Archive for the 'photos' Category

Howdy folks,

It’s been awhile. Lots of things have happened since we last spoke. Let’s not getting bogged down in he-said-she-said and let’s get right to the tale of the tape.

This is Zach on the balcony of the Driskill Hotel in Austin, TX, at a free happy hour we went to at SXSW last March. He looks rather pensive here, as though he’s just come to the end of a long journey and is pondering what it all might mean. But instead he’s probably just catching his breath from the maniacal pace of our drinking that day, as we tried to cram an entire evening’s worth of drinks into two decidedly happy hours. On this tour, we were all dead broke and relying on our wits for survival – sleeping in a friend’s backyard, making mental maps of where the free buffets with the loosest security were, trying to hang out with the people most likely to buy us dinner, and pouring free Shiner Bocks down our gullets like our intestines were on fire.

This is a lamp we saw for sale at The World’s Most Awesome Flea Market – it’s God-given name – just outside of Louisville, KY. We almost bought it for the merch table, but we realized it’s porcelain days would be numbered in the back of our van. Plus, we were all pretty positive that it was housing at least one Satanic spirit (and Zalamia doesn’t need back-up). But we made out in the end because a kind, shirtless, semi-toothed man took our brief pause here as his opportunity to tell us about the time he beat a Teddy Ruxpin doll to death with a baseball bat after it verbally threatened him. My favorite part was him capping the story by aping himself standing over the obliterated doll, bellowing “Who’s your daddy NOW m*therf*cker!” I’m sure around the same time this happened, KrazyGlue stock went through the roof.
Rod had another priceless exchange with a dealer:

[Rod admiring a bicycle the man has for sale]
Dealer: How much you wanna pay for that?
Rod: Ahhh, only thing I can offer you right now is a handshake, man.
Dealer: How ’bout $75?
Rod: I wish I could. Thanks anyway though. [Starts to walk away]
Dealer: Hey! [Under his breath] Trade you for a gun?

The South is spooky.

This is a side project some friends and I have called Warning Track Power (featuring most of The Egg Babies Orchestra). Back in February, we wrote a song for this past Baltimore Orioles season called “How ‘Bout Dem O’s.” The team picked it up and starting playing it at games, and we enjoyed five seconds of local celebrity in the run-up to Opening Day. We got to play on “Coffee With” with Don Scott and Marty Bass (a personal dream of mine since third grade) and this is us on the field at 7am on Opening Day, doing brief musical spots for the Fox 45 morning show. The O’s subsequent 92 losses rendered most of our optimism comically premature, but hey – there’s always next year.

In October and November of last year, we went on tour with Murder by Death and William Elliott Whitmore for a month, and my heart and health have never been the same since. One day when we’re all rich and famous, we’ll play touch football on the front lawn in Hyannisport and drink Keystone Light until someone drives a car into the lake. In the meantime, all we have are precious, precious memories. Like these:

I wish I had a better shot of this, but this is an old AirStream trailer out back of the Bottletree in Birmingham that we spent the night in after playing there last October. It has several eerie spirit orbs! Are these the souls of lost rockers of years past?? Hendrix? Cobain? RAY VAUGHN? Mayhaps. The spirits have been known to be attracted to Zalamia’s glowing angel shoes.

This is what came down the street about 30 seconds after we parked the van in New Orleans. I’m pretty sure this was The Official Welcome Wagon.

When we were in New Orleans, we somehow stumbled into a time warp and ended up on the set of Miami Vice, where these guys had just shot a rival dealer and were on their way to the speedboat with the coke they’d just stolen. I’m pretty sure Crocket and Tubbs put an end to their scheme, but I got distracted by some really nice booby beads so I didn’t see what happened.

This is a sign we saw in Ft. Worth, TX advertising…something. Beats me. I took French instead of Spanish because it seemed to me at the time that…OH MY GOD! IS THERE A HUMAN BEING BEHIND THAT THING? I stared at this for like 10 seconds trying to translate it when suddenly the hands moved and I screamed like a woman. Apparently this is someone’s job in the 135 degree Texas heat – human wooden stake. Texas is weird – don’t let anybody tell you different.

