwood Forest. Here’s a taste:
Minutes later Joe and I were the ones lying on our backs inbetween the gongs wearing American Eagle sweatshirts and communing with our inner hippies. Later that night we got all the zen out of our system at a McDonald’s somewhere in Michigan.
And before you go thinking that drive thru policies have loosened up in regard to walk-ups, they made Scooter shout the order to them from inside our bus, 12 feet from the window, rather than walking up to the window.
What happened next is hard to explain, but you can only watch Rothbury wookies dance naked for so long before you finally listen to Paula Abdul on another level. D.F. Yonkman is the man behind the iPhone.
Went head to head with Whitesnake and Judas Priest last night at Summerfest in Milwaukee. If not for the grassroots audience acquisition campaign waged by Ryan & the Funny or Die dot com crew, there might have been no one at our show…
Thanks, Milwaukee for another great time at Summerfest. We will return.
Day 2 of Summer Tour and already an epic dilemma faces me. Feeling a little sticky after playing a set in Mississippi without a post-game shower last night, I walked off the bus in the 97 degree Atlanta heat this morning to see my old nemesis, the festival port-o-potty, beckoning me from the side of the stage.
To recap the rules — tour buses are not really equipped to handle #2, so you have to scramble off the bus every morning to do your business elsewhere. It’s industry standard, and courteous to your fellow bus dwellers. TV on the Radio, who had this bus last week at Bonnaroo, did not poop on it, so why would I? There. Now anyone googling Guster *and* TV on the Radio *and* port-o-potty has found a home on the worldwide web.
With the exception of The Blue Room, a luxurious palace of a port-o-john where I read two chapters from Lonesome Dove comfortably in Richmond in 2002, I’ve always had a great fear of these poorly-vented boxes of B.M. And just as I was thinking that maybe today would be the day I’d overcome my fear, I saw in the distance a brick structure next to a pool that had to be a public restroom, with proper porcelain and room to stretch your legs. Perhaps this was an imaginary oasis, induced by heat exhaustion and dehydration? No. It was the real thing. I began the uphill journey.
When I got there I found two empty men’s room stalls, both very clean. I was elated — that is, until I checked for toilet paper and came up empty. I’m 35 years old and I’ve been using public restrooms on the road for thirteen years. I have learned so many life lessons the hard way. I know to check. Both stalls were out of paper and there was nothing in the towel dispenser to boot. I found my friend Jenny outside and asked her to look in the ladies room. Nothing. I asked the nice lady setting up a poolside bar for some cocktail napkins to wipe my ass with. No go. Shouldn’t have said that last part.
So I trekked back downhill to the closet of darkness just to grab some toilet paper and head back uphill. But when I entered it was relatively clean, with nice morning light and no aroma to speak of. Why walk all the way uphill with a bunch of toilet paper (so thin it might just evaporate in my hand on the walk) when I could just plop myself down here in this port-o-potty, do the deed, and move on to the other things I have to do today (namely writing about taking a crap).
So that’s what I decided to do. And I wasn’t in that box for five seconds before my shirt started sticking to my back, my forehead started beading up with sweat, and I noticed my knee was bumping into the piss-beaded gray urinal on the side. I looked up for any sign of ventilation, but found nothing. It was hot as hell in there, in my port-o-potty in the sun. And then came the dreaded splashback. Fuck. Forgot to create a landing pad with toilet paper down in The Hole, though with 35 sheets of port-o-paper equaling one sheet of regular toilet paper, a proper landing pad might have left me nothing to wipe with. Stop lying to yourself Brian, there’s plenty of toilet paper in here, you just don’t have your A Game today. I was starting to feel claustrophobic when suddenly I had a flashback to an old experience that I think I’ve been suppressing. It might help me to talk about it.
The year was 2005. I was on my way up to northern Vermont for Ryan Miller’s wedding. We stopped at a flea market on the way, in a field off a country road. A nice selection of stuff at this flea market, and Vermont prices to boot. I bought a keyboard and an antique set of drill bits. I had to take a crap.
