After eating breakfast and dealing with our violation of the 8 AM parking space curfew. We hit the road and drove… and drove… and drove. That road from Flagstaff to LA is long but beautiful. We got lucky and bought gas for $2.58 a gallon in AZ before passing into CA (where we were certain it’d be over $3/gal).

We arrived at the Steve Allen Theatre where we were to open and close the Tomorrow Show – kind of a variety show starting at midnight on Saturdays. It’s sort of like a place for stand up comedians, improv comedy troupes and musicians that cross into the comedy genre to hone their skills and try new material. I played this same show with Graham Reynolds and the majority of the skits were mediocre at best. This time was different, though.

Anyway, we got there early and went for some Thai food. The place we went featured Bill’s Thai doppleganger. Also, one of the waitresses had just bought a new booty skirt (we didn’t know what else to call it) and some white stiletto heel knee boots. She drew a lot of attention. There was also some “live” music. Basically, this guy had his laptop, a cheesy keyboard and a P/A on this little stage. He warmed-up with some muzak versions of pop hits from the 80s and 90s… rather, his laptop did this while he ate his dinner at the table up front. After several tunes, he finally started singing along to a number of US tunes and that was pretty good… still it was kind of like watching someone do karaoke and knowing that no one else was going to get to play the game.

We loaded directly onto the stage. Steve, the soundman, did a great job. This place is a real theatre – though small, it’s totally pro, has great sound and is clean, clean, clean unlike the places we usually play. The deal is, we get about 15 minutes up front to play and then play a song as people are leaving at the end… not a lot of stage time but it’s a great stage. Originally, I’d hoped to book this as a later show to follow our Knitting Factory gig the same night… when the Knitting Factory confirmed with me, I didn’t get too worried that the folks at the Steve Allen were sort of unresponsive. However, the Knitting Factory then cancelled ALL stages for that night about a month before our tour in favor of a Pink Floyd Laser Light industry party. Fortunately, Craig from the Tomorrow Show was willing to add us to the bill - so this was our Saturday night gig in LA. I sort of knew the format and what the show would be like but I didn’t expected it to go as well as it did. In the end, I think we were better off playing this place than if we’d done the Knitting Factory.

We decided to play Bald Mountain but hadn’t played it since a rehearsal the week before. So we ran it as our sound check. It was…. rough to say the least. We finished that, got dressed and then hit the stage to start playing at midnight. We opened with the Spanish Dance as people filed into the room. Bill’s sister Karin was in attendance. We followed that with Iron Fist of Stalin and then Cue the Tie Fighters and planned to play Bald Mtn at the the end. I started debating this though – often, the band plays to close the show and the people just start leaving (the show is essentially over at that point). If we played Bald, we’d wind up on stage for 15 minutes with no one to sell CDs or shirts to people as they left (we’re not traveling with a merch person).

I figured we’d deal with this as when the time came and decided to just enjoy the show. Tommy’s friend James showed up DRUNK about midway through and Tommy started sweating because he was so loud. He thought that the place was going to ask James to leave so he took him outside. The rest of us saw the best comedian I’ve seen to the Tomorrow Show but I can’t remember his name! He did a great bit about Atlantic City being the place where sadness goes to cry and his finale about Jim Morrisson was very good, too. Tommy and I also met Kate McCoochy (sp?) back stage. She was going to play a few tunes and was really nice – I’d guess in her early or mid-twenties. She played second or third and had some really sweet and well written songs that she sang along with her ukulele as well as one where she simply banged a spoon and fork together between lines. Her stuff reminded me so much of Sam Arnold (from Opposite Day) that at the end of the show I gave her my copy of Opposite Day’s “Fictional Biology” – unfortunately, I didn’t have the cover but I really thought she would like Sam’s songs and I had a feeling that she’d forget all the info I’d given her about Opposite Day with out something to remind her. The funniest thing about her act was when she said she’s thinking about naming her album “Playing with McCoochy” (say that out loud and you’ll get it)

The hosts of the show (Craig and Ron – who actually plays all the doctors on the Sarah Silverman Program on Comedy Central) were super cool to us. I didn’t really get to talk to them very much though because I was too busy talking to Kate backstage about Opposite Day. When the show came to its final act, Craig mentioned us again and told the audience that we had done a song at the soundcheck and that he hoped we’d play it when we came back up. He even started yelling, “if you can hear me, please play it!”

So that rested my doubts about Bald Mountain. I guess that the guys had told ron and Craig about Bald Mountain so when we took the stage they announced it as, “The Invincible Czars performing Night on Bald Mountain!” That was pretty cool. We played it just fine – not perfectly and it definitely lacks something without Rick’s trumpet… however, Phil is a great reader and had an old chart of the piece that was a combination of his part and Rick’s for when Rick can’t make a show. He hadn’t played it in a while but he did a great job and we sounded massive, yet clear and not too loud in that room. Steve did such a good job – but he told us later he didn’t really do anything. Haha! I guess we just lucked out with our volumes and stage placement.