Ever wonder how much Kiss you can buy for $150 at Target? This is us on Halloween night in Austin, TX, on the Murder by Death tour. We’re wearing about six rolls of aluminum foil between the four of us – if anyone had turned on a microwave, we all would have pissed ourselves. Billy is the saddest Spaceman ever.

This is Adam from Murder by Death singing Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” in Louisville, KY. Zach saw his Meatloaf (err) and raised him “Unchained Melody,” which forced Adam into going all-in with a version of “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince that he sung so hard I thought he was going to have an aneurysm. He literally dragged himself across the stage on his stomach, begging and pleading with the crowd. I think he actually cried. I was moved. Meanwhile, Zalamia was in the middle of a hot sake fit in the bathroom, and let’s just say the toilet seat was definitely getting the worst of it.

This is William Elliott Whitmore, Dagan (from Murder by Death) and Rod yukking it up backstage in Northampton, MA. We were all in the midst of admiring the handiwork of the bands who’ve left their artwork and anatomy lessons on the walls for the rest of us to enjoy. Two of my favorites:

“Anus Punch” This has a real stick-it-to-the-man vibe about it. I picture it symbolizing some secret resistance group, who just really want you to “Punch ‘em in the ass!” Maybe I’m wrong. Whatever it means, this has been the wallpaper on my phone for nine months. It never fails to get me pumped up every time I see it.

“Wizard Bong ‘07.” That’s a four-chambered bong with a set of boobs in the hitter. Sweet.

Here’s Murder by Death’s tour manager/merch guy/driver/wet nurse, Mr. Dixie Earthmover, wearing one of his many hats in Buffalo, NY. (Hats may be the only things Murder by Death does not have for sale on that table.) Dixie used a gentle hand in keeping us in line for the month, kindly turning a blind eye to our habit of tacking on five extra minutes of piano-humping to our already-generous set (which was cutting in to Will Whitmore’s banjo-fingering). He’s also an oddly sensual dancer. (Dixie fronts his own band, Sam Lowry and the Circumstance.)

Lastly, the immortal Wizard Staff. Murder by Death taught us this game on the last off-night of tour after talking it up for an entire month, and we were still completely unprepared for how hard we would fall in love with it. The basics are such: You buy a bunch of cans of beer and once you finish one off, you duct a new one to the top of the old can, thereby assembling a Wizard Staff of beercans over the course of the night. Like so:

The real essence of the game is built around House Rules. These are the ones we played with:

Speaking of #7 – I don’t shotgun beers. I don’t bong ‘em or slam ‘em, and Senior Week ended for me a long time ago. Even when I drink to excess, it’s at a stately pace – a canter, maybe. Billy has a similar mindset, so when he finished #6, I just had to see what was going to go down:

Like an old pro. He made it look so easy, that when it was my turn a few minutes later, I was ready to slam that beer, spit it back up in the sky, and slam my own backwash while I was crushed my beer can with a might crunch. That feeling lasted about three seconds:

Man. That sucks.

Anyway. As the night went on, we were visited by the motel manager and the Albany County police, on account of the folks downstairs who saw fit to complain that we were “entertaining minors” in our room. The manager opened the door on ten people wielding staffs of beer cans taller than him, and was so clearly terrified that he slowly backed away from the door as he was talking, like he’d just delivered pizza to the Manson Family. Twenty minutes later, the cops showed up, and once they verified that we were all of age, they professed their awe and amazement at this Great Game. One of the younger cops couldn’t stop laughing while he was checking ID’s, and the eldest said that in all his years on the force, he’d never seen anyone playing this before. They left us to our fun. Point = us. We rule.

Anyway, we were all feeling victorious by the end of the night, but the true winner was Dagan, who conquered all and rose to a Level 18 Wizard. (He still had two beers to go when this was taken) Truly mystical.

In May, we flew out to L.A. to do some recording. We’ve never toured farther West than Texas, and for some of us, it was our first time on the West Coast. For me, it was not only that, it was my first time in an airplane. Weird. Because we spend so much time riding in the van with our lives in the hands of someone else – someone who probably hasn’t slept right in three weeks – I was able to relax enough to enjoy the whole thing.

