April 2010
28 posts
West Side Toury (Scottsdale, AZ - 04/28/10)
Living easy. We’ve been staying in Scottsdale, AZ for the past two days at Tom’s Dad’s house. It’s an incredible home in a gated community equip with a pool, beautiful grand piano, pool table and the like. It has been a perfect place to recharge our batteries after eleven days of sporadic showers, concrete floors and other such ‘awfuls’.
We woke up, all in separate beds mind you, to the sun...
West Side Toury (Tucson, AZ - 04/27/10)
I feel like a chapter of my life has closed. It’s been about 13 years since last seeing a very influential person in my life. This guy schooled me on “popular” music, taught me some songs on guitar, let me jam with him in front of people. All this, then one day he was gone. I heard stories of where he went and how he got there but they were all second hand. I wanted to know what happened to...
West Side Toury (El Paso, TX - 04/26/10)
Finally, a 45-minute drive to the next venue. I know I mention “the drives” pretty often but it’s such a huge part of what we do. We are constantly in motion, on our way to the next venue, the next town. On average we spend about 5 hours each day in the van we know as Patrick. That’s a lot.
A huge water tower flaunting the slogan, “Jesus Lives”, welcomed us to El Paso. It was a very cool...
West Side Toury (Las Cruces, NM - 04/25/10)
Hello and welcome to the desert. It’s freaking hot down here but it’s a dry wonderful amazing type of hot. We left Lubbock, TX around 11am after a party that allowed for no sleep and drove 8 hours to get to Las Cruces, NM. Correction, Tom drove 8 hours. He seemed to really enjoy it as the rest of us slept on and off, read books, etc.
We made two stops on our way. One of them was Roswell,...
West Side Toury (Lubbock, TX - 04/24/10)
Slept like a medium sized baby last night thanks to Emily and Shea opening up their medium sized dorm room to us. Starving, as usual, Emily and Shea underwent much adversity to smuggle us into the college cafeteria. Andrew got in by using the student ID one of Emily’s male friends. The rest of us aligned ourselves with an elevator scheme that put us in the backside of the cafeteria. Once...
West Side Toury (Ft. Worth - 04/23/10)
We headed to Ft. Worth from Austin after an amazing pizza breakfast/lunch downtown. This was all after saying goodbye to Brittany and Ross. Mr. Ross was looking more and more homeless at the days went on. When we left him he was wearing an over sized polo shirt and high-water corduroys, carting around a roller bag and some food wrapped in Kroger bags. I was honestly worried if he would ever...
West Side Toury (Austin, TX - 04/22/10)
The drives the drives the drives. San Antonio to Austin wasn’t terribly exciting or terribly boring either. It was just something that had to be done… something that provided no entertainment, scenery or excitement. Once in Austin, we headed to Waterloo. Waterloo is a great record store in the heart of Austin. Our friends, Cruiser Weight, played their 2nd to last show there and it was great....
West Side Toury (San Antonio - 04/20/10 -...
Tom here, recalling events that took place over the last two days in San Antonio, TX. We arrived Tuesday evening at Jigger’s (worst venue name ever, nice folks though) and enjoyed our glorious reunion with friends and tour-mates The Winter Sounds. TWS, who had just returned from playing in Mexico, told their stories of the road thus far, and after a few minutes of conversation it was as if we had...
West Side Toury (Day off - 04/19/10)
With four people in a van, an eight-hour drive is bearable. With five, it’s worse than a root canal. We’re jammed in this van. It was a super boring drive that we’ve made many times now. We had the day off after our first show in Memphis (bummer). Since we are to meet in San Antonio, TX with our tour mates, The Winter Sounds, on Tuesday we need to break up the drive. To do so, we made...
(catching up on tour videos) Johnson City, TN -...
..better late than never :)
Yesterday’s Memphis video coming soon.
(catching up on tour videos) DC - 3/6
(catching up on tour videos) NYC - 3/5
West Side Toury (Memphis, TN - 04/18/10)
We’ve never been gone this long. A month and a half of making our way to the West Coast and back with our very dear friends the Winter Sounds will be fun no doubt, but it is still a lot to take in and a lot to leave behind. We made our way to Memphis after frantically packing every last nook and cranny of the van. We’re even heavy an extra passenger. Andrew and Tom’s next door neighbor, Ross,...