FXHL+NTRSTS in Lampasas, Texas (Derek absent, as he’s behind the camera)

So we’re finishing Day Six of our eight-day tour de force… Going on the road is a real gamble, as you have to rely on people you’ve never met, in towns you’ve never visited, to set up and promote the shows you’re going to be playing. The show in Houston, for instance, was pretty successful though no one there’d heard of us; the next night in Austin, musical capital of the Southwest, was more or less a flop as far as actual concertgoers and merchandise sales are concerned.

We got done playing here in Abilene, Texas, a couple hours ago (the last band is rockin’ it out right now), and though there was a good size audience, our music didn’t seem to connect with many of them. Mostly high-school and young-college-age kids here… and I wonder if it’s the music or the image: Older guys with beards, who aren’t dressed “cool,” and who don’t do much cool dancing/headbanging/whatever on stage. I was talking to Kyle from Interstates (our touring partners), who has been in the indie rock scene for nearly 15 years now, and we decided performing is a little bit hopeless for us. Not that it’s impossible to find some good shows here or there, but how do we appeal to people like us? WE don’t go to shows.

But driving through parts of the country I’ve never seen… that’s been the fun part. The van has continued to work despite it’s age and abuse; the band has kept up good spirits and had hardly any cross words, despite sleeping on floors and eating very little. It’s also neat, in a bittersweet way, to be away from Shelley and Lewis. It makes me realize how much I do love and appreciate them, and how much they add to my life, and I get a double-shot of pleasure: Thankful to be on tour, able to drive around and play music for a week; and thankful to be nearing the end of it, headed home to reunite with my love and my son.

P.S.: Yes, the above picture is a bit like “The Last Supper,” not only because of the surreal sort of focus but also because Topp looks a lot like Westerners think Jesus did. Texas is a weird place. Wonder what Oklahoma’s like? I’ll find out tomorrow.

It’s far from the glamorous, drug/booze/sex-filled scenes you’ll see in TV and movies. Who knows… maybe some bands actually do this stuff. But for us, it’s more of a brief road trip, through entirely random places, dotted with performances and sleepovers with people we’ve never met before. Our tour bus is actually a van—a pretty shoddy one, at that, with no AC and just enough seats for people and which gets all of about 10 miles per gallon on the interstate if we’re going downhill. Our venues include a church, an old theatre, a couple clubs, a cafe… it was supposed to include a grocery store, but somehow that prime spot fell through.

Anyway, reflecting on the few brief jaunts we’ve taken—some for days, some for just a weekend, and at least one trip to Michigan and back for a single show—brings a bunch of great memories. There were crappy parts; in fact, when in the middle of it, it almost seems like one continuous journey through irritation and despair. But good memories tend to crowd out bad, and thank God that they do. If not, I’d have had good reason to ditch this whole rock-star idea a long time ago.

Top Five Tour Memories

FIVE: “Your mom’s a nice van!” | It’s hard to fathom that I’ve been in this band, with three of the same people and a rotating cast on drums and in the auxiliary spot, for almost eight years. When we started, we didn’t know how to play our instruments, nor did we have any clear idea of what we were trying to accomplish. That didn’t stop us from recording and self-issuing an EP, and in Summer 2002 we hit the road for two weeks of shows.

It’s worth noting that some of these turned out to be something other than “shows” as I understood that term. One place a freelance “agent” “booked” for us turned out to be open mic night at a bar that usually featured country acts. Having driven all that way, we went ahead and played, and a younger couple that happened to be there did buy a CD from us. So we made $6, gross, on that show.

Anyway, on the first night out we played near Hell, Ohio… in fact, our van broke down in Hell. While waiting for it to get fixed—which took all day—we hung out at a roast-beef restaurant next door, juggling and eating Equal packets and generally bemoaning life. The show that night? In some dude’s garage. Surprisingly, there were a lot of people listening to music in Hell, and so the show wasn’t too bad. It was the beginning for us… the beginning of driving a long way to play music for a few people, of spending our own money in an attempt to share our music with the world.

FOUR: Rockin’ the art museum | On that same tour, we stayed with my friend Taylor’s brother, Wil, and played with his band True Solar Holiday in Roanoke, Va. … Well, that’s not quite right. We actually showed up late; he and the venue had given up on us, and when we walked in everyone else was walking out. Wil (the funniest guy I’ve ever met, period) tried to get the crowd to stay; meanwhile, we went ahead and set up our stuff, then played a show—mostly for Wil, who was one of three of four people left.