From the start, I knew L.A. was going to be a different than the East. This was posted outside all of the elevators in the condo complex we stayed in. This is L.A. in a nutshell – “Just in case you don’t know about what an alarm sounds or looks like, we’re gonna go ahead and explain it to you like you’re brain dead. Then we can all dig on this beet-radicchio smoothie I just paid $13 for.”

But I quickly fell for L.A.’s charms, in no small part because of palm trees.

At least L.A. seems to appreciate what it has – most of the ones in Hollywood were better groomed than the people passing underneath them.

This is Rod, Billy and I at the mixing board of Ocean Way studios, where we did some tracking during our stay. This was easily the nicest studio any of us had been in, with a full complement of runners and engineers, and wall of platinum records that seemed to stretch around the block. (They also had incense burning in the bathroom, probably for “vibe.”) Below is an eerily silent mini-tour of Studio B, ending on the huge photo collage of all the greats who’ve recorded there: Brian Wilson, Frank Sinatra, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones…Wilson Phillips. All the “heavies.”

Here’s some drum mic’ing hi jinx on Day One:

This is the studio apartment we rented in L.A. I like to think we decorated it “Communist Chic.” We didn’t end up miss many creature comforts while we were out there, because our apartment was in a Melrose Place-type complex with a pool and a hot tub, and we only managed to get thrown out of those once a piece.

This is a “Al Pacino” – a street performer that we ran into a couple of times just outside the Hollywood and Highland metro stop in L.A.. From what I could gather, he just hung out there all day long, randomly butting into other performers’ acts, and then doing his level best to blow them off the sidwalk. I never got close enough to figure out whether he was perpetually hammered or semi-retarded, but I felt like he worked for my laugh so hard that it was probably O.K. to give it to him.

The other performers were less appreciative of his talents, and I saw him almost get in a fist-fight with a one-man-band who did not appreciate his impromptu backing vocals. But I instantly loved him. Every time I came out of the station and he wasn’t moonwalking with the Michael Jackson impersonator, or locked in a grapple with a Transformer, or trying to juggle loose change directly behind the knife jugglers, or pelvic thrusting the audio-activated t-shirt girl into the Sweet Hereafter, I was disappointed the whole damn day. You can hear my mind being blown at the :24 mark.

This is the first time I saw the Pacific Ocean. This is from Zuma Beach, which pumped Neil Young up enough that he named a record after it. We did a photoshoot here with Matt Wignall, with a bunch of surfboards, cowboy boots and Coors Original cans everywhere. We ended up not being able to stay here long enough to watch the sun actually set, instead darting back up the canyon to hit a seafood stand, where I had my 17th shrimp burrito of the trip. I was cosmically repaid the next night when we ran into Matthew McConaughey at an after-party at the El Rey, and as he was leaving, Billy and I watched him do two enormous bong hits in the front seat of his van with the doors wide open and the dome light on. Maybe I wasn’t cosmically repaid in full but I’ll take it.

And that was kind of the year that was. 2010 has loads to live up to, but I’ve got a feeling it’s up to the task. Keep your eyes peeled.

Some quick ones:

Zalamia giving it back to the Finger Lakes.

Zach, crushed by the weight of it all, One-Eyed Jack’s, New Orleans

Zach at the Gateway to the West, St. Louis.

“Tell me you don’t want to go to heaven.” – Rod

This is a father-and-son set of mariachi outfits we saw at a thrift store on Melrose. I’ve never wanted a child, a chimp, or a midget girlfriend more in my life.

The game room at the Broxton Highway Citgo, somewhere in Georgia.

Thank you, West Virginia.

Our Moment of Zen. (Kudos to our friends Ryan and Cherie for getting us into Disneyland for free.)

But despite all our adventures over the year, this is the most amazing thing that happened to us. This is Lilian Rose Westphal, Zach and Greta’s daughter, born on August 25th of this year. Thankfully, for Greta’s sake, she did not come out flailing with spurs and a moustache (though she does have an amazing head of hair). I just can’t wait for their first father-daughter headbang.

