DZ IS ON TOUR

The Curse of Discovery Zone

We have a curse: Two car accidents, lost money, lost weed, lost innocence, missed radio interviews, dead hookers etc.

As we drove into the Greenest Green of Colorado, we thought maybe our luck had changed. The sun didn’t even have to fight the clouds. There were no clouds. The rocks were red. The trees hugged deep green pastures that opened up for cows and horses and lakes and rivers and perfectly aged barns, rationally geometric power-lines and provincially simple telephone poles. It was “Fuckin’ Beautiful”. 

So I guess that beginning list of turbulence doesn’t quite add up to an anathema. That kind of stuff can be expected on the road, but as we pulled out of the last Gas Station before Telluride, a Black Cat ran in front of our van. Coincidence? Maybe. Nothing bad happened immediately. We made it to Telluride. The town seemed like a gathering place for white pot-heads. A pretty fitting demographic for us. The venue Fly Me to The Moon was awesome. The sound was good and the bartenders were nice, but that night was not a normal Telluride Saturday. No. In fact, the owner of the club had suggested to us that we would probably see an 80 to 100 person crowd, at the least 40 people: that’s their average weekday. The bartender told us after the show, that it was the slowest saturday he’d seen in Telluride since ‘94. 5 people were there. 5. We played the slowest night in fifteen years! SO WHAT, Right?! That’s not a curse. That is just some bad luck, but dig this. Our next show, in Reno Nevada, required the longest single day drive yet. We drove and drove through a stock desert landscape that looked like it was on a loop. For nine hours it never changed. When we finally got to the club, they didn’t have mics, mic stands, cables for their speakers, and they also told us that even if we could find what we needed we couldn’t play. We couldn’t play because they had moved the Karaoke an hour earlier. We got fucked, and at this point I’m pretty sure we are cursed.

I Got Caught Up

Sorry guys. I slacked off. No excuses. I’m gonna skip a lot, but I’ll throw in some pictures from the time between New Orleans and Colorado. If you want to know about what I skipped, just ask me, Sam, Jamie, Aaron, Chris, Jake or Zander. They were all there.

Headin through the Bayou

We’re on our way to New Orleans at the moment. The skies are a little heavier as we move towards the Bayou. A few scattered showers accompanied by a different kind of heat, a thick-slow-wet and dirty warmth. I’m excited for New Orleans. Never been. This is what I’ve heard; Beignets, Accordions, Women, and Vomit.

We have a four hour set at a place called Checkpoint Charlies on friday. I have no idea what’s expected of us. We have maybe an hour of music total. The plan was to cancel our gig in Jackson in order to get ready for the beastly friday night performance. We’ll Learn a few covers, rework a few unfinished gems, and then jam.

It sounds like a solid plan. The only obstacles that might present themselves are Beignets, Accordions, Women, and Vomit.

The Rest of Texas

1 - We played a show in Austin on Sunday, the hippest place in Texas. The venue was Headhunters on Red River Street. Red River is packed like row houses and sardines with venues and bars. It’s packed with an energy too. The people seemed vibrant. And the world’s greatest movie theater, The Alamo Draft House, complete with waited food service and an extensive list of draft beers, was nothing less than excellent. Our show, on the other hand was not. Are you familiar with B stages? Like say at Madison Square Garden for example, you’ve got the Theater at the Garden, or at any festival you’ve got secondary stages. Headhunters main room probably has a 40 person capacity. We played on Headhunters secondary stage out back, which was suprisingly empty seeing as the seating capacity was probably less than 10. Add that to our disappointing and exhausting excursion to “The World’s Greatest Water Park” Schlitterban, and our performance came out somewhat lackluster.

To make it clear, Schlitterban is about the biggest waste of $37.99 possible. The lines lasted over an hour sometimes, which just made the experience of the slides that much more confusing. I think we were all well beyond being pissed off though. By the time I reached the landing pool straddled around Chris in our 2 person innertube we just sort of looked at each other and said “What?!”. And that was coming straight out of the mouths of the two biggest theme-park-pussies in the group. I refuse to go on X, deja vu, or Tatsu, and Chris refuses to go to Magic Mountain altogether. We laughed in the face of the ride voted “best water ride in the world” 5 years in a row by travel and leisure magazine, The Master Blaster. What a rip off. At least we got some delicious BBQ ribs, and Brisket afterwards, although thinking back on it eating a pound and a half of meat right before our show may have hindered our performance gene.

2 - And then… Fort Worth. We played the Aardvark, and I honestly think it was the best show we’ve ever played. So often we can’t hear ourselves on stage, but the sound at the Aardvark was perfect. Being in a band is often like being married. The shows are our sex life, and all we needed was that one good fuck to get us over Austin.

3 - The last stop in Texas was Houston, and for some reason Chris thought it would be a good idea to drive straight from the gig in Fort Worth to Astro’s territory. A 6 hour drive at midnight. We got to the motel after sunrise, and all seven of us piled into one room. Houston is awful. Humid, concrete, and lonely. One native Houstonian, a somewhat removed skinny black man, explained to us that “Houston is a big hood, period”. He told us that there weren’t really any good parts of houston, and the only nice part of Houston we saw felt like a cookie cutter mall, like over processed sucralose village with no soul.

The venue we played in Houston, on the other hand, could not have had more soul. Super Happy Fun Land. A hallucinogenic, retro-futuristic, post-apocolyptic rainbow warehouse of marionettes, graffiti, lamp sculptures, and a piano graveyard. The three owners also call it their home. Louis, one of the owners, was also our soundguy. Long grey hair and homelessly dirty clothes. No pretense whatsoever. When I asked him what his favorite music was, he said “whatever’s on stage man”. He described to me the origin of the name “Super Happy Fun Land”. It seemed like the title was completely without sarcasm or irony. Like they genuinely wanted the place to be super happy and fun. Like they had done so much acid, mushrooms, and mescalin that they had lost all their cynicism. The show was alright, but the venue was probably one of the coolest we’ll ever play.

Racisms and Other Pleasantries

THINGS OVERHEARD IN TEXAS

-There is an epidemic of sorts going on with the God Fearing, Deer Hunting, Barbeque’n, White folk of Texas baring their souls to us. I think, because we look like good little white boys ourselves, racists just trust us. If they only knew we were Jews…

An obese middle aged brunette that I ran into in at Simon Bro’s mercantile, in Roosevelt Texas, offered up a few choice words. Simon Bro’s is a family owned general store with an antiquated gas station, equipped with two pumps set in dirt, and a gas jockey to operate the pumps, and maybe wipe your windshield. Inside the mercantile was a fairly standard middle of nowhere general store, except for the fact that its walls were overflowing with deer heads. This was a hunting town, Teddy Roosevelts favorite in fact, which is how it got its name. They were very proud of this fact. Anyways, back to the Brunette’s feelings about our Los Angeles origins…

“Y’all live in California?! I couldn’t never live there. There’s too many Chinks down there, y’ever notice that? Always ‘niwang chong ching ting long” and all that. Plus the people are all stuck up there. I mean y’all seem alright but most of em… It’s too expensive too, and all them news channels down there is all death and destruction all the time. Ya ever realize about all them chinks though. I just don’t know bout’ that .”

Nice, right?