Tuesday, February 16, 2010

On the Road with 1994 & Welcome to this Blog


A great man once said "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times". He was of course referring to when Algernon Cadwallader leaves home for any amount of time to go on tour.

We recently went on a 4 day graduated weekend with our Pennsylvania buddies, 1994 from Lancaster. Boy, was it a blast and boy, did we run into some trouble. The shows we made it to, which were Cleveland, Chicago, and Kalamazoo were basement stuffed sweaty good times. Even during this modern ice age and in the heart of the midwest. The Strangelight in Chicago, where we played with Grown Ups and Castavet, somehow welcomed hundreds of people into it's bowels. This is definitely one of the most impressive and well organized house venues I've had the pleasure of visiting in my years of touring. Unfortunately I woke up the next morning and found myself wondering why Milwaukee Ave looked different then it had the night before. It was because our 4 passenger mini-van with turtle-top had been towed off of it. Our host overheard our lament and graciously leapt to action to get our buggy back. Thanks Matt. Pizza!

Onward to Kalamazoo where Chris from '94 said he knew the moment we walked through the door at the Deer Blood House that we would not be falling asleep sober that night. He was right. I think. It seemed that way in the morning anyhow. Slowly we maneuvered our bodies out of the crevices of couches and into a nearby diner to replenish ourselves on glorified garbage plates. Feeling 80% we started driving towards Pittsburgh. 10 minutes into the drive it was clear the Grand Voyager was still hungover. It shat and pissed liquids, smoked, and sputtered to a hault in a Shell station parking lot. On Super Bowl Sunday. Luckily we had made friends with the boys from The Reptilian who generously put us up and made us feel very comfortable in their house. Yes, we drank our worries away but no amount of 90 Minutes or Breakfast Stouts was going to resurrect our once golden chariot. With the transmission shot amongst other things we cut our losses, scrapped the motherfucker, and rented a van for our 12 hour drive home. We arrived to the 27 inches of white snow we heard Philadelphia had landed while we were away.

I really can't stress enough how much fun we had and how successful we all felt the weekend had still been. You can't let a little rain get you down. Only a couple of weeks prior in upstate New York we'd had our van cavity searched by 5 police officers and 1 dog for 2 hours (nothing found) and hydroplaned into a concrete highway median. So I guess we are used to these kinds of bumps in the road. Thanks to everyone who helps make them bearable! We can't wait to get our new car and continue speeding into disaster.

So, we are starting this blog to document our adventures and keep you up to date on what the band is doing. Our website expired and was bought by crazy porn distributors and myspace is an eye sore. You can consider this the our official internet identity. I hope that it will be informative and enjoyable. Thanks for reading!

8 comments:

  1. glad to see you guys are drinkers of fine spirits, that for some reason makes me happy.

    come to new england and i'll give ya some fine craft ales.

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  2. R.I.P. Grand Voyager. sucks to loose the ones you love especially when it's your tour van. shame shame.

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