Alright. That’s enough out of me. Keep it real.

Steve

Hey all,

We’re back in the Motherland – Bodymore, Murdaland – resting, relaxing and making some headway on a new record. (Which, if all goes according to plan, we hope to have out by the end of this year.) In the meantime, we’re hitting the road again in the Spring and we’ll be bringing loads of new stuff with us – songs, t-shirts, album art, possibly LPs…its a brave new world!
In honor of fresh starts, I wanted to clean out the pipes a bit with some pictures left over from our summer tours.
Dig it:

This is how our days on tour usually start. Well, actually, this is more like noon-ish – after we’ve eaten, after we’ve B.S.ed about the night before, after my “Dad Rock” mix has been turned off for the second time (no love for The Coug’?) and after the thirty hours of sleep we’ve gotten over the last week has caught up to some of us. Here we see Billy in the conventional posture, lounging in his beat-off shorts, wrapped in a stranger’s bath towel, while Zach’s taste leans toward the avant-garde. Naps are awesome!

Here’s Billy eating a Louisville Hot Brown. If any one meal has the potential to bring about the end of the human race, it’s probably this. From what I can recall, this local dish is comprised of a slice of white bread, melted Cheddar cheese, sliced turkey and bacon, more cheese, another slice of white bread topped with a tomato, slathered with a final, all-encompassing layer of cheese. It should come with a complimentary set of defibrillators. Billy is just clowning in this shot, but Rod ate his entire sandwich, to everyone’s horror.
But it did get us thinking: If we ever run into legal problems using “The Business,” say hello to “J Roddy Walston and Hot Brown.”

These are our friends Jeff and Tim from Chattanooga. Jeff, “Uncle Ding Dong Sauce,” had a memorable turn as Mr. T at a Halloween show we played in Chatty last year (chronicled in an earlier post). Since then, Jeff’s been hard at work with his band, Double Dick Slick, yet still found time to begin writing a solo concept album about 9/11. Some sample lyrics:

Pray for our troops America
Never forget 9/11
That’s when three-thousand people all went up to Heaven
Or Hell if they did not live right

and…

It’s just a honky-tonkin’, love-makin’, boot-scootin’, rooting-tootin’, ass-kickin’, 9/11
Marvelous Heart

I can’t be absolutely sure, but I’d wager Jeff is the first person to have used “9/11″ as an adjective.

Here’s Zach’s Muppet ‘Stache (Also known as “The Shalit.”) He just recently trimmed it for the first time since March, and it’s gorgeous. He recieved the ultimate validation on the last tour – up there with the time a homeless dude high-fived Billy in Knoxville because he thought he was homeless too – when a dude in full hunting camos came into a gas station while we were in line, and was stopped dead in his tracks by the mere sight of Zach. All he could do was blurt out “DAMN!” and shake his head. WE’RE FOR REAL!

This is Billy with a beef blanket he bought at a truck stop in North Carolina. He said it tasted like burnt cardboard. On the way to this truck stop, we passed a smoldering three-car pile-up on the interstate and overheard two truckers discussing it in line for the bathroom. “I hear three people got killed,” the first one said. The second one thought it over for a moment. “Yup,” he finally said. “That’s a good one!”

Truckers!

Here’s a portrait Billy did of himself on an Etch-a-Sketch. Well, he says it’s not supposed to be him, but I think it’s awfully coincidental that he gave him black hair.
Either way, I think we can all agree, the man is a wizard with a small knob.

(Ouch.)

Speaking of tasteless, here’s Rod.

This is Zach, killing himself. He’s about to dig into a triple order of Waffle House hashbrowns, “All-The-Way” (minus “Capped”) style. For the layperson, thats an entire platter of hashbrowns covered in chili, cheese, diced ham, tomatos, onions and jalapeno peppers – hold the mushrooms. The first time he ordered it, the waitress flinched. Zach can literally eat anything – I’ve seen him eat three McDonald’s quarter-pounders with cheese in less than five minutes at 10 a.m., and I’ve unfortunately been in a van with him for several hours after he’s chased two gas station kosher dogs with some leftover beef jerky and a bag of pork rinds. His stomach is a compost heap.

