1,200 miles and several home runs

Austin, Texas, you are but a mere two hours away, and we cannot wait to get to you.

After five or six straight shows in the Northwest (and my first-ever Orange Julius! Delicious!) we piled into the Say Whenabago and pointed it toward Texas. Mark is a driving machine. He has done all but five hours of this 26-hour trek. I did the overnight driving to give him a chance to sleep.

We stopped in Oklahoma City to grab lunch/dinner, a meal that at age 6 I skillfully named “dunch.” Everybody really enjoyed Cracker Barrel, except for that we got served by a dude rather than the cute Southern girls they always have working there.

After dunch we played what may have been the finest Wiffle Ball game of the tour. Mark and I beat Zack and Maxwell 4-3. Mark provided much of the offense, hitting two home runs and several doubles. I had a bomb of my own and managed not to strike out nearly as much as I have been. Zack developed a nasty breaking ball that I nicknamed The Ukranian Gong, so named for the sound it made when it hit the metal garbage can we were using for a strike zone. Everybody pitched really well today. Mark had some crazy curveballs, Maxwell’s stuff was moving well, and I threw a nasty slider and even managed to strike Maxwell out with a hanging curve to end the game.

This really has been a great week for baseball, mainly because the Cubs AND the Yankees lost. And Boston and Denver won (we stay in Denver so much we now kind of feel like we live there.)

Mark gets MVP for the past two days. Not only is he a hell of a driver, he also changed a flat tire in Dallas today in about 30 seconds. OK it was more like 15 minutes but that was OK because everybody else seized the opportunity to get out of the van and stretch a bit and practice karate moves against one another.

This has been a long drive, but it’s almost over. That’s it, sports fans. More tomorrow, when we engage in hijinx at the New Found Glory show in Austin tomorrow with our friends in The Banner Year.

John

Lost and found

Lost: Mikey’s suitcase and my suitcase. Last seen in my parents’ driveway in Lombard, Ill.

Found: Sense of focus.

Tough start to the day. We forgot to close the trailer door when pulling out of my parents’ driveway, then about 500 yards down the road we wondered why people were honking at us. It might have had something to do with the fact that the trailer doors were wide open and about 10 tons of musical equipment and luggage were about to fall out.

We pulled over and everything was there — except for Mike’s suitcase and mine. At first I was furious. Come on, we’re a professional band. We don’t make mistakes like this any more.

But apparently we do, and now we’re back on the road, headed for two shows in Kansas. These will be two of the best showss we’ve played in a while. That suitcase held everything I took on the road with me, save for a couple of books, my shaving kit and my Aerobed. Now all I have is my guitars, my amp, a few cables and five people to whom I have entrusted my life and musical career.

It will not be fun to wear the same shirt and jeans until I get a chance to go buy some new ones. But that’s not important. I still have what I need to go play rock music, and that’s what I am here to do.

John

Dispatches from Camp Latif, pt. 2

Ever hear of home field advantage? Apparently I have it at Camp Latif.

Throughout the first month of this tour I have struggled at Wiffle Ball. I’ve been swinging high at low pitches, low at high pitches, and I’ve been way ahead of the curve balls. But somehow all these problems corrected themselves as soon as we began playing at Latif Grounds, also known as Maxwell’s parents’ back yard.

 I launched the first pitch into the trees. And the second. We got a proper game going and I hit four home runs in one inning.

All of this led to a good show at the Webster Theater in Hartford, then a good night on the town with several of the Latif brothers. It is impossible to have a good night on the town with all the Latif brothers, mainly because Hartford lacks a bar big enough to hold all 735 of them.

We enjoyed a delicious breakfast of falafel and grape leaves then headed back to Boston, where we are crashing with family or friends for the next few days. We’ll be booking lots of shows in the next few days, catching up with the people we left behind, then heading right back out on Tuesday for Leg 2.

Can’t wait for that to happen, but for right now it’s good to be home.

John

Dispatches from Camp Latif, pt. 1

We arrived at the Latif compound in Connecticut late yesterday afternoon. First stop was the family grocery store/deli, where all of Maxwell’s brothers either work now or have worked. Then we went to the home and threw around the football a bit. There were some gorgeous passes and catches by me and Mark and Maxwell.