So… no one left! People just stayed right there. I figured at least some would leave but no one did. Even Kate stuck around and I was sure she must’ve thought I was trying to hit on her after my enthusiastic diatribe on Opposite Day. James was LOUD! He was screaming at us while we played. At times he even got over the music at our loudest points! The show had been relatively short that night so Ron let us play another and we did A Glezele Vayn. People STILL didn’t leave so he had us play one more and we did a great version of “Working Song”. We always open up the middle to improv and this one was just the right combo of guitar wankery, fiddle fiddling and Bill banging on his keys. (Although I must mention that the BEST exit from this improv section was when Phil, Bill and I played the finale from Opposite Day’s “Monroe Doctrine” on top of Tommy and Adam playing the riff from Working Song when we were in Phoenix.)

After the show, we hung out and talked to Josh (the manager of the place) and Steve for a long time. They were really awesome dudes and Josh is a fan of Estradasphere and Secret Chiefs 3 so we had some stuff to talk about.

Eventually, we loaded our stuff and headed back up I-15 (or as they like to call their freeways here in CA “THE Fifteen”) back out into the desert to stay with Bill’s grandparents in Helendale. So basically, we drove another hour and half plus and got there at 5 in the morning. Bill drove and I sat up front but that last 15 minutes was hellish. I had start hallucinating from tiredness and Bill was freaking me out by driving with the lights off and stuff down these roads he knows so well from his childhood and teenage years.

Finally we arrived. Bill’s grandparents and uncle were there and already awake (of course). We just went in and crashed. I don’t remember a lot other than that.

This was our day off… I don’t think anyone got up before 1 PM. Bill’s grandparents made us some tasty lasagna and a casserole style chili relleno (veggie for Philliam) which was a new way of serving this dish to me. Tommy got an earful from Bill’s granddad about various surgical procedures. After doing pushups and lying in the chigger-free, soft grass in the backyard, I heard my share of the same surgical tales… but the best thing was when I noticed the “Polish Kitchen” wooden decoration on the kitchen island. I asked Bill’s grandma about that and she said that it was Bill’s grandfather who is Polish (100% according to him) and that she is only Polish by injection. HA!

By about 7 o’clock the grandfolk were winding down. We stayed up and watched the Simpsons while Adam did some work. I eventually fell asleep on the floor after watching an episode of the Family Guy that was actually semi-funny to my brain only because it was set in Texas. I don’t like this show and I was disappointed when Aaryn Russell succumbed to its’ un-funniness. (I’m certain to be flogged when the other guys read that bit.)

Oh I also watched the Sarah Silverman Program and I liked that but I didn’t see Ron from the Tomorrow Show. I don’t have cable. Rick thinks I should get it but that’d just keep me from finishing up Mursketine part MCMLXXIV.

We got a little loud and eventually started doing our laundry. Tommy tried to take the golf cart out for a midnight spin and eventually he and Bill wandered off into the dusty desert that surrounds the community. I’ll have to get them to write and addition to this part of the journal because I was asleep by this point.

Another late-ish start. We ate breakfast around noon and then drove around the area.
We saw the house where Bill lived as a teenager. This is a weird place where, as Bill says, if people left a house and no one else bought it, it would usually just become an abandoned shell and eventually fall to pieces. I imagine that living out there in the high desert must be a little like living in the wild west of the movies. This is the REAL desert – not like northern Utah (my home state) where there’s at least SOME green in the landscape. This is a true dustbowl. Orange, yellow and brown are the only earth tones out there (in that order). It is hot and dry as all get out. Bring your mentholatum!

We came through Victorville and Rancho Cucomonga where we encountered some serious smog/fog coming down in the valley. Fortunately, the terrible accident that had happened on “The Five” on Saturday had been mostly cleared so we didn’t have trouble getting into LA. However, Adam and I teamed up to burn up our extra time – first we overshot the location of the venue by about 20 miles (which means about an hour’s worth of time in LA) only to find that I had written the address down incorrectly and that’d we’d actually been closer to the real location when turned around. Argh!

So we finally got to the Mint and then went for some Kosher food since were obviously in that part of town. I even saw a Kosher Subway while walking to a Wells Fargo. We went back to the mint and Tommy and I checked out some nice Moroccan shirts that we really liked but… I think we’re about to get some new Indian stuff from India so we passed.