The good part of this memory is the camaraderie of staying with he and his girlfriend, Anousheh (a gifted songwriter and singer herself), staying up all night and talking about music, movies, and our general philosophies of life (Nathan, who’s no longer in the band, trying to tell Wil about Jesus, and Wil telling him straight to his face that it was the second-stupidest thing he’d ever heard). The next day we went with Elizabeth (a nice girl who did the art for the band) and Graham (in the most ridiculous metal band I’ve ever heard) to a river-rope jump and then to a posh art museum.

THREE: Signing autographs in Minsk | Outside of Foxhole, I’ve done very little performing. One exception was in 2003, in Minsk, Belarus, where the girl I was courting lived as a missionary. She played too, and so we set up a couple shows—a rare occurrence in Minsk, much less with two Americans. The funny part was that, at the end of one of the shows, literally every girl there wanted my autograph. (If I hadn’t been performing with the girl I’d wind up marrying, I’d probably have ended up in a lot of trouble.) Worth noting, too, is that our trip to the first show was delayed by a opposition protest in the streets, complete with police (militia) in riot gear, after which a few people disappeared. Belarus is still a dictatorship of sorts, but change is coming.

TWO: Naptime’s over — now, some rock! | A show in Owensboro, set up by a friend (to protect his identity, I’ll simply call him Brandon Andrew Miles, and we’ll call his band Stellar Kin)… which was populated mostly by children under the age of 8. How he came up with this idea, I’ll never know… but those kids sure did love the rockin’ anthems of Stellar Kin! Our music, which is a bit more nuanced, didn’t go over quite as well. We radically re-evaluated our sound after this, and are hoping our next album gets some buzz through cross-promotion on Disney Channel.

ONE: To the future! | As with romance, the best part of touring is often the anticipation. Getting amps fixed, guitars restrung, practicing in large concentrated chunks (tomorrow will see me head to Nashville for practice beginning at 10 a.m. and probably lasting until late afternoon)… the fun is in the planning.

[audio http://rjustin.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/murkville_mixed.mp3] “Ooee” (from forthcoming “Murkville” compilation, also included as bonus track on new vinyl version of “We the Wintering Tree”, soon to be available from Burnt Toast Vinyl)

Used to be, whenever there was a “good show” (performance by a band I liked) anywhere within a couple of hours, I gathered a few friends and went. These days, it takes a free performance by Radiohead or something equally rare to get me to a show. It gets me down sometimes… I wonder if I haven’t lost the capacity for spontaneous fun. But it’s part of growing up, I guess… two jobs, a child and a lot of extracurricular nonsense make “spare time” hard to come by.

When I was just starting in college and beginning my life as a rock star, I liked to “chat” with the artists I went to see, when and if I could pull it off. And, invariably, I tried (subconsciously, I think) to steer the conversation toward how I am in a band, too! and attempting to get some sort of verification that I was really someone.

Looking back, I’m certain, the people on the other end of this conversation just wanted to get out.

•••

This is how I feel, nowadays, when people—good, fine people who have no ill intent or hidden agendas—try to talk to me about coffee, particularly ®Starbucks®. It usually starts like this:

Hey Justin, have you heard that ®Starbucks® is doing xxx?

Uh, nope, haven’t heard that. (I attempt a subtle but direct signal of disinterest.)

Yeah! They’re facing competition from xxx and so they’re trying xxx to get back some business!

Oh, that’s interesting. (I attempt, again, to signal that this is, in fact, NOT interesting.)

Well, you know, I went the other day and this new xxx thing is really pretty good!

At this point, if Shelley’s around, she tries to steer the conversation, as Mr. Lebowski would say, “into the mountain.” This rarely works, but shifts the conversation like so:

Oh yeah (snark snark)! I guess I can’t say “®Starbucks®” around  you, huh? (Snark snark!)

No, it’s okay. (I attempt to convey that, just maybe, there is a whole world of things we could talk about vis a vis ®Starbucks® that would illuminate this instigator and somewhat justify my by-this-time-irritated demeanor.)

The conversation ends here, generally… and I get the feeling that both sides go away extremely unhappy. Me, confounded that I had to endure this yet again and pissed off generally with the state of coffee knowledge; the other person, flabbergasted at my aloof demeanor and thinking that I think that I’m better than them.

But that’s not it at all. It’s that, No. 1, as someone in the coffee industry, I don’t really care about a layperson’s perspective on a corporation that is wholly different from my operation, save for the fact that the earthborn product we sell is the same; and No. 2, that the person doesn’t see that ®Starbucks® is in some ways a legitimate threat to my livelihood, that the idea that ®Starbucks® IS COFFEE is a hindrance to what I’m spending my time and hard-earned money (not that of shareholders) on.