(P.S. – In this picture, Zach is wearing his beloved “deer shirt” that we bought for him on tour last summer, and which was stolen from him after a show in Chattanooga in September. He has been virtually inconsolable since he lost it, so if the person who took it would like to cleanse their soul of its misdeeds, drop us a line.)

This is the Most Bad-Ass Game Of Jenga Ever Played, pitting Young Master Gordon against what appears to be meth personified.
When the Jenga tower finally falls, it’s always pretty exciting.

This is Billy and Zach playing video poker in Shreveport, Louisiana. The people we met here were great, but everything else about the place creeped me out, from the crumbling, moss-covered shacks along the main drag (with cars out front), to the apartment complex across the street from the club that looked like a prison with bars on every window. Plus there were dudes walking down the street who I’m sure had more than one machete on them at all times.
But even a town stocked with would-be cannibals can offer intrepid travelers a silver lining, and Shreveport’s is most definitely “The Inquisitor,” a weekly paper that basically compiles the mug shots of everyone who was arrested in Bossier County over the previous week. I knew it was going to be good from the cover:

That’s the kind of syntactic goodness that grammar lessons rob you of. I wish more newspapers might could write like this.
Then there’s this guy:

“Edward Mouton – He’s got one up on Justice.”

(I’m probably going to hell for that.)

Lastly, this is the backstage bathroom stall at the Star Bar in Atlanta. Not like I’m keeping a running tally or anything, but this is hands down my favorite bathroom in the world. (Solely in an aesthetic sense – I don’t fancy doing my business behind a Bud Light beaded curtain). The entire stall wall – well below where the picture ends – is covered in hand-written graffiti left there by bands who’ve played there over the years. Most just scribble the band name or motto if they’ve got one (i.e. – “Party On It”). But I like the ones that write about the drives (“Ten hours here and boy do we have to poop!”), the shows (“Here on the day The King died – 8/16/2002 1977″), and the towns they traveled from (“Who the f*** lives in Macon?”).
I like it because it all makes me feel like I’m part of a larger fabric, made up of other people who just have to do dumb shit like drive ten hours to play to a dozen people, and then wake up on a stranger’s floor the next morning and do it all over again – not because it’s always easy and not because it’s always fun, but because its the only thing they can think to do with themselves.

Keep your eyes peeled for them dates.
See you soon,

Steve

Here’s our man J Roddy on the cover of this morning’s perezhilton.com, playing the role of “lovable street urchin” with his good bud Jennifer Garner in Central Park over the weekend. One commenter questioned whether he was actually Sean Lennon, while another noted his striking resemblance to Peter Jackson (director of Lord of the Rings).

Heck, why don’t you pay a visit and leave your own comment? Check it – http://perezhilton.com/?p=7820#respond

OK, OK…it’s been a thousand, million galaxy years since I – or anyone from the band – updated you on our whereabouts. What was the hold-up? Got me – if it didn’t involve Price is Right or Chocolate Chex, I probably didn’t hear about it. Anyhow, I wanted to give you a brief recap of some things we did this summer. Smell me in my hood:

This is me and Rod on Folly Beach in Charleston, SC, living The Dream. We had just run into some drunken high school chicks swimming past who were telling us how they got a construction worker to buy them vodka at 11 in the morning so they could drink before they went swimming, and how none of them were wearing swimsuit bottoms. Then a crowd of skeevy 50-something dudes moved in and it got real weird. I guess the whole thing left us feeling really triumphant, or something. Then we had to walk back to the van like this.

This is Billy, Zach and I honky-tonkin’ with the good gentlemen of Hot Pipes. Somehow we ended up in the only New York sports bar on the block – can’t get enough of those…I guess. This is a pretty good representation of the lights on the main drag – it’s like a country music theme park, or someone throwing up a Lite Brite set. If you’re from Baltimore, you better be able to appreciate the charming side to tacky, and this had it in spades.

