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Sunday, August 28 Whilst some of the other guys slept in the van and on the sidewalks, I spent the nights across the river at my cousin's Hoboken apartment and got overly spoilt with a bed, clean bathroom and the absence of cats... the very things we desire most on any given night. And like a loving big sister, she stuffed my face over the course of two days with more food than I'd eaten on the whole tour so far. The Chinese, Thai and Italian were a much welcomed change from the usual fare of Subways and Taco Bells. The problem with playing in a major city like NYC is that you're bound to be clashing schedules with plenty of other good bands, so attracting a good sized crowd is always a dilemma. On the night of our Brooklyn show, I think we spotted at least four other shows happening in other parts of town that we wanted to check out. Even our good friends Early Day Miners were playing over in Manhattan. But this severe abundance of good bands on any given night can also work in one's favour. It turned out that Jimmy Gnecco (of Ours) happened to be playing a sold out show on our night off. Without tickets to our names, Brooks decided that it was worth the trek from Time Square over to Hoboken to try talking our way into the show. He was confident he had enough names to drop at the door to ensure us entry into the show; and so we did get in. But then again, my friend Annabel managed to do the very same thing by merely giving a smile to one of the bartenders. Ha. Jimmy Gnecco performed with only an acoustic guitar but between that and his voice alone, he successfully created a rich and textured wall of sonic bliss. He performed a number of well known Ours hits, and nailed every single note spot on. The falsettos sounded like they belonged to the soprano of a church choir and his screams were some of the most spine-shivering sounds I'd ever heard from someone's mouth. I wish I can somehow get a recording of that night. All in all it was a splendid way to spend our only night off of the tour, after which my cousin picked me up and proceeded to shove more food down my throat.
Friday, August 26 We're somewhere in Connecticut at the moment, the majority of the band still fast asleep on the hardwood floor of a house literally right around the corner from the (Atlantic?) ocean. I should probably check it out in a bit to see if there's anything worth photographing, although I've been somewhat irresponsible with my film lately, a bit too trigger happy, so now I need to ration myself to about a roll every three days. Let's hope I can control myself. We've yet to hit photogenic cities like New York and DC, and I've been told that Savannah, GA is absolutely gorgeous. Since my last update, we've gone through some pretty crazy adventures. Somewhere near the top of that list would have to be the story of last night, when for the first time in the history of Unwed Sailor, we almost got into a fight with a local jock rock band. It all started with one of the guys from the other band handing out his three(?!) flyers to us, for his band's show tomorrow night. He had been to a baseball game and had already been drinking too much. He started talking to us when he found out we were from out of town and asked about our style of music, instruments, and those other usual boring tour questions. Jaret, our unofficial tour photographer, decided to be funny by telling the guy that he was the drummer from the Killers. For no logical reason whatsoever, this seemed to really irritate him and he proceeded to spend the next couple of hours spreading this around to all his beer buddies, that we were being all pretentious and arrogant, that we had the audacity to brag about being members of Killers. Anyway, they decided to vent their rage by trying to remove our license plate and writing stupid comments on our windows while we were playing our set. Johnathon refused to tolerate this one bit and immediately confronted them about it. Hiding behind the giant fur coat of a Sir-Mix-a-Lot, they did not even have the nerves to look into Johnathon's eyes and instead depended on their king kong friend to intimidate us with loud and threatening words. After failing to round up much support, they quickly retreated round the corner, but continued to linger about in the area. We were more than ready to get the hell out of there. It had been an extremely beautiful day walking around New Haven and checking out the campus of Yale University, until those jock clowns ruined everything in the final hour. In other news, we had one of our rear tires blow out on our way to Philly, which left us stranded by the side of the tollway for a good couple of hours. It's a good thing we pulled over right when we began to hear the repetitive dull thud coming from the back, for half the tire had already been torn to shreds. And in a similar light to that of our severe car wreck in Europe, I truly believe we were graced by God's mercy this time round. Right where our van had come to a halt, there was lying next to the tire, one of those wrenches that you use to remove car tires with, something that we didn't have on us. However, this wrench did not fit the size of the nuts on the wheel. Johnathon and a few others decided to go look find some help, the next exit being only a half a mile or so away. An hour later they returned with a mechanic who kindly walked