We woke up at 5 AM and started driving around 6 so we’d make it Tucson in time for our first show. Not much to tell about the drive. We ate some good deli food in Las cruces, NM. Also, our cruise control has been disabled for this tour due to a recent announcement by Ford that speed controls in older E and F 150s with over 100K miles have been causing under-the-hood fires for many owners. (so I had it disconnected since the parts aren’t available to repair it yet.)

I had been trying to advance the show (meaning confirm all the details with the booker) for about a month but heard nothing from the venue. We were on the calendar so… we showed up at the venue and I learned that the booker hasn’t worked there for weeks. Lovely. No wonder we didn’t see a single flyer that we’d sent.

This is actually pretty typical – it’s weird that the band-club relationship has become one where the bands are expected to practice, be good, draw people, promote the show and the clubs get all the money for the alcohol sales and sometimes take a cut of the door… I guess that’s the result of the democratization of music – everyone’s in a band and it’s created a kind of Apartheid. So many bands want to play and the clubs know that most will play for free or very cheaply. If a band demands a higher cut of the $, the clubs can just stop hiring them and get the bands who’ll do it for free. It’s a shame because it affects the quality of the music in clubs and the shows that bands are able to execute.

But I digress… the highlight of the pre-show evening was when a crusty punk on the other side of the road yelled at us (Czars and Br’er) to ask if we had any money. Of course, none of us do. “We’re on the road – we’re bands,” we replied to which he responded, “Faggots!” That got a groan out of everyone.


So all this added up to the fact that I was now the person with the most details about how the night. Ugh! Fortunately the people running the place were cool. There were 5 bands (!) on the bill that night at we were headlining. That meant we’d probably go on at 1 – which was 3 our time (meaning we were all semi-conscious for nearly 24 hours by the time the show was over). I immediately started asking the other bands how long their sets would be. Calle Debausche was a really good Tucson band headed by our friend Dev. They were willing to play short. Br’er from PA were only going to play 5 songs. They told me this was their 4th show ever. The 3rd act was to be Dearling Physique but there was some drama here. The guy was a one man act and contacted me a month earlier to try to join several of our bills on this tour. By that time, all the bills were already full. He was also booking Br’er a whole west coast tour. Br’er informed me that DF had screwed them over and that they barely knew him (why did they have some stranger book their tour?). So they were not happy about this guy and I got the impression he wasn’t going to show up.

Fortunately, he didn’t! The other Tucson band, Flagrante Delicto also played a shorter set so we were actually on and playing by 12:30 (miraculous).

Tucson is a tough town. It reminds me a lot of Houston and Berkeley – people will be into a band but just kind of sit there looking bored the whole time. I personally think that Tucson is a bit spoiled like Austin – everyone wants to play Tucson. It’s easily the hippest town in Arizona and even booking a show there is really challenging. We decided to play a number of tunes we hadn’t played in a while since we figured it’d be a pretty low key weeknight show – good chance to practice! The audience was into it and stuff but they weren’t like people in Texas who actually WANT TO and WILL participate or dance if engaged as such. It turned out that this was more of a ROCK audience than a dance crowd and we learned that the hard way. In the end people were having a good time, though. They went crazy for WP, Brown Whornet’s working song and even managed to coax us into playing Immigrant Song – which we have now played a total of 2 times with Tommy on drums and neither of them have been in a rehearsal.