There were two port-o-johns in the middle of the field, and I had to take care of the situation immediately, so I entered the one on the left. With my pants down at my ankles, mid-business, someone knocked on the door, which is a little weird, since I’d locked the door, and I knew it created a red OCCUPIED sign on the outside. Whatever. “I’m in here” I said, in the lame sheepish voice that everyone uses in a situation like this. Three more knocks, this time harder. “I’m in here!” I say a little more forcefully. Was it my girlfriend-at-the-time, now wife, Megan, messing with me? No way, totally not her style. And then in one of those Oh My God Is This Really Happening To Me moments, the person began pounding on the door with their fists and shaking the port-o-potty back and forth. I tried to grab something to gain my balance. This sucker was going down. I had a horrible vision of myself climbing out of the top of a tipped-over port-o-potty, a feces-covered monster in the middle of a quaint Vermont flea market, and more than anything needed to know WHO THE FUCK WAS DOING THIS AND WHY, so I pulled up my pants and kicked open the door and emerged from my closet, ready to rumble. What did I see on the other side?
A seventy-five year old man. Yes, someone that could have been my grandpa. He looked me in the eye, made a frightened expression, started laugh-mumbling, and then covered his head as if to shield himself from the inevitable blows that were coming. I did not strike the old man, even though I had the right to. But I did say “what the… what in the… why would… what are you DOOOOING!?” And the mumbling grandpa gathered himself, peered up from underneath his forearm, and said “I’m sorry… I thought you were my friend… he must have gone in the other one!” I was angry but slightly amused. I hope when I’m old I’ll still want to pull a prank like that on my friend, even if it means leaving a life-long psychological scar on a drummer who plays summer festivals regularly.
I feel better now that that’s out of me, and I know that while it’s a continuous struggle to confront my fears every day, I’ll only get better if I talk about my feelings, and write in my blog every time I use a port-o-potty. I want to thank you for reading and understanding. Back in the box in Atlanta, I wiped up, zipped up, and turned around to flush the toilet. But there was no flush. And there never will be.
We played at Marquette last night, but I forgot to go online and check to see which team eliminated Marquette from the NCAA basketball tournament this year, so we could start a chant that that school sucked horribly. Would have been awesome.
Instead, the crowd at Marquette were treated to a show where me and Scooter had the same t-shirt on. It had never happened before but now that we’ve tried it, I’m sure we’ll be doing it again and again. It’s like we’re the generic uniformed workers slaving away on the drums while the guys at the front of the stage with the microphones near their faces are the celebrities in the band.
The shirt was the STAFF concert shirt from the previous night in Madison WI. We all wanted the shirts because:
a) They didn’t say Univ of Wisconsin on them (not that they suck horribly, unless they eliminated Marquette, just that it’s nice to have a shirt without text on it)
b) They didn’t say Guster on them (not that we suck horribly…)
c) Nobody has any clean clothes left at this point in the tour. And whereas normally in a situation like this someone would just go change their shirt before the show, neither Scooter nor I were about to budge.
Oh man. I just saw that Missouri was the team that eliminated Marquette. And for reasons that will soon become apparent, I can not disparage Columbia Missouri in any way, shape, or form. Stay tuned.
I saw my first swine flu face mask today at the airport and immediately thought that I needed to get a picture so I could share it with the swine-flu-dodging followers of the Guster road journal. I tried to “shoot from the hip” with the photo so she wouldn’t notice me, but the first picture came out dark and a little blurry because I don’t how to use my camera (I’m 35) (I use an Elph, or something)… so I went back for round two only to discover that the lady was holding a bag up over her face, well aware that she was being photographed, and not at all amused about it. What a surprise to learn that swine flu lady was too busy avoiding a pandemic to have a sense of humor about the situation.
Then again maybe she was a hipster from Brooklyn with a poorly conceived personal brand that mocks those who suffer from a deadly global pandemic. Oh wait, that’s me.
Just dropped my yogurt spoon on the carpet at LaGuardia airport, and actually thought twice before putting it in my mouth (but put it in my mouth anyway) (rather than getting up and getting another spoon at Au Bon Pain) (which is like 10 feet away) (if I get swine flu I blame you, Adam Gardner, and your omniscient environmental specter) (shit, what if I have swine flu).
