Starting to crack

After a particularly hot and sweaty set in a particularly hot and sweaty Phoenix establishment, we escape to our hotel in Surprise, AZ and struggle to open up some warm beers:



and attempt to cool the beer down:





And Rob finds a new way to charge his cell phone:

Video Shoot

From the office of Catty Tasso:

We came to L.A. a week before the tour to shoot a video with this cool guy called Heath, from Lowbrow films. So it feels like we've been on tour for more than 4 days. The video shoot was really cool and their crew was amazing! We got to hang out in the suburbs in 100 degree weather.. eat almost a pound of goldfish and a bunch of non-diet soda, which sucked... at one point I asked one of the crew members if I could go and buy one diet because the sugar of the regular was making me really loopy (i had 3). He called me a diva and told me to toughen it up. Which I found pretty interesting...



Their D.P. was really cool and we could tell he knew what he was doing. The girls on make-up and hair were amazing! They didn't rest one minute, always on site with us checking us out making sure we didn't have some crap hanging out of our mouth. This crew rocked! Now the video better be good...

One day off

Relaxing poolside in the desert on Sunday, our one day off before we strike out eastward. Warm winds, chips and beer, eccentric neighbors. Phoenix tomorrow.

We Like It

From the mind of Catty Tasso:


Fuck, fuck, fuck, this is hard.. where is my bed and my dry towels? After 4 nights drinking and going to bed at 3am, sleeping on the floor and driving in the heat, I'm cranky. I can't imagine how it's gonna be after 4 weeks.. man.

But I got to say it's fun and we all like doing it, because we are masochist motherfuckers. We like to suffer and get drunk doing it. Is that bad? As always we've had awesome hosts. My friend Jaime and Jason are the best. Feeding us, buying us booze and making sure we don't collapse. Frankie, my dear friend too, took us in and he gave me his bed -- awww, so cool -- while he suffered with the rest of the band in the hot living room. No air conditioner and he lives in the valley (wow). He comes from Miami so that's why he is used to it. The guys almost melted.

When we got to Anaheim, we got some Cheese and Anna's love. We arrived to their house at 2am and he already had some inflatable mattresses set up for us and some delicious BBQ leftovers. Not to mention the nice fresh brewed coffee in the morning and the yummy BBQ the next day before we drove to the OC tavern.

We definitely have amazing friends that made this first week nice and cozy. So I guess it hasn't been that horrible. That's what friends are for!!!

A few things go wrong

Three days in, and three minor emergencies. Okay, the first one was super minor, but it still seemed like a big deal at the time, cause it was the first one. After a packed night at the Knitting Factory, we left our clipboard and email list behind at the merch counter. Or so the other merch girl told us.. we even went back in to look, and it was gone. Oh well. Total loss: a night's worth of email addresses, and a $5 clipboard.

Later that night, while trying to back out of a particularly cramped tacqueria parking lot (and distracting ourselves with a shark puppet) we backed into a Mercedes. The other guy was all pissed off and aggressive, but he chilled out quick when we started busting out the insurance information. It was basically an issue of scratched paint:



Total loss: we'll find out when the insurance jibber jabber goes through. One lucky thing, maybe, is that we have the same insurance company as the guy. That seems good for some reason.

And, finally, minor emergency #3: Johnny's pedals get left behind in San Clemente. Luckily, our friend The Cheese has a friend who left her car there too, so she and Johnny went on the recovery mission. Total loss: 2-3 hours of Johnny's day. Lesson learned: gear should never be stored out of sight, partially obscured, or separate from the other gear. In the load-out chaos, it's sure to get left behind. And with three bands sharing two vans, it's load-out chaos every night.

Anyway, that's all behind us now, and the Cheese is grilling some meats, so things are looking up.

Circo Rocktastico Tour: Day 1

The tour begins, naturally, in the cozy L.A. bachelor pad of Frankie "It's Just a Prop" Martinez, where we all plan and scheme on our laptops. Well, for Johnny it's more of a handheld device, and Cat doesn't have a laptop, so she's just carrying her entire iMac around...



So it's day one, and how are you feeling so far?



Luckily, we did manage to cram three band's worth of stuff into the available vehicles, and San Diego awaits...

