September 2011
1 post
Andrew "Scooter" Laubacher 2005-2011
He’s not dead. Just dead to us. After six and a half years as Guster’s drum tech, Scooter is moving on to dedicate more time to his many musical projects in San Francisco, where he lives. At 4350 Geary Blvd. Just a few blocks west of Burma Superstar Restaurant in Inner Richmond. When you get to 4350 Geary, hit the buzzer for the second floor, or if the first door is open, which it...
August 2011
5 posts
Nothing Will Stop Us From Rocking Tonight In...
This story begins with the usual whoa-is-me-the-hurricane-cancelled-my-flight drivel that you’ve already read about in everyone else’s road journals. But on Saturday when Delta announced they’d cancelled my Monday morning flight out of New York, there wasn’t much time to react. A hurricane was bearing down on us, and we had to be in Indiana by Monday night. We...
We would like to know what love is...
LEFT TO RIGHT: Ryan Miller of Guster, Andrew McMahon of Jack’s Mannequin, Adam Gardner of Guster, Will Forte stripping off the fourth and final of the four Guster t-shirts he was wearing while belting out Foreigner’s “I Wanna Know What Love Is” in Boston the other night, even though we made the mistake of transposing the song up a half-step to the key of E, where no...
Evolution of the Disco Ball Helmet
The other day in Philadelphia, this was the scene onstage during “This Is How It Feels To Have A Broken Heart”:
It’d be a fair question to ask how it came to this. I mean, yeah it’s our disco song, but Ryan looks less like the human mirror ball we intended and more like a transvestite robot that got the shit kicked out of it.
Let’s go on a brief photographic tour...
RT@
How did Ryan Miller miss this Re-Tweet? How did I forget to mention, in my Week Recap, that he walked on stage with some guy’s puppy in his arms in Newport?
Here’s the blog where I stole the picture from. Thank you, nice lady, for posting this important moment in Guster history on the twitter-net. The puppy was returned to its owner after being exploited and traumatized during...
Week in Review
Cape Cod Melody Tent 8/2: As promised / threatened … in my first “revolving” concert since I saw Air Supply on a rotating stage in Connecticut when I was ten, the band let me sing “All Out of Love” for the encore in Hyannis. Will Forte joined us on beautiful, sincere vocals. No lettuce was harmed during the performance of this song. Danbury CT 8/3: It was...
June 2011
1 post
More sweet than bitter
I know there are a lot of people out there with not nice things to say about the airport in Denver… that there are “murals” about the “extinction of races”, that the “runways” are shaped like “swastikas”, that there’s a “bunker” beneath the airport the size of China that will house our leaders when the “apocalypse”...
May 2011
1 post
Fenway
We got a sweet last minute hook-up and were able to check out the Red Sox game Saturday afternoon at Fenway before our Boston show. Kind of perfect because the House of Blues is now a giant club on Lansdowne Street behind the Green Monster, and not a cute little music shack in Harvard Square. You could hit the House of Blues with a towering home run, if you were Manny Ramirez, before your third...
April 2011
1 post
Whyyyyyy!
Our bus on this tour has a shower in it. This is not a good thing. No one is going to shower on the bus. It uses up most of your water tank, for one, and then you’re all naked and exposed in a claustrophobic closet around your crew, which now includes two ladies (“Megan” who sells our merchandise and “Fallon” who is searching for Brita Filterers). Every inch of...
February 2011
1 post
The penis of Tyler
I have been off of the BNL cruise ship for a week now, but my legs are still wobbly and certain sounds and images won’t go away: The casino dealer, offering up “insurance” before testing the ace of spades in the little blackjack-tester. “Sorry,” says the casino dealer. The breakfast buffet, at first a cornucopia of colorful fruits, tasty sausages, and...
January 2011
2 posts
You Can Just Bring Your Toddler to the Guster Show
The last two nights have been Assigned Seat shows, which are different animals than General Admission shows — one the one hand, seated theaters sound pretty good — often they’re designed with acoustics in mind — and have fancy ceilings and little muppet show balconies for vibe. On the other hand, at general admission shows the people who are most excited to be at the...
Melrose & Vine
So we’ve been out in LA for a few days now and this time we tried something different with our accommodations. Rather than three nights of expensive hotel rooms that have fake-log fireplaces with a switch-on gas flame, we tried a more economical VRBO (Vacation Rental By Owner) that have fake-log fireplaces with a switch-on gas flame. The place looked good from the Craig’s List...
December 2010
1 post
Jason is sad
VERY SAD JASON Stuck with a two hour delay at the Detroit Airport today, Jason, our tour manager, made a costly decision regarding his lunch. He checked out the “PB & J” shop in our terminal and balked at the $4.50 price tag. “Four fifty for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, no thanks” was his official statement. Jason is a careful and frugal person when it...
November 2010
1 post
Ganging up on the sons...
Adam and Lauren made a boy and he’s cute!
Welcome Julian Sullivan Gardner, who arrived Nov 4th. Congratulations!
October 2010
5 posts
And the winner is...
Seems fitting to announce this one after a great homecoming-show-of-sorts at the State Theater in Portland ME. Whereas most of Easy Wonderful is about the usual Guster lyrical topics (catastrophes, depression, drowning, loneliness, troubled relationships, armageddon, general insecurity, biblical floods), the one song we asked you to submit videos for, “Bad Bad World,” is actually...
