It was late drive back to LA the night before. We arrived back at Jeff’s place around 4:30 AM. I couldn’t believe Bill drove all the way back from SD after driving there and being so tired the whole time. I got some real shut eye on the way but it’s tough to sleep in the back of the van when moving because the rear of the van sort of whips all around and I usually am jolted awake with terror by a careening lane change, staring out the windshield at a horrifically normal scene that wouldn’t phase me at all had I been awake for the initial turn.

Anyway… so we slept. We woke up and I went to the local Whole Foods (and I promise not to exercise my lack of intelligence here or engage in unclear yet disappointing motives by mentioning Whole Foods, its employees or anyone else) for some food. It was the only grocery store I could find just driving around Santa Monica. We cooked the loaded up and headed north to SF. I know that (the) 101 is supposed to be the most beautiful way to get from SoCal to Northern California, but I like the drive through the San Joaquin Valley – especially passing by all the fruit and nut trees out there. Although gas prices started going up up up as we neared SF, we never paid more than $3.11 a gallon the whole time we were in the Bay Area (compared to last time when we wound up paying something like $3.70 at most).

So we didn’t have to deal with tons of traffic until we crossed the Bay bridge, but that’s to be expected. We arrived at the Elbo Room and unloaded. John and Moriah were already there. We learned that there had been confusion between a few parties as to the order of the night. The club had the order listed in the exact opposite order of what I had suggested. I guess this was because Matt, the booker, and I hadn’t clarified that and thought each other understood the order as specified. No big deal - Matt’s a super cool guy and we switched the order around but if left us headlining. GAH! However, we chose to do it because it meant we could play longer, which we like. The only bummer was that a lot of people who came to see us just didn’t bother to even come in when they learned we’d be last. It’s weird that SF is NOT like Austin in the sense that people will go to a show and PLAN to stay at least to see a few songs by the final band, if not the entire night – even on a weeknight.

TANGENT – I forgot to mention at our night in Flagstaff that the door man for the show, upon learning that we were from Austin, immediately called us “poor bastards” for living in a city that had been ruined (I guess by population?). There seems to be a sense of that IN Austin, too. However, I don’t feel like Austin has lost any of its character. Some people say that Austin’s “golden years” were the 80s. Some say it was the 90s during thec tech boom. Others say the 70s. I think it all really depends on your age as to when you think Austin’s glory days were. It seems to me that in spite of Austin’s growth, it’s retained its character. The whole Keep Austin Weird thing is kind of hokey… but it IS indicative of the desire of people there to retain the city’s personality. It seems like it’s probably somewhat easier for a city like SF to resist having Wal-Mart or other Home Depot come in and set up multiple huge, giant big boxes because there just isn’t that much room! Austin is just like any other Texas city – plenty of room to sprawl. Austin’s got its fair share of Wal-Marts, home depots, etc… but it seems to also have a pretty good sense of balance with this. Big companies are constantly trying to muscle the locals out. We can’t stop huge companies from coming to our city, but we can choose to support our local economy and people do still do it. For anyone who thinks that they can find a better music scene in the US, I think they should consider some of the stuff that exists to help musicians in Austin that I don’t hear about anywhere else – like HAAM, Sims and the Austin Music Foundation. If these things exist in other towns, I don’t know about them. Anyway, point is - nothing lasts forever and although there are plenty of people who say Austin isn't as great as it was in the 70s or 80s or 90s are missing the fact that our city, like all cities, is dynamic. Many things change - population is one. The skyline is another. Yet Austin remains unique and I love it. END TANGENT.

Before the show began, we all went for food. Phil, Tommy and I all went for Indian/Pakistani and Adam and Billiam had Japanese. People in SF are interesting. They have the whole bohemian thing like Austin yet they’re very fashionable and proper like yuppies in Dallas. It’s an interesting mix of those two worlds with a whole bunch of its own flavor. Lots of personality. Nice cool air.


So anyway, Austin Lucas was great. He had a very good voice, his band was well rehearsed and they were on. Apparently he used to work at the Elbo Room but moved to the Czech Republic and was touring the US with his band who were all Czech. The Elbo has a little backstage area but there’s nothing to keep anyone from going back there except a door. The club provides bands with a certain amount of beer and bottled water in a cooler back there. They put in a pretty good mix of beers, which is decent of them. Usually, it’s just a cooler full of PBR or Lonestar – cheap stuff. Since I don’t drink beer, it don’t make no nevermind to me. However, it was irritating that people NOT in the bands kept coming back and taking all the good stuff out before any of the bands could even finish dealing with their gear. I’m not sure of the exact situation, but at some point, Adam got fed up with it and actually took the beer out of one of the guys’ hands and put it back in the cooler. HA! I thought that was pretty bold. But hell, that’s kind of how you have to be in the world of bars. No one’s really policing anything and people who know it will take advantage. Anyway, this didn’t popularize us with Austin Lucas’ crew because I think the guy Adam took the beers from was one of Austin’s band.