This is the hardest working, most beloved and probably the cleanest member of the band – our 1997 Ford Club Wagon, lovingly known as “The Diaper” (because she holds all our crap). We bought it off a church in Alabama awhile back and left the decals on as talismans against both cops and robbers. The shotgun seat doesn’t recline, the air conditioning is spotty and the speakers are blown, but she always carries us through the storm.

Wanna know how I know Billy’s gay? This is him playing “Rhinestone Cowboy” with Soul Asylum on his 28th birthday during our show with them in Raleigh. They asked for someone to come up on stage at the end of their set and Billy’s drunken sprint past security ensured this opportunity was firmly seized. They strapped an axe on him and let him loose with a basic knowledge of the chord changes, he promptly went about prancing and cock-strutting like Angus Young drunk on bleach. He was whipping things up so hard, security threw him off stage before Dave Pirner pulled him back up. The highlight was any one of Billy’s ripping solos or him blowing kisses to the crowd after Pirner got them all to sing “Happy Birthday” before the encore. It was all too much to take in. Here he is taking it for a ride:

But the real story of the Spring wasn’t the shows we played or the people we met or even the record coming out, really. Because, years from now, when I think back on March of 2007, I will only remember it as The Month Zach Westphal Became A “Man.” Zach’s hitherto barren face suddenly sprang forth in a river of molten manliness right before our very eyes, and luckily, I was able to catch our caterpillar becoming a gorgeous butterfly:

Here’s Zach near the end of March, just a scant two weeks into the voyage. As you can see, it had promise from right off the bat. His toothless sneer has now become a thing of real menace. The God-given talent was clearly there, but was he willing to work for it?

Here’s Zach a week later. He’d been subjecting it to a rigorous training, consisting solely of combing it down with his fingers 8 million times a day (henceforth known as “The Westphal Method”). The results were really starting to show. When I see this picture, I like to think of him lording over his Guitar Center with an iron fist, slowly being corrupted by the power of his upper lip. “I don’t think you understand, lady – you ARE buying this guitar!”

Barely a month in and now we’re shitting whole grain oats! You can almost sense the manliness oozing from his pores. Aging bikers and city bus riders were paying their respects, and he stopped having to look over his shoulder during every Amber Alert. But his saga wasn’t over by a longshot…

Gentlemen – we have achieved Kick-Ass! Man in bloom! With those golden ringlets and that lip warmer, all boundaries have been obliterated in a tsunami of raw puberty. Its even more glorious now…I’d take a picture but I’m afraid I’ll turn into a pillar of salt.

For the real stories, come out to the shows and say hi. The list is to the write. I mean, the right.
Buy the damn record.
Holla back,

Steve

This photo was part of a feature in Gutter Magazine. Scary?!

My cell phone camera is about the only thing more ubiquitous on our road trips than Gatorade bottles that may or may not be filled with Gatorade and Billy’s antacids. I like to think of myself as the Ansel Adams of dirty white dudes in a van. My journey to document the mundanities and tchotchkes that come with spending entire weekends in a moving box with your four best friends, has produced somewhat interesting (read: mixed) results. Witness:

This is Zach on the boardwalk in Asbury Park, NJ. It’s a great town – I just wish we could have seen it before a nuclear holocaust levelled the place. We walked along the boardwalk after getting there several hours too early and later learned from the bar staff that a band had done the same thing the week before and one of them got shot in the head. Thankfully all we got was windburned.
The manager of the club that night was a guy named Casper who had left his long-time gig at a bar in Florida to take the job. He was still tanned six months later – which provided a beautiful contrast with his blinding white set of fake choppers – and was physically aching for college girls (he didn’t elaborate). All night long he regaled us with tales that included getting high with Rick Derringer, selling crystal meth to Joey Ramone and living next door to the MILF Hunter. It was pretty awesome. At the end of the night he slipped us his phone number in case we ever needed a lawyer (he knew a good one) and the last four digits were “WILD.” SCORE!

This is the world-famous Casino in Asbury Park. The gambling here sucked…all they played was craps.

Beautiful, downtown Cincinnati.