I don’t mind that people go to ®Starbucks®. It is what it is, the Wal-Mart of coffee (although the clientelé may be, on average, considerably better dressed), and it’s not likely to disappear anytime soon. It can even be seen as a help to a business like mine, helping move “boutique coffee” into the mainstream. But I’m a husband/father/entrepreneur with considerably meager means… the David to the drive-thru Goliath. I’m out hunting down my business, armed only with the slingshot of a quality product and knowledgable staff, while the big bad wolf is drawing in prey by means of neon signs and slick plastic interiors and genius marketing.

So no, I’m sorry, I’m not all that interested in what ®Starbucks® is doing this week. I don’t go there—and I don’t mind if you do. But I’m too busy trying to provide for my family to think about the neat new ways some rich guys in an office building found to make another penny per cup.

What passes? What mutters? What dies? What ascends? Who is in my head and what do they intend to do? Why, with newly born gusts of cathartically wayward winds stuck in seasonal transitory, am I so warm and when did it become such a timely process to articulate these questions that’ve been burning through my skull all these minutes? These laws of motion do not pertain to the psyche yet I feel so inanimately strung over century old bearings that are only just now making sense. My mind is a canvas for errant deconstruction, unbidden reconstruction, and serene destruction. Compromising with the Push and the Pull of hot sex, firefights, steamy shower bathing, or salsa dancing begets the appropriate response. But somehow this new force is oddly uncompromisable; innately tormented commentary through the subtle discordance and rupture of an underwater panorama. It dilutes the room around me as if the prospect of death through unrivaled beauty could bend space and time; graceful and uninterruptedly. Salvation rears and chokes this Push/Pull until the air supply between myself and these emotions, this religious experience, leaves me quaking to the realness of Foxhole. Lonely deaths and miraculous resurgences of hope manifest themselves in every instrumental nuance; tugging and straining the idea that no human voice is heard here, yet at the same time making it clear that trips to the moon can, in fact, be unmanned (per se). Trumpets cry and squirm throughout this Push/Pull, but it’s their fractured tenor that validates their purpose in being a reminder that not all is perfectly composed when hopelessly sinking in a chime-y mist of harmony. Peaks are formed and crescendos glaze them with twinkly, often dwelling, melodies; some of the most jarring song arrangements I’ve yet to hear rolling off the tongue as if this is all just second-nature and no one is really getting hurt in the process. It reads like a novella yet matter-of-factly sticks to a shade reserved for an epic. It blends contemporary instrumental reconsiderations with the grandeur and confidence of old sea tales that dustily made appearances in pubs over a century ago. Crashing waves and choppy regrets filter through a glorious dissonance between the earnestness of the instrumentation and the unabashed static often made the focal point of the song by the whim of brilliant production. What passes? What mutters? What dies? What ascends? Questions so general are all too specific in the context of the Push/Pull and what may remain unanswered is what gives it a beautiful mystery and flighty circumstance. 

Next up, we have a review which was written in Portugese, and I’ve translated it for you. Translated being a relative term, as it’s still hard to make heads or tails of. Anyone with any idea of what this person is saying, please explain.

This band almost finished. Pra would not go to make lack me, they made a generic post-rock to a large extent and nor guaranteed the complete hearing of the record. There in 2006 they had come back with new members, new house in the Burnt Toast Vinyl and one disquinho of little more than half hour that if did not primava for the originalidade had three factors that they made of perfect it: the baterista Jason Torrence, the use of form fan of heavy rock deliciosoa the clear, clear, limpid production and I know more how many adjective similars there.The complicated one to write on music, in special on instrument, is that I can be here stepping on in the accelerator and to deliver metaphors, poetical lines and nor to little would arrive close to the real sensation that it will cause in you, I can suggest or only induce. E I do not want to make this with this record, therefore it presents common elements to the sort that the less intent listener of bands as Explosions in The Sky and Mogwai goes to perceive. I go to abide itself by three itens that I spoke there in top:The baterista Torrence possesss one led rítimica only one, remembers the strokes of the Dave Lombardo (it is, of the Slayer) that you can listen in any place and identify. The fan of heavy rock does not act in first plan in the majority of the times, always aparando the falls of the songs (perhaps there an explanation for the heading of the record) and creating new lines that arrest the listener, making the record to fly in the phones. She creates a good sensation, pra gives will to listen to another time these faces of the Kentucky alone know if at that moment he was one ground of trumpete or the trimmed turn of the battery that called me the attention. A record that until appeared in some publications specialized in top 2006 but that as all the great majority of this type, does not arrive here.  

 Fun stuff. 

FOXHOLE: Circa 2003 

FOXHOLE: Circa 2007