Anyway – Austin, if you happen to be bored and you google yourself and find this, we thought your show was spectacular and no hard feelings about the beer. J

Mojow played second and sounded great just like they did every night. John Whooley is the real thing. I think he may be the most accomplished musician I’ve ever shared a stage with… more on this later. 3 Piece Combo was also good but I missed a lot because they were playing while we were preparing to go on. 3PC is one of many of Matt Lebofsky’s bands in the Bay. Matt is a longtime ICSer and a prolific music writer. 3PC reminded me a bit of Shellac.

We finally went on around midnight (not even that late by Austin standards!) and though the place had significantly dropped since the great influx of people who were there to see Austin Lucas (That’s why I thought he was supposed to be the headliner), several of people stuck around for us and for the first time EVER, someone in San Francisco danced to one of our songs… albeit only for a few moments during Iron Fist of Stalin.

San Francisco is even tougher than Tucson and Austin. I can’t put my finger on it but people there are not remotely rowdy – even when I toured with Golden Arm Trio, San Francisco just seemed sedate. Still, we played well, the sound was good and I was glad to see so many people we knew stuck around – like Aaron from Giant Squid and several of our friends.

We played a pretty long set and in the end we even had John Whooley join us on stage to play “A Glezele Vayn”. That was awesome! He just started figuring out lines and playing right along – no rehearsals or anything. He had some great soloing, too! This was also the first night that we started gathering around Tommy’s drum set and all playing a different drum. That was really fun and totally “in the moment” but I liked it so well that I directed us to do it again the next 3 nights in a row.

John also played “Working Song” with us. Phil and I had a particularly good exchange of crazy percussive thwacks on this one. Adam was not feeling great about the show. His amp had started farting out – I still don’t know if it’s his head or his speaker. This just got progressively worse and was even more noticeable in Sacramento the next night.

My second cousin had come to the show and planned to leave no later than 1 AM (now we’re getting closer to Austin standards!) and I was surprised to see she was still there at the end of the show which was at about 1:30. She said we were so entertaining she didn’t want to leave. Cool! That’s what I like to hear from people – and I did hear it from people. Aaron from Giant Squid said it was the best Inv. Czars show he’d ever seen. In spite of the lower than expected turn-out, the venue seems to really like us and was positive about everything.

Afterwards, we went to the Fishtank in Oakland where our friend Lisa D. lives. We were to stay at the tank for 3 nights (and did). Aaron Seemans also lives there. Aaron is an accordionist extraordinaire and plays with the Fishtank Ensemble. Sadly, I think he’s the only member who still lives in the Bay Area at all. Aaron also does his own solo thing under the name Duckmandu and has recorded and excellent solo accordion version of Dead Kennedys’ “Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables”. John Whooley actually sang bass in Aaron’s opera “Opium” during their days at UCSC in Santa Cruz… so Aaron’s pretty connected the Estradasphere guys from their days in SC.


Anyway, we stayed up a bit and then hit the sack.

Not a lot to say about the next morning. I’d been joking daily about how, “Tomorrow, Phil’s making blueberry pancakes.” Each morning, I had upped it a notch. Chocolate chip pancakes, Belgian waffles, cheese blintzes and chocolate éclairs. Unfortunately, Papa Davidson doesn’t have any recipes so Tommy and I finally made some banana whole wheat buttermilk pancakes.

We just kind of hung around and then left for Sacramento around 5 PM. Aaron from Giant Squid had warned me the night before that Old Sacramento (a historic and touristy district of Sacto) has become hard to get people to come to shows. I learned why when I drove us there – it’s like a maze getting down there and even worse trying to get out. In the end, this did hurt the show. Even though the headliners, Radio Orangevale (who were VERY very good), had been featured on the cover of a local music paper, they had almost no one there to see them. They told me the same thing that Aaron had said – it’s just become difficult to get non-tourists to come to Old Sacramento.

We met John and Moriah and Tommy, Phil and I ate pizza with them. We got all the dirt on Estradasphere, John’s days in Santa Cruz, their marriage, etc. etc. etc. They are a pretty cool couple and after a few nights of playing together, their positive energy was rubbing off on me! I’d felt disappointed that we’d had such a mediocre night in SF the night before but hanging out with John and playing with him on stage was a real treat and probably worth the whole trip. J

The Speakeasy has a crazy old disco dancing floor that is used as a stage. It also has mirrors all around – which was cool because I didn’t need to turn around to see Tommy’s signals – I could just look up at the ceiling or to the side and see him playing. However, it made the sound in the room rather awful for louder band like us. Mojow sounded really good. I was also very excited to hear John throat sing Tuvan style in one of the songs that night. Amazing. Tommy had a special treat – since they didn’t have a drummer for the evening, Tommy sat in! He did 4 or 5 tunes with them and did fine. He had to play to a looped track of John’s beatbox beats – not easy when you’ve never done it or rarely do it.

