tuffin' up 2k9 tour diary part 3: East Coast in brief

but first....

check out some hottt spiked punch pics here. This was taken from a practice we did on Will's roof. Will is Dann's best friend from the semester he spent abroad in Italy, and is hereby bestowed Ultimate Spiked Punch Bro status.

http://williamhereford.blogspot.com


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Let me just say what we did in brief over the past week or whatever. We ate at a burger place called "Surf Burger" and i got my brother an overpriced T-shirt because it was incredibly awesome. We hung out in Tallahassee a couple days, and played The Engine Room which was the other half of "Castlemania" (same bar, basically, but Castlemania is the DIY lookin space with no A/C and cool overhead lights and The Engine Room is the cavernous more bar like room). There was a hardcore show that night and they wanted the other room so we switched, which honestly I wish we wouldn't have for our set. That one was our toughest to play, because the stage was far away from the people and there were lights in our eyes so we couldn't even see them. We played a very short set. The room was so dark I couldn't even find my ukulele even though Dann told me exactly where it was. We were gonna stay in Tallahassee for 2 days, so it was lucky we met some chicks, cause we were gonna go swimming the next day with them at some Sinkholes, but then unlucky when we got rained out. They came to meet us at this (pretty cool) coffee shop where we hung out for 2 days basically, but we went on a break to see Harry Potter, which we idiotically payed $9.50 for instead of saying we were going to a different movie for $4.00 and just going in to see Harry Potter, and it turned out the show was to be the last we saw of them. At the coffee shop later that night a giant tour victory did occur when I beat this Rasta man at Chess. Dann lost his match to this other Rastaman inside, but he says he had the guy the whole game and just blew it with a bad move towards the end. My game was sort of a boa constrictor type thing. The guy I was playing was definitely better than me (making victory all the more sweet) but I had the fortune of being white and kept him having to respond to my moves on a queen pawn game for basically the whole thing, working small advantages from the early game (a doubled pawn for him, controlling the middle for me) into eventually sealing the deal. Dann also downloaded a huge harddrive worth of music off our host and ultimate bro Stone.

Next we went to see The Dirty Projectors and Atlas Sound play at The Earl in Atlanta. They were both awesome and that club is amazing. Great sound. Atlas Sound covered "What Goes On" by The Velvet Underground successfully which I'm not sure I've ever seen done before. That guy can play guitar, he's got some good tricks. Dirty Projectors killed it, playing their whole new album and about 4 old ones in the middle.

Next was Athens GA. Our show there went great. We had to unload a bunch of gear to make room for Eddy, but we managed to do that. I wish we had some pictures, but we really decked out the space with confetti and beach balls and blow up fish and crabs etc. It was a great beach party. We've been suffering some attrition on the blow up animal front, but I hope they are spread around the country reminding people of the good night they had that one time when Spiked Punch came to town. There was a great potluck, and later that night a pretty solid jammm session.

Chapel Hill was next, we played Joebog a house where RXR played last year (then called Philbog). Things got a little crazy, with one dude in the audience constantly putting a plastic bag over other peoples heads. This night was pretty lost in revelry. Some dudes pet rat had died and there was a viking funeral for it in the backyard, as well as fire spinning. We closed the night by playing some wasted Dynasty Warriors 4, which should be hilarious to anyone familiar with the game.

Richmond VA was next. It was this girl Allison's 25th birthday. She plays in the band Hot Lava, and the show that night was us, some singer songwriters, and 3 members of Hot Lava at a coffee shop. First there was an awesome and quite hospitable pizza party consisting of Pabst and Papa John's, an ultimate combo where I come from. Her place was on Monument street, which meant there were a bunch of Monuments to Confederate hero's such as Stonewall Jackson, Robert E Lee, and also tennis player/humanitarian Arthur Ashe. You could tell how important the people were because the more important ones had less text. Arthur Ashe had like 3 paragraphs explaining who he was, Stonewall Jackson just said "Stonewall Jackson" and Robert E Lee simply said "Lee." That night got pretty rowdy as well, but in a pretty wholesome Pabst and Papa John's kinda way, as it turned out. The next day we went down to the river with our new friend Elizabeth. The river was fucking sick ass shit, you had to jump from rock to rock like Frogger to get out there, and then in the middle there was this really great current. We set up shop on the most badass rock of all, and downstream of it there was a pool where we could hang out with no current when we felt like it and it got pretty deep. Sick shit all around.

That night we played The Black Cat in Washington DC which was probably the nicest place we play this tour. My cousin Ben set it up and it was great to see him and also my cousin Chava. They treated us real nice at The Black Cat, $10 food allowance and 3 pitchers of beer for the band. We played with Spoonboy, a solo guy who I thought was pretty good. We hung out with the fam that night, and the next day hit up the National Mall and Natural History Museum. DC freaks me out, it is so like 1984 big brother government type shit for me. That's what I was thinking about in forthcoming pictures. The Natural History Museum was cool though. Dinosaur skeletons!! Except they were all casts, I wanted to see the real thing, but i guess they cant do that, the fuckers. There was an awesome Rastafarian exhibit though, with an hour long video primer we sat through, and I liked all the early man stuff.

That night we went to Lancaster PA where we played an awesome attic show. There was some sweet hanging out, and my bathing suit was used like a stripper g-string for dollar bills. Everyone got pretty drunk I am pretty sure, and we had a conversation with this one dude about this magical bill he saw in Philly with The Flaming Lips, Cake, and Ween. Wish I coulda been there!

Philly was great. We played the Danger Danger Gallery, one of my favorite spots. That place is much improved, like Home Improvement style since last year. Now they have a badass backyard, greenroom, improved stage, and cool murals in the downstairs. We have a couple pictures to get posted later. We hung out after the show with this cool band called Everything Now! and had a bit of a pass the guitar / apple seshh in the green room that night. It ended in hugs. The bassist had a badass moustache and after singing a song at one point said "I write alot of songs about people doing their thing." It was cool. The main singer has a great gravelly voice as well.

Now that all brings us to NYC. We have been here a number of days at this point and are on a mix of tour and vacation. The first couple nights we stayed at Will's and have since then been at Tina's up by Columbia. I guess I'll write about NYC later, Dann's friend Jenny just got here and I think we are gonna do some stuff