Seriously, the Queen City is awesome (so I’m told). It was the site of The Greatest Argument I’ve Ever Heard In My Life, which took place at 4am in a suburban Cincinnati diner, and involved two drunken hillbilles. It went like this:

Woman: F*ck you
Man: No, f*ck you
Woman: F*ck you
Man: No, f*ck you
Woman: F*ck you
Man: No, f*ck you Denise

[End scene]

To Cincinnati: You must have been nice in, like, 1920:

Here’s our man, Chris “Ichiban” Zalamia in action. He travels with us and handles merch for us. He might also be the smartest human being alive (or dead). We shared a house in college and I watched him teach himself Calculus 8 or something in one week, because he had slept through every one of his classes (and he had three alarm clocks). He got an “A.”
He’s also a shaman.

This is us applying white face paint and baby powder to ourselves in the bathroom of Parkway Billiards in Chattanooga, Tennessee. This was our big Halloween show and someone decided we were going to be some kind of Colonial America-Louis XIV hybrid. We raided a few women’s blouses and blazers from a Goodwill, picked up some tights from Wal-Mart, and lost our self-repect somewhere along the way. The end result was pretty hideous. The hightlight was watching the halo of baby powder that surrounded Rod’s head the entire evening.

Also at the show, we met a white guy who came as Mr. T. Just have a look and we’ll leave it at that:

This is Rod cleaning our friend’s floor in Lexington, Kentucky. He probably knocked over a glass and made a gigantic mess and then started crying like he always does. I mean, he cries all the time over the littlest stuff – he asks for a drink and someone hands him a “bad” Gatorade, or Zach eats raw broccoli and falls asleep next to him, or we throw away his sleeping bag because it got mixed in with the trash in the van…I swear! He’s probably crying while he’s reading this. BABY!

These are the fingers that I hurt really bad on tour. I bled all over, like, three pairs of jeans:

This is Billy wearing the new Hardees Fry Holster. (You can put Tater Tots in it too, I think.) This is from some rest stop in New Jersey…those stops are either really good or really terrible. This was one was pretty terrible (that’s why we’re eating Hardees). We had played New York City the night before and made $30, while racking up two separate $60 parking tickets at the same time. We kept them both as souvenirs.

This is Raleigh, North Carolina in a bewitching fog. I met a witch once – I dated her daughter for a week in high school. She wrote romance novels for a living and had alot of lame candles…I heard later on that her daughter convinced her to put a spell on me. I hope she instead spent the time casting an anti-gingivitis spell on her daughter because her gums were gross.
Anyway, we played King’s that night and got to see The Whistlestop for the first time, which has got to go down as the one coolest things we’ve got to do. Later, I got diarrhea.

Seriously – who’s not flushing? Seriously. Grow up.

Couple of quickies…

Rod is The Cream Machine. (In related news, I’m looking for a new inflatable mattress-mate.)

This is our friend Matt Ballard, who came on a trip with us once. We would like to thank the kind folks at Chik-fil-A in Dorch, North Carolina for allowing him to eat in their establishment.

These are some gorgeous Tennessee mountains. (And no Dolly Parton punchline.)

This is Zach’s dream vehicle – he said he would pay $500 a month to own it. It belonged to Jerry Berghoff who drove a monster truck called “The Attitude Adjuster.” It’s painted “General Lee sienna” and has a mural of “The Attitude Adjuster” on the side. It is currently parked at a Texaco station in Wheeling, West Virginia, across the street from “Hubcaps” (a hub cap emporium).

This is me drunk and loving it at The Dame in Lexington, Kentucky. The next morning, I realized our crappy performance the night before was due to this shirt being unlucky. I have since undertaken a vow to never wear it on stage ever again.

This is Zach and I kissing a pair of Blue Bulls. I don’t know why drinking them that night was so funny. You can look at Zach and tell I forced him to take this picture. I’m sorry Zach.

And finally:

This is the last thing we see everytime we head out for the road and the first thing we see when we get back – Jesus, shotgun shells and a baseball bat. That’s America in a milk crate, baby!

Steve