Dinner was ridiculous. Imagine all the food you’ve ever seen and then imagine more than that, and that’s about how much we ate. We sat around and talked, then shared a nargile with  a few of Maxwell’s brothers, watched “Rock of Love” on VH1 and then proceeded to sleep for the next 10 hours. We woke up to the smell of breakfast and ate profusely once more.

Wow, did it get cold up here in a hurry. A week ago we were swimming in the ocean in Florida. Now we’re wearing sweatshirts at high noon. It’s good to be back east, but that west coast weather sure is easy on the body.

John

Greetings from Asbury Park

…where Bruce Springsteen is from, and where the sleep is unbelievably comfortable. We spent the night here after we played to a full house at the Knitting Factory in Manhattan.

The show looked and felt and sounded great, which nearly made up for the $115 parking ticket we got. We’re pretty sure they saw the Massachusetts plates and decided to mess with us; we were the only car on the block to get a ticket.

Afterward we wandered Manhattan in search of a drink and instead we wound up at this Italian festival straight out of the Godfather. All we wanted was a beer and instead the bar sat us at a table with a tablecloth and candles and stuff. We ordered appetizers strictly out of a sense of obligation.

We had one beer and some fried mozzarella and got the hell out of there. Then we had another quick one at a martini-type place near the club.

All night it felt like something was missing. That something was Matty, who has gone home to be with his family for a few days. He’s meeting us back in Boston to start the second leg of the tour.

We’re off to Hartford for a two-day retreat with Maxwell’s family. Lots of food, lots of exercise, lots of rest. Can’t wait.

New York means “no parking here”

We’ve been driving around for the better part of an hour now looking for a place to put the van and the trailer. That was after the ridiculous detour we had to take because they wouldn’t let a trailer through the Holland Tunnel.

There are cars everywhere and people everywhere and ambulances trying to get by us.

 We like playing New York. We hate getting to New York.

Wow, this stuff might actually be working

Last night’s show in Philly was great. We had a nice new crowd to play for at the World Cafe Live (classy joint!) but even better was that we were in a strange city, and people who heard of us came to see us play.

There were some girls who saw us play at Bamboozle, a big festival thing we did at Giants Stadium. There was a guy from New Mexico who we met on Warped Tour, and there was a girl who saw us in New York about a year ago. They all thought enough of us to keep checking back on our tour dates, and they saw that we were playing their town, and they came. Beautiful.

All we need is to find a few hundred thousand more people just like this and we’ll be all set.

John

Y’all come back now, y’hear?

A girl actually said that to us last night. And then her friend made fun of her for it.

Great times in Raleigh. Promoting at NC State really paid off…we brought some people to the show and the venue was impressed with our efforts. We’ll be back there, because it was a cool place full of VERY cool people. We played pretty early to a good-sized crowd, then spent the next few hours just hanging around and talking to people and telling jokes and having a great time.

 It was a good end to a rough patch of the tour. We’ve had some long drives, costly fill-ups and lean crowds, but now we’re playing some sweet shows in Pennsylvania and New York and Hartford, where we’ve played before and have already planted the seeds of what some would call a following.

It only gets better from here.

 John

Anybody want to check out a band from Boston?

We must have said this 10,000 times today. We got to Raleigh this afternoon and saw that the club is half a block from North Carolina State, so we charged up the iPod, made a load of fliers and hit the campus to promote tomorrow’s show.

Everybody’s in a pretty good mood today because we had a good show in Fayetteville last night and splurged on a $40 motel room. Sleeping in a bed that does not require inflation is a wonderful thing.

Say When vs. The Elements

We had a day off today so we went to the beach in Jacksonville, Fla. It was beautiful: lots of sun, lots of sand, no rocks to cut our feet, and some of the biggest waves I’ve ever seen. We stripped down to our swim trunks and decided to have a go at Mother Nature.

 Mother Nature trounced me.

The first 10 waves or so were great. Then I decided to get adventurous like Mark, who used to live on the Cape and knows how to bodysurf. I took on one really huge wave and caught it right as it broke. It flipped me over, I scraped my chest on the ocean floor, and the wave washed over me and flipped me on my back. My trunks got shredded, and I looked like someone had just torn my nipple ring out. (I do not have a nipple ring, and after today, I’m REALLY glad I don’t.) Matty took some pictures but trust me, you don’t want to see them.

