hi and thank you for being here for entry 3. if you haven’t already, please subscribe to the fan club. this week is story time. we went on tour last June of 2022 and on this week’s entry below, i am recounting the events along with some attached photos. at the end, we have a great diary entry from our old fill in drummer/best bud, the one and the only shoegaze legend… will KRAUS. without further a do, here we are.
The reasoning behind this entry leans on a couple of things. First and easiest - this tour occurred just a year ago and i’ve been feeling super nostalgic about it. The second reason being that while on the tour, we saved a special kitty from a gas station and she is still with us today (more on that below). We were happy to be invited by our friends (hey my roommate is the singer!) in the band LIILY to come out and play some shows with them last year. We ended up making it a super fun tour, filling in our own headline dates as well and linking with such heroes as Gleemer and Bedlocked in other cities. Our first show took place on June 12th at the Rebel Lounge in Phoenix. It was a show to get us to our destination of Austin, TX which is where the first show of our dates with LIILY would begin (and we would meet Bedlocked for the first time). The drive from LA to Phoenix was unbelievably hot. It was like 114 degrees pretty much the whole way there and even once we had gotten to Phoenix it was night time and still that hot — under the stars and everything…
People always fuck up my name when I order stuff. It’s like Brendan is a fake name.
After Phoenix, we took off for Texas which if you have done it before - it involves about a day and a half of some serious driving to actually get to Austin. I don’t need to really explain to you how beautiful that drive is cuz you should go do it yourself. I do recall making it to our first Whataburger which may have still been in New Mexico and having a truly good experience because Kraus our drummer grew up in Dallas and he knew exactly how to work that menu. It was also like a training center or something so it was very well put together. There was a table of like 12 new employees all suited up learning about the company.
The great and vast state of Texas. We played 3 shows with LIILY and Bedlocked. Taking place in Austin, Houston, and Dallas. They were all so great. I have such a love for the state of Texas… every since I started booking my own DIY tours back when I was a early 20 year old, it has always been such a great place to be. After some Texas fun, the tour took us a bit north to Memphis by way of Arkansas. When you go to Memphis, you have to go to the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid. It’s a huge ass Pyramid. It’s insane. I remember walking around listening to Magnet and Steel on repeat in my noise cancelling headphones (a tour must!). We played the sweatiest show I have ever played outside. The humidity was unimaginable. Indescribable. There are two studios in Memphis that hold some sort of legendary history for me. The first being Ardent which most people will know. It’s most popularly known in my brain for Big Star working there as well as REM and The Replacements so we had to stop by. One studio I WISH we could have seen but sadly is no longer there would be Easley Recording. Pavement recorded Wowee Zowee there and Silver Jews did their first record Starlite Walker there - 2 big bands for us so needless to say, we were listening to a bunch of their recordings while driving around the Memphis setting sun after getting some dinner at a Whole Foods.
After Memphis, we took off in the night towards our next destination - Indianapolis. We stayed over night in Kentucky — a state I still have never played a show in. We usually just end up watching TV every night after the show, usually coming down from the buzz of music and beer. If you’re lucky Seinfeld or Family Guy is on - otherwise you’re usually stuck with Friends or some not so good sitcom.
Indianapolis took us to Ohio and we said goodbye to LIILY. It was a great time to get to tour with them, especially as such good friends as they are. We headed back Westward with our first show in Chicago. On the way there, we had a day off so we decided to go see the Chicago White Sox play the Toronto Blue Jays. Of course we blew out a tire on the Indiana interstate and almost did not make it, but we did.
With our tow truck driver
Now the next part, I will be putting in Kraus’s writing. I think he did such a great job and think you will too.
“Woke up in the basement of a member from Dearly Somber’s parents house. They had set up a couple of places to sleep near the couch and the TV. Something about the arrangement of the beds around the TV felt particularly middle school sleepover-ish. It was pretty cold at night and Brendan had went into Yarden’s room at some point in the middle of the night to split the bed. Yarden later told me he was pissed about this. It worked out well for me though. I remember being half awake in the middle of the night taking Brendan’s sheets and blankets which was the only way I was warm enough to actually sleep. Nick from DS had the couch but the least bedding and basically was freezing all night and was consequently pretty fried that morning. Hung out with Seb and Nick for a bit when I woke up.
We left and got Starbucks (I will accept no elitism on this subject… it’s good) and then went to a tire shop. We had an ordeal beginning about 20 hours before where we blew one tire on the interstate outside of Chicago and then realized that they all were worn really thin and needed to be replaced. In retrospect, I’m not really sure how that wasn’t addressed before leaving.