On the drive back to Oakland, Adam and I talked for almost the entire time about the future of the Invincible Czars. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed at the fact that almost no one from the Estradasphere shows in april had come to see us in most of the towns we’d played. In fact, on this tour, we did BETTER in towns where we didn’t play with Estradasphere. But there are a number of factors at work there – a lot of resources that Estradasphere and other bands have are either not available to us or prohibitively expensive (booking agents, labels, national publicity agencies, etc.) Normally, I at least have a bit of time to dedicate to publicizing our tours but this time I did almost none because I’d been working every day and night on our Nutcracker CD right up until the day before we left. Between tracking, mixing, working with Kennon the artist and scheduling the whole upcoming release AND the dates we’ll be playing, I just didn’t have time to properly publicize this trip.

But we learned a lot out here this time. We know we can and like playing shows like we did in Flagstaff where we can go all night and even be the only band. Though Northern California was tougher than ever, Arizona was GREAT and easier to re-visit. Also, we made a really good connection with the people at the Steve Allen Theater and the people who do the Tomorrow Show there.

We woke up late… as usual. No one wanted more banana pancakes but me so Phil, Bill and I walked to grocery store where I bought an orange and whole sprig of broccoli. I ate both raw while walking around. Then we found a bigger grocery store where we all bought some food. Adam had gone to get coffee with his friend Trish who lives close to the Fishtank. Tommy did some laundry up the street.

Then we went into Berkeley and spent too damn much time at Amoeba records and Rasputin Music. Both had some great selections. I was excited to see My Education’s albums in Rasputin. I tried to be frugal and I actually bought a Phish album!! Ugh! I’ve never been a fan of these guys but Philliam played their first album (from 1988?) on the way to SF and it reminded me a little bit of… us! The music was less improv based and more planned. The playing was fantastic of course. I liked it so well, I bought a used copy at Amoeba. Even I’m surprised about this but I have to admit, it’s really quite good.

Tommy wandered again and eventually found his way back to us in the UC Berkeley area. We went to the Starry Plough and it didn’t seem as… magical to me this time. I

remember the first time we played there that it was all new to me and Berkeley seemed like such an awesome town. This time it just seemed more like another venue in an semi-residential district. Still, the Plough is a great place with very good food, drinks, music and sound. Mojow opened and had the best outfits yet (they wore different ones every night) – matching camouflage suites with Vibration Army logos on the back and Peace Symbol arm bands.

We had a good set and I tried to savor our last show with John joining us on A Glezele Vayn. Another really good improv on that tune. We wound up exchanging single note licks between Phil, John, me, Bill and (for the first time ever) Tommy! Our quiet section got so quiet that in the end we were all just snapping for several bars. We also had a good run on Bald Mountain. I love playing in the East Bay. More than anywhere else, the people here GET what we’re doing. I’d love to move the whole band out here – it’s just too damn expensive. During Philliam’s solo in Deeksha, I started slapping my own but on the snare hits and stood near the end of the stage – eventually some of the ladies from the audience (who’d already started dancing) began to slap it for me! I thought this was so much fun that I teased them into doing it again later in the set. J

I also finally met Cameron (cubehead) from the NoMeansNo forum. Another reason you gotta love the Starry Plough is that they love NoMeansNo! They even had two posters of NMN in their back office. Speaking of the office, I must mention that Tommy did such a good job on wardrobe on this trip. We brought a little iron and countertop ironing board so we could keep our kurtas looking nice and he had them pressed for us every night. They look terrible when they’re wrinkly. Someone at the plough yelled out to ask us if we ironed them before we played so I introduced Tommy as, “Tommy Holton on wardrobe!” and he received a massive applause.


Now – remember what I wrote about Christine from Chief Beef? Well, we met another really talented lady musician - Jenya from Fuzzy Cousins. I’m not trying to say that women are not good musicians – they are! It’s just that we don’t see/hear many of them in the underground rock world. Fuzzy Cousins is just Matt Lebofsky and his wife Jenya. I liked them even BETTER than 3 Piece Combo – mostly because of Jenya. She and Matt harmonized almost ALL the vocals and she sounded so good! But the best part was her drumming. My gosh, she could really play. Her beats were interesting and she played like… well, like a guy! She hit hard, played good beats and was very coordinated. She also played a bit of bass and did several songs standing at the front of the stage with a single drum and singing. That single drum stuff was impressive as hell. She was using just about every sound one could get from a single drum. At one point, she was singing, playing bass with her left hand and hitting tiny little bongos with her right hand. This is not to detract from Matt – his tone was great and I was HIGHLY impressed with his abilities on Warr Guitar (like a Chapman stick – it’s the instrument that Brian Kenney Fresno plays). Anyway, I was really impressed with them.

Though not quite as highly attended as expected, people were super enthusiastic and we had a very good time. Not much else to tell. I did get to chat with Wally and Nat from Mirthkon – who are pretty much favorite non-Austin band in the USA right now. Wally actually started Mirthkon back in Houston and Sarah Norris had played in one of these early versions! Tommy also kind of knew Wally from Houston – and Brian from Bat Castle definitely knows him. Small world.

We went back to the Fishtank, hung out and talked with Aaron and then I fell asleep.