The Mint was a really cool room. It’s a bar/restaurant that hosts a jazz jam on Mondays. The booker, Casey, was willing to have us and John Whooley’s band Mojow and the Vibration Army for an earlier show. The annoying thing about this place was that they require you us their backline. This was great for Adam but no so hot for the rest of us – Phil was going into a direct box that bypassed his effects and foot volume control. I was playing out of a really nice Rivera combo but didn’t get used to its controls. My volume was totally squirrelly as a result. My louds were too quiet and my quiets were to loud. Also, in the middle of Cue the Tie Fighters, my effects power supply went bonkers and I learned not to plug it into a certain outlet on Bill’s power strip. Tommy had the WORST of it though, playing on a semi-cheesy Mapex set. He told me later that he didn’t have one bit of fun up there. Bill didn’t even have an amp. I don’t think he heard a single note of his keyboard for the first 4 songs. Phil and I did have a fun lick-trading (settle down!) improv in the Working Song (geez, we’ve played that a lot). Also, Invaders went swimmingly in spite of the fact that we were struggling with our sound in the early part of the set. More than any other show on the tour, I wished Leila had been there to sing so I didn’t have to. Of course, this is unrealistic since she doesn’t know our songs well enough yet to perform them. I am not a fan of my own singing but I have wound up doing it because I’m the most coordinated when it comes to moving my mouth and playing my instrument at the same time. Anyway, the vocals came through loudly and clearly and it kind of rattled me. I don’t like to hear too much of my voice on stage. Still, I thought we sounded good vocally on the tunes where we sang – Ounce, Run to the Hills and Invaders.


In spite of the technical troubles and the fact that it wasn’t our best show, we still had a good time and played well considering. We were psyched to see Josh and Steve from the Steve Allen Theatre. Also, Phil had a friend from college who showed up and Drew previously of Echobase and Friends of Dean Martinez was in town and came to the show.

This was our first show John Whooley and we didn’t know what to expect. We’d heard some music on their web site but it really didn’t do them justice. They had a drummer (making them a trio) that night – John from the bass/drums duo Clevis. They started the show with the two of walking out into the audience with a wagon full of gear attached to John W.’s pants. The wagon had some little amps and stuff and was playing a looped beatbox beat and John and Mariah (the other member of the band and his wife) sang over it. John had his saxophone and a delay/loop pedal which was attached to the pocket area of his pants. They were amazing, looping voices, and instruments right there. It was quite incredible… all of this was being done about 2 feet from the audience using battery powered equipment. They wandered around the bar and eventually back to the backstage area. Then they came out and played from the stage. They are very funky and all about creating positive vibes. John was incredible. His singing was humbling (see above) and his horn playing can only be described as shredding… however, he doesn’t do that all the time. He’s a great improviser but he doesn’t let the tunes degenerate into just a bunch of wankery. He played keyboards and guitar also. They were very entertaining and more musically interesting than we’d expected based on the music on their web site. Mariah was particularly impressive. She sang really well and was a solid bass player. She told me that she had never played an instrument before she and John started doing Mojow a few years ago.

The people at the Mint were really nice. The bartendress even gave me a free hamburger. ☺ Here’s the thing with LA – they invented “pay to play” where bands have to put down a deposit or purchase X amount of tickets and sell them to their friends and fans. There are several variations on this but it usually works in some ridiculous way like this – band pays the venue $200, venue charges patrons $7 a head at the door, of which the band gets a percentage – let’s just say the band gets $5/head. Each $5 goes against the $200 that the band paid the venue. So after 40 people show up, the band breaks even and the club has earned $80. It kind of sucks and I refuse to book us at these places… more accurately put – I can’t book us at these places because we don’t have 40 people that will come see us in LA. This is why I appreciate places like the Mint, The Knitting Factory and several others that are still not pay to play. They allow you to build a following rather than expecting you to come in with a huge draw right out of the gate. This is kind of like the difference between major labels and indies. It used to be that a major label would sign a band like Sonic Youth or Metallica or REM and allow them to develop. Now they’re only interested in sure-fire platinum albums. Pay to play has even spread to places like Fitzgerald’s in Houston. It’s pretty much the ultimate answer to the fact that everyone and their damn dog has a band these days and all of us seem to think we’re the next big thing. I suppose pay to play is a way for clubs in a town like LA to filter out the crap in the sense that if a band is together enough, they’ll pay the deposit and work to have people show up. The truth, though, is that all its really filtering out are the bands that don’t have any up front money, regardless of talent. I guess the next big thing had better have enough money to pay to play or else we’re all going to miss the future Kurt Cobains and Jimi Hendrixes… unless they don’t bother with LA.