that half mile with them back to the van because he wasn't allowed to park his car along the tollway. It turned out that, despite being able to take off the wheels with relative ease, he did not have the right tool to unscrew our spare. This was where that wrench that we had found lying by the side of the van came in. It was a perfect fit. It had to have been more than just a mere coincidence. On this tour we have three out of seven people who are allergic to cats, one of whom is severely allergic. And as luck would have it, we have been staying consistently at the homes of cat lovers. Besides the occasional runny nose and itchy eyes, I've managed to keep my allergies to a minimum by avoiding contact with the cats. But the presence of cat hair on a person's clothes is enough to wreak havoc on Brooks' breathing. As a result he's been sleeping almost everynight in the van, and even so, we still have to be careful that we don't board the van with any furball clinging onto us. As far as food is concerned, we've been eating pretty good, staying away from McDonald's and the likes, trying our best to stick to groceries stores and Subway. We did however, slip big time the night after our Louisville show. With there being a White Castle a block up from where we played, we gave in to our junk food desires and ordered the abominable Crave Case. 30 White Castle singles for $14.99, the burgers left a horrible smell in the van and an equally horrible mess in few of the guilty party. I'm itching for some good rice. It's been two weeks. Thanks to a last minute cancellation in Richmond, VA, we now have two days in NYC so hopefully I'll be able to get some of that in Chinatown or Flushing. Now I'm off to enjoy the sea breeze.
Wednesday, August 17 The moment is here. We leave today for Memphis to play our first show of the tour. Thankfully there's only a two and a half hour drive standing between us and the club. It's been a good week hanging out and practising with the band but I'm more than ready to get out of the suburbs and enjoy a little life on the road and in big cities. Tonight we play with our new friend Paul Sammons, the kind soul who has given us a basement to sleep and rehearse in. He also happens to have an amazing voice and writes some pretty heartwarming tunes so you might want to give him a visit over at his myspace page. He could do with more friends anyway so go ahead and add him or something, although I don't know how I feel about his comments that I kinda remind him of James Iha.
Saturday, August 13 Three days of rehearsals have gone by and things are finally coming together. The set will be a good mix of the old and new. Originally we wanted to be slightly more ambitious and attempt five or so unreleased songs, thereby avoiding the need to play songs from the Faithful Anchor, but the limited time we have to work with prior to the first show next wednesday has forced us to pause and reconsider our set list; a good thing actually as everything now sounds a lot more in place and the transitions a whole lot smoother. Seeing Johnathon and Brooks again for the first time in a couple of years was like a surreal trip back to the past. In some ways it felt like I had never left the band and we were able to just really pick up from when we had last seen each other on the tour two years ago. Matt Putman and his partner in crime Matt Depper happened to be in town because of some time off from Lovedrug so I managed to catch up briefly with them too. Seeing them was no different. It felt good to be reunited with old friends and it was kinda neat having the classic Unwed Sailor 3-piece line up under one roof. Life in Arkansas has been interesting to say the least. I don't think you can experience a change much more drastic than coming all the way from Hong Kong to here. We've been rehearsing/staying in the basement of a talented individual by the name of Paul Sammons, in a redneck town called Bryant, which is as no man's land as you can get. A car is the only means of getting around. Public transport is non-existent and the shops/restaurants are too far away to even consider walking, especially in this heat. So it's been like being stuck on an island full of musical instruments. It's also probably not a particularly good thing that we've been subjecting our bodies to a daily diet of fast food, which is just about all you can get here if you want to eat out. I must say though that the taste of a 7-layer burrito after not having had one in so long was pretty darn good. Taco Bell, Sonic, Wendy's... visiting all these obesity institutions and the tour hasn't even started. I feel like a re-enactment of Supersize Me. I was told that the majority of American cities/towns were designed this way so to benefit the big car manufacturers of the time. Life without a car is virtually impossible. A friend commented the other night that the future ghettos of America will be the suburbs, when they inevitably run out of fossil fuel. But food isn't the only problem of not having a car. I made the mistake of leaving my bag of clothes, shampoo, gear, etc back in Little Rock at the place I had spent my first night, thinking it'll be dead easy to swing by there at any time to pick them up. That was three days ago. In short I still haven't showered or changed since touching down in Arkansas. My head is all greased up and starting to itch but at least I still smell good. Ha.