I stuck with it for another half hour or so, and the salt water stung so bad I thought my chest was on fire. Lucky for us we have hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin, so now I’m bandaged up and feeling much better.

The rest of the guys put up a valiant fight with the waves, and while I cannot say they won, I can say they battled Mother Nature to a draw.

We’re driving through the night for two shows in North Carolina, then it’s back up to the Northeast. We’re back in Boston on Sept. 22. It will be nice to be home for a few days, but no more than that. The road has been good to us — hard, but good — and we can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.

John

Hunting alligators

To give you an idea of how last night went, I give you the following conversation from this morning.

Maxwell:  ”How late were you guys up?”
Matty: “5:30. We were throwing bottles at alligators.”

Cool times in Tampa last night. We played at a club right across from Busch Gardens. I took advantage of my guitar’s wireless system and performed one of my guitar solos while standing atop the head of a giraffe.

Then some of our friends took us back to their house and showed us a great time. We all shot each other with water guns for about an hour before our hostess decided maybe we’d had enough of that. I took a shot right in the eye and I think I got Zack in the ear.

I crashed late, but Mike and Matty decided to stay up and throw bottles at the river in the hopes that they would hit an alligator. They did not.

Tonight we’re in Jacksonville. We just pulled up to the venue, and we’re early. Time to play some Wiffle Ball.

Barreling through the bayou

Man, Louisiana is dark at night.jj And bumpy. Those double j’s I just typed were courtesy of Interstate 10, which appears to have been last paved right around the time Jim Garrison was investigating the Kennedy assassination.

Today has been a long day in the car. We started in Austin and are headed to Tampa — a 20-hour drive. Zack lost his mind somewhere around Baton Rouge and drew a little guy on his hand, and then proceeded to have a surprisingly coherent conversation with him.

It’s not that we’re short on things to do. We have movies and a Sega Genesis and some hand-held video games. In fact, I was ostracized today for not participating in today’s game of Family Feud.

The good part is that we haven’t played for a couple of days and we’re dying to get back on stage. Tampa’s going to be a great show, and then it’s off to Jacksonville on Saturday. We’ve been there before so we’re hoping to pull back some of the kids who saw us last time.

The last few days have been pretty lean on money. Today’s drive is killing us on gas money, we haven’t sold a CD in three days, and someone hacked into Zack’s bank account. But we’re soldiering on, because the only way this is going to get better is if we make it happen.

 John

Texas Flood

Tonight’s show in Houston has been rained out. Bummer.

The flooding down there has been out of control, and I just got off the phone with the promoter and she told me it just wouldn’t be worth it to open the club and pay the sound guy tonight. The good news is she likes us and is working on giving us a very cool big show a little down the road.

Austin was a great time last night. We showed up and the club was about as big as the kitchen in my old apartment. We didn’t think there would be enough room to get ourselves on stage, let alone our monster Marshalls and our drums. Lucky for us the guys in Banner Year had some more manageable amps and let us rock out on their gear last night. Really fun show, and we got to try a beer called Lone Star, which is both inexpensive and delicious.

So we have a day off today and another tomorrow, and a very long drive to Tampa for the show on Friday. This means lean times for Say When. No gig means no money, and long drive means we’ll be paying out the ears for gas. We’ll get through it. We always do.

John

How to kill on stage, every night

We have discovered the secret of playing a great show every night.

1) Leave immediately after the set, then spend 17 hours driving to the next show.

2) Don’t eat until about 15 hours into the journey. Make a four-minute stop at Wendy’s and order several items from the value menu. Chili is recommended.

3) Show up to the venue and have just enough time to get the gear on stage and start playing.

We played at The Door in Dallas’ Deep Ellum neighborhood and to our amazement, the show felt good and we felt fantastic. We’d all been pretty tired and stir crazy and on edge when we got there, and it didn’t help that we showed up about 20 minutes before we were supposed to start playing. But the stage was excellent — very big, very comfortable — and the sound was the best we’ve had on tour so far. We walked off feeling great. We met A Heart Between, a cool metal band from Tyler, Tex., then hung out with some Dallas friends who were