News from the front

[Muscles Marinara]

This is allegedly the same staircase from Gone With the Wind; what I can't figure out is which one? Is it the one from Tara, or the one from the party Scarlett attends at the beginning of the movie, or is it the one from the end of the movie when Rhett walks out? Who cares I guess, it's still a good story and one heck of a staircase I say. The three shows from Richmond/Durham/Myrtle Beach was (in my opinion for what it's worth) the best three show run we've done in a long time. Richmond finally got a great new venue and the crowd welcomed us back mightily after not playing there for more than ten years. Durham was looking pretty grim before the show, they were hassling us big time about not being allowed to smoke onstage and after arguing with the stage manager over it for awhile I was really kinda pissed off at the irony of the situation. For starters, we use two smoke machines which pour off enough smoke to trip every fire alarm in a ten mile radius, so the clubs always turn the smoke detectors off when we play. Secondly, we're in fucking Durham, NC--the goddamn place where all the fucking tobacco comes from in the first place. You would expect that kind of bullshit in Los Angeles but not Durham, NC. Regardless, this show was really great too. Myrtle Beach was a trip out, we played the House of Blues and didn't expect too much of a turnout. We were exhausted from playing 3 nights in a row and about to do our fourth. I'm usually really keyed up before every gig, I have a whole routine that I have to go through to prepare myself--drinking, stretching, smoking, whatever. Well instead I fell asleep, as did Dreiwitz and Coleman. The three of us were all passed out cold when Gabe (our roadie) woke us up with the "ten minutes" signal. The place was sold out, like more than 2,000 people. I've never gone from a deep dark black sleep straight to the stage before and I was totally disoriented. The show turned out to be completely over the top and one of the best evenings of the tour. We went to an afterparty and had a very rock and roll evening, complete with throwing furniture off a tenth floor balcony into a swimming pool until security came and we cut out of there. Good times. The next day I slept for 14 hours, and Claude slept for about 20 hours (our sleep schedules are the most alike on tour). I finally woke him up in his bunk and he looked like he was gonna die. He sorta just gurgled "dude I've got the flu really bad" and went to his room and slept another 24 hours. By the time we hit the stage in Athens last night he looked like a dead man and I felt really bad for him, he was running a wicked high fever and had little energy. He still stuck it out and we played pretty much our full set in Athens. Today his fever broke but he's still pretty banged up. We have an overnight drive to Florida tonight from Atlanta. On a final note we had a really brown dining experience the other night. We had an all day drive and we were starving--there were only like 2 restaurants open where we were staying and it was getting late. We grudgingly picked this small out of the way Italian place and sat down for our well deserved meal. Our monitor engineer Jamie suddenly was like "awww what the fuck?" and pretty much at his feet was a half dead mouse caught in a trap struggling across the dining room floor. The meal was putrid and we didn't mention the mouse to our waiter, we just sorta adopted the mouse for the night as a symbol of our culinary misery. We finally told the hostess when we left and she offered us half off our next meal if we ever come back. I don't think so baby.