Thursday, August 11 Shanghai wouldn't have been so bad had I not forgotten to bring along my China re-entry permit. After all, I was only there to get on a flight to the US, why would visa matters be of concern? And luck would have it that I was there with the most despised of passports - British. Thankfully they did little more than take me into a room and put a stamp on my passport. Why the guy at the immigration counter couldn't do that himself though, I will never learn. It was the least he could have done for me, having been responsible for the slowest of all the foreigner lines and therefore making me the last passenger on the whole darn flight to get through immigration. Just when I thought that there was little else to worry about, headache #2 came in the form of the China Eastern check-in staff cheerfully informing me that the status of my Shanghai - LA flight had been switched to stand-by as it had been too overbooked. Why didn't anyone in HK say anything before I had boarded the flight over?! Going through all the troubles of getting some renmenbi in order to buy a calling card to call my travel agent back in HK proved to be little more than an exercise in pointlessly spending fifty hong kong dollars. Thankfully they managed to squeeze me into economy (why they couldn't upgrade me into business instead of making me fly stand-by is something that I too, will never know), next to someone who smelled awfully similar to the scent of clothes after a night of Korean barbecues. This was all that I could smell during those twelve hours across the Pacific ocean. And in fashion with all that one can dread about in-flight neighbours, he had the annoying habit of shoving near-empty cans of Qingtao into the seat pocket in front of him, which resulted in spilt beer narrowly missing my bag. As with all previous trips to the US, my biggest fear was of course getting turned around at US immigration. Ironically enough, this ended up being the smoothest part of the whole process. A couple of questions, fingerprints and an eye scan (via a cheapo webcam-looking device - I'm thinking 1.2 megapixels) was all that it took. The wait at immigration though lasted a good one hour. Add this to my Shanghai depature being an hour late and you can see why I was all worried about missing my 3:25 pm connection to Atlanta. And either it's my hearing problem or really broken English, but I swear I heard the flight attendant announce that it was 5:15 pm when we landed at Los Angeles International Airport. Fortunately neither were true and I had a comfortable one hour to walk around the departure terminal before boarding. We got into Atlanta at 11:25 pm. The flight to Little Rock was scheduled to leave at 11:42 pm. A couple of other passengers and myself naturally ran for the departing gate like it was the 200 m dash. Got there at 11:35. We ended up boarding the plane at 12:55 am. A one hour and twenty minutes wait. Without fail, every flight on this trip had been met with delays and the one for Little Rock had been the worst. If I had yet another flight to connect on, I would've been spending a night at the airport for sure. Johnathon and Brooks ended their tour with Chase Pagan tonight and will be driving until sunrise to get here. So I better call it a night in case they try to wake me up at 6 am. There's a new Unwed Sailor song on the myspace page. Head over there to catch a glimpse of Johnathon's vocal efforts on the White Ox. I think Dan Burton's contributions are quite apparent. It's like a fragile Roadside Monument covering a Pullman song. I can't wait to try this stuff live.
Wednesday, August 10 The reason for this arduous trip... Unwed Sailor. It all happened rather out of the blue and a bit too quickly but I believe all things happen for a reason, and I'm thankful for Johnathon's invitation to join them on this tour. I guess we'll see where things lead to after this. For me, I'm just looking forward to the sheer joy of making/playing music with whoever is in Unwed Sailor again, as well as the rare chance of catching up with plenty of old faces across the US. We'll be hitting 25 or so different cities in total, mostly in the south and east coast. You can check the Unwed Sailor myspace page for the details. After this tour comes to a close I'll also be making my way to Vancouver to attend my cousin's wedding as well as taking full advantage of the rare opportunity of having 90% of my dad's side in one place at the same time. So yeah I'll be away from Hong Kong for a good 6 or 7 weeks. Means I'll miss most of the summer, which is a bit of a shame, but since most of my students are on vacation anyway, I've just been sitting on my butt doing pretty much next to nothing. Nothing productive anyway. I'll post again when I make it through the US thugs-for-hire immigration officials. I hope that stuff about getting all ten fingers printed is just a sick joke. |