The car took a while to get fixed. Everyone was exhausted as fuck. Once the tires were on we started heading to St. Louis. Brendan and Yarden were beefing about something related to paying for the tires and talking to Neil, the owner of the van who we were renting it from. Morale was low for most of the drive. Brendan had his headphones in and Yarden and I listened to the To Catch a Predator podcast “Predators I’ve Caught”, which seems awesome in theory but is just ok. We got to St. Louis and pretty much went straight to the venue. It was in a pretty industrial area. We pulled around to the back to park and stepped out to have a cigarette and stretch. Pretty soon after, we discovered a sizable amount of human shit by the back door. I can’t quite remember how this went down. I remember joking with one of the venue people about it. But I don’t think anyone did anything about it and I’m pretty sure we just loaded amps next to it — a large portion of that load in smelled insane, that’s all I remember for sure.
When we arrived, one of the guys from the other band was already there and sitting in his car. The rest of his band pulled up and we talked. They were a bit older and I remember that one of them worked for the MLB in some capacity. He had come from work and had his badge on his waist. The venue was this pretty classic rectangular dive-bar. We finished moving stuff in the venue and agreed to share a kit. We left and went to this burger place called Stacked that I will shout out by name because it was very good.
It was a build your own burger spot and we spent a lot of that dinner trying to come up with the most disgusting burger possible. Yarden joked about leaving his number for the waitress and I tried to convince him to actually do it but he wouldn’t. In retrospect, this was a mistake on Yarden’s part but to be fair he was going through a somewhat recent breakup. We went back to the venue and the first band had started playing. They sounded kind of like Eyehategod. Sort of like a doomy Southern Metal type thing. All the instrumental members kinda ripped, in particular the drummer. The singer's vibe was a little off the wall and I’m pretty sure he spent the whole evening barefoot (remember... we were 6 inches away from human poop hours before) and he was sporting the Shavo Odadjian style beard braid.
They wrapped up and I smoked a cigarette outside. There was this dude with a top hat, skinny black jeans and oversized white tee looking super fried hanging around by the window most of the night. He looked relatively healthy from far away. But when he asked Yarden and me if the show was free his mouth was black and 90% of his teeth were missing. He walked off with his hand in the rock on symbol above his head while telling us to keep rocking and playing guitar. The second band started and it was a dude playing drums, singing and playing a sampler pad all at the same time. Deantoni Parks style. Had some cool moments. Whole thing had a 2011 AnCo kind of energy.
Once he wrapped, I felt kind of bad to be performing. It seemed like everyone that was in attendance was there because they were personal friends with the openers and I didn’t want to punish them or something. However, the show turned out to be really good. I distinctly remember it being one of the more enjoyable experiences I’ve had playing live music. Relaxed and loose and with the ease that you get from being in the late stages of a long tour. It felt like we were back in the practice space or something just messing around. Most of the people seemed to be pretty attentive, and afterwards we spoke to a couple people who had come to see Milly.
We chopped it up with the openers after the show and with the anxiety of having to perform dissipated in my mind, everyone turned out to be really nice. One of the guys in the first band worked at a vintage guitar shop and invited us over there the next day, but it turned out to be too far out the way to hit. Said the owner had a guitar he just sold for over 100k (this seems unlikely in hindsight...). We packed up and went to a hotel. Fun ride over. Everything healing. Watched some George Lopez and went to bed.”
Everyone clap for Kraus. That was great. The big finale of this tour was finding our cat Domino that my girlfriend Niamh (pronounced like Neve) and I now own. It was nothing short of a miracle. Niamh had flown out to Colorado to meet up with us and some family for the last 2 shows which were with Gleemer in Colorado Springs and Denver. Those shows were a blast and we had begun heading home towards LA, up through the Rocky Mtns. About an hour in, I really had to use the bathroom so Yarden pulled off at a stop where there were 2 gas stations available. He chose to go to the less populated one that had an abandoned Subway sandwiches spot attached to it. I went into the bathroom reluctantly,, and as I came out I found Niamh outside with a small kitten in her arms. We did our best to search the immediate area to see if there were more cats and we checked with the gas station owner and he said he’d never seen her before. She seemed like a runt — she was so tiny and is still quite the tiny cat today so we knew somebody had definitely abandoned her. I bought her a turkey tray and a towel at a small shop as a temporary bed and we brought her along for the journey. No fussing or fighting she was immediately so happy to be with us - safe from a potential bear or wolf that would have surely destroyed her.
St. Louis