Ithaca
Ithaca NY — Ryan was under the weather and didn’t have much of a voice at this show, which usually isn’t a huge problem because we can lean on our other singer to step up whenever this happens. Except that Adam had a cold and a froggy voice too.
So we went out there and just tried our best. We didn’t let the drummer sing, but we did resort to other tactics (Ryan...
D.C.
We’d played the DAR Constitution Hall once before, opening for Mayer in 2002. I remembered it was carpeted, seated, and generally felt like you were playing to Congress. I remembered it was located amongst the buildings you see on the back of your paper money.
So last night I was impressed that our show felt great. Much less sterile than the one with Mayer. It was like a rock show in a...
Wood Men
Omaha.
Because the venue we played was right next to Greenstreet Cycles, we got our broken bicycles fixed in exchange for guest list spots, and I got to ride my bike to McFoster’s Cafe, where I ate an eggplant sandwich and didn’t even mind the soy cheese, and along the way I noticed the Omaha skyline, which doesn’t leave much of an impression, except for the one WOODMEN building...
TOP 5 THINGS I SHOULD HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT IN THE...
It’s Saturday October 9th. I’m stealing internet from the lobby of the Moonrise Hotel in St Louis, and I actually have a window of time to compose a road journal for the first time in a while. The powers that be have had us on a busy promotional frenzy — lots of airports, lots of stripped-down-acoustic-performances-of-do-you-love-me, and one Whole Foods Wine Tasting. There are...
September 2010
1 post
All Things Must Pass
Some parting words from Joe Pisapia…
In the age of Twitters and Facebooks I find myself conflicted, constrained and in a little pain (while typing on my I phone,) as I try to offer a condensed version of what is to be my final guest Road Journal. Don’t worry, you’ll still see me in D.F Yonkman videos in the studio with the guys, but I will miss you in person, on the road. ...
June 2010
2 posts
First class!
This is awesome I’m in first class. I’ve never sat in first class before. In fact, I usually cropdust the first class on my way to my coach seat. Now I’m here, on the other side of the curtain. I’m sitting next to a woman in a gray business suit while wearing my holy (as in, has holes in it, not as in sacred) (well, kind of sacred) lime green t-shirt. I’m going...
Welcome, Dash...
Dashiell Townes Miller. Born June 11th, 2010. 7 pounds 11 ounces.
May 2010
1 post
Meanwhile we have been playing our instruments...
Yikes. Guster shows, hopelessly undocumented Guster shows, dissolving into history with nary a mention on the Official Road Blog of the band. Is this how bands react when they finish an album that took them two years to complete?
Yes. Yes it is.
Let’s test the memory. We started off with a show in Massachusetts and it was a good one. We played surprisingly well. I sang a Phil Collins...
November 2009
1 post
Giant Frozen Castle!
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...
October 2009
2 posts
9:30
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...
Home Run Derby
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...
July 2009
3 posts
Hot summer nights!
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...
Guster = McDonald's = America
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...
Heavy Metal Parking Lot
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.
June 2009
1 post
Hot-lanta
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...
May 2009
2 posts
Hot Blooded in Reading PA
Albright College. Last night of the tour. Last song of the tour.
For bonus points, watch again and see if you can find:
a) The crew from Reverb joining us halfway through the song
b) Ryan’s dad buzzing around the stage like a butterfly
c) Two random kids up past their bedtime
d) Brian’s neck vein snapping in two
Marquette
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...
April 2009
6 posts
En route to Madison
Swine Flu Lady 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...
Syracuse
Syracuse
After the show at Syracuse last night I put on an orange t-shirt and talked with a bunch of kids after the show by the bus. The conversation went something like this…. Blah blah blah good show blah blah blah yeah ben folds is amazing blah blah nice campus you have here blah blah winter lasts 8 months blah blah blah party school blah blah can’t wait to get out of here blah blah blah...
THE WEEK IN REVIEW
Friday the 17th at UPenn — Nothing special really about this show, just your ordinary gig opening for Akon in a stadium full of drunken Ivy League kids. We spent all day hunting down a way to put an auto-tune effect on Ryan’s voice so that he could sound like T-Pain during the part of Airport Song where we distort his microphone into the Vincent Price from Thriller voice. While Akon...
Ryan is a twitterer
And I wouldn’t normally promote the guy who’s competing with me for your online attention span (I’m a tumblrer, myself), but this particular tweet involves a photo of me posing like a Timberland sailor stud. With two free pairs of baby shoes at his feet.
Uh oh. Photo collage. It can only mean one...
You guessed it. Our guitar tech, Anderson Heath Bracht the 3rd, also known as Li’l Andy and The Silent Killer, is bidding the Gusbus a fond adieu and moving on to a more domestic life in Austin TX. He got a cake on stage the other night at Northeastern that had “You’re Dead To Us” written on it in delicious squeezable chocolate. Then he was gone.
Andy, I’ll...
We might as well have played "Enter Sandman" at...
PLAYING MUSIC ON A BOAT Our first real show in a year and a half happened on a cruise ship last week, somewhere off the coast of Baja, California, and went swimmingly. Everything felt fresh, even “Demons,” which was celebrating its 3,000th performance that night. The songs came back to us, like riding a bike, and no one puked. Overall our Mayercraft Carrier experience was a huge...