Take the f..fuckin motorway.

Rob likes maps. Pipe likes mapquest. Cat likes to ask for directions. And now Johnny has a GPS thing. So we can generally find whatever we need to find, if we can decide on which navigational method to use for each situation. The GPS device was cool at first, then it got kind of annoying, always telling us to do this and that... then we found an Ozzy Osbourne voice for it and it got cool again. Of course, what we really wanted was a Mr T voice, but no such luck.

Anyway.. we finally got our asses out of Vegas, thank god, and made it to the San Diego Beauty Bar in plenty of time to stand around with the other bands and try to decide what order we would play in. Finally it was decided that the Frantic Romantic would play first, then the Fascination, and the May Fire would headline. This seemed to make sense, given that we had got a great writeup in the San Diego Reader that week, and it was a Saturday, and the sets would be early anyway cause they have to stop the live music at 11:30. The other bands were actually really good, but they played a little long (despite the Fascination's singer having been recently punched in the throat -- again with the singers!) and the club didn't enforce their set times, and we ended up taking the stage at 11:25. At least the club was nice enough to let us play more than five minutes, and we got a good 20 minutes in before they made us stop.

Whatever, everyone was awful nice, and the music was good, so cool.

And at last, it was time for our first trip to Tucson. Crap, that's a lot of driving, but it was pretty flippin' sweet when we got there. The Congress Hotel is a lacvish historic hotel with restaurant, bar, and venue. The crowd was good, the sound guy was friendly and on top of it, and the other bands, The Solace Brothers and Shark Pants, were splendid. There was a questionable moment during our set when the singer from Shark Pants started getting inappropriately intimate with our big stuffed white tiger on the front of the stage, and he had a hard time explaining himself in front of everybody when Cat interrogated him on the mic (Let that be a warning to you all!) But overall the Tucson leg of the trip was a grand success, and we actually almost made enough to break even for that part.

Here's a little math: Gas is around $3.60/gallon right now, and our van is getting about 14mpg. That means we're getting about four miles to the dollar. It also means that it costs us about $17/hour to cruise down the highway (or, as Ozzy puts it, the f..fuckin motorway). That adds up! Basically we are in the business of converting gasoline into entertainment. Rough business so far, and not so profitable... probably a lot of people would just rather skip the entertainment and keep the gasoline. Times are tough, man.

But we say screw that! You'll get entertainment dammit, not gasoline. It's better for your health. Besides, the traveling leads to funny things, like the hostess of the hotel restaurant recognizing Rob's homemade Kap the Shampoo t-shirt, of which less than 10 even exist, and she turns out to be the ex-girlfriend of his old high school buddy from Connecticut. Whoa! How many of these people do we interact with every day, not even realizing how we might be connected? If everyone made their own art and t-shirts, maybe we wouldn't need social networking websites.

On the drive back to L.A. is when things started to get a little silly. The late drunken nights start to pile up, and our only iPod bit the dust so we had to buy random cds from roadside stops. You know, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Chuck Berry, Toto... once we started playing "Rosanna" and "Africa" over and over to decide which was better, it seemed as though we might not be able to function in normal society again.

We had already acquired that fuzzy gloss that makes everyone ask "are you guys a band?" And now the fuzz was entering our brains as well. By the time we arrived at Evocal in Costa Mesa (near L.A.) we were crazed and hungry and unable to say more than three sentences without interjecting "take the ff..fuckin motorway!" or "You have reached your f...f...fucking destination!" Nothing to do at a time like that but start drinking. Again. It was a short show in a tiny place, but somehow it was pretty fun. It's usually the most fun when you just don't give a damn anymore.

Later that night, with our exceedingly hospitable Anaheim friends that put us up, there was much discussion of cheese, for some reason. And we learned that Johnny our new guitar player is a dog whisperer. He had their wacky adorable dog under his thumb.. they were kind of amazed to see him curl up at Johnny's feet and gaze up at him in stone silence! Apparently it just has to do with establishing who the boss is. Which naturally shifted the conversation to Bruce Springsteen. From there it got reeeally foggy, until the next morning when our fabulous hosts cooked us steak and eggs! Ah, it's the good life.