And not bothering with LA was really my plan – if we hadn’t had such an awesome gig with Estradasphere in April, I probably would have just skipped LA. I really only planned on us playing there once and moving farther north but things got a little (lot) screwy with the cancellation at the Knitting Factory. Booking is the neccesary bane of my existence. Scheduling in general would be #2 on that list.

Blah Blah Blah… so afterwards went back to Jeff’s place (Jeff is Bill’s friend from his days working at High Fidelity in Austin). Jeff lives in Santa Monica and we took the long way home… then we went for MORE Jewish. Jeff is super cool guy and just lets us take over his apartment when we’re in town. I fell asleep watching more cable TV (see, it IS a good thing I don’t have it at home).

We woke up too late to really do much other than eat breakfast and head down to San Diego. We ate at Tacos Por Favor in Santa Monica – tasty. Then we then left immediately for San Diego. The drive from LA to San Diego was lovely. We stopped for gas at the swankiest service station that I’ve ever seen. I think that Southern CA must be the model for every suburb or newly developed part of every town in the rest of the country. In spite of it’s clean look and beauty it’s kind of… generic - like Plano with palm trees.

We arrived way early… but we missed the traffic. We checked out their Salvation Army and I bought a used copy of Ozzy Ozbourne’s re-mastered “Diary of a Madman”. I’m not a fan of Ozzy but I AM a fan of Randy Rhoades. We drove to the harbor and checked out the outsides of all the boats and ships that have been turned into museums and wandered around. It seems we were just slightly too late to do any of the cruise tours. Eventually we made our way back to the University area and ate some food at Ranchos.

At the venue, word was that Action Friend (the other band) was stuck in Phoenix and probably wouldn’t make it to the show. Though it wasn’t good news, we were at least excited about playing a double set. Scolari’s doesn’t have a stage and I wound up standing next to Tommy’s hi-hat… this was deafening. It was the weirdest sound I’ve ever experienced… I kept adjusting volume on my amp. I’d be too loud, not loud enough, too loud… etc. The drums would seem deafening, then just right… then suddenly I couldn’t hear Phil anymore. Meanwhile, the vocals were coming through the PA with NO MONITORS and they were loud and clear the whole time. Who’d have thunk it?

About half way through our set, Action Friend did finally make it to the place. They were good but tremendously loud. By the end I was kind of glad they were done because my ears and head needed a break. ☺ They told us that their van had broken down in Phoenix and they’d missed a few dates. Apparently the transmission was history. Gah! So they’d rented a van and left theirs in Phoenix. Sounds familiar…

San Diego wasn’t exactly a high energy kind of place and the people Scolari’s reflected that. We wore our new Chairman Mao shirts that were given to us by Mike, Bill’s brother. He brought bunch of stuff like that back from his business trip to China. There was a fellow there named Tom who had the Roy Orbison glasses – he told us he is legally blind. I think he was on the prowl because all of us got the impression he was coming on to us. The weirdest part was when he told Phil that Phil looks like he’s from Iowa. Weird because he is. When we arrived, Tom had asked me to light his cigarette for him because his lighter kept getting blown out by the wind. After I helped him with it he told me he couldn’t see but that he bet my face was handsome. I told him I had to go to the bathroom.

We also met Troy from Cattle Decapitation. It was odd because we’d brought them up in a conversation earlier that day about over the top band names. He was a really cool guy. Everyone at the place was super. It’s just too bad it was so dead. In spite of that, people were enthusiastic and we actually sold more CDs than any other night so far! One guy was a friend of an LA cumbia band and asked if were going to play LA. I told him we just did and we talked about playing LA. I told him we’d love to play with his friends in LA sometime because we never do very well there on our own. In fact, I told him we don’t really care to spend a lot of time in LA and he was shocked. He said, “why?” and I thought back to the little rant I’d made in the last journal entry about playing LA.

Bill slept in the van for the entire length of Action Friend’s set but that was probably for the best as he drove us back to LA – arrival time was 4:30 AM! We stayed at Jeff’s again.


The place was kind of dead – and even the employees and other regular patrons said it’s usually not like that… I don’t know whether to believe that or not because that’s what every venue tells a band when the night is slow – especially when you’re earning a percentage of the bar as pay.

After doing these last three dates (SAT, MON and TUE), I think I did just about the best I could do with the planning/booking. We didn’t have to drive much, we had free lodging and great weather and although the shows were not well attended, at least we didn’t lose a bunch of money by paying to play or driving really far. Filling MON and TUE is always challenging. This was much better than driving 5 hours to some nowhere town where people would ignore us. I guess what I mean is, I knew that MON and TUE would be mediocre pretty much no matter where we played. At least we had the opportunity to play to enthusiastic (if small) audiences without spending a lot of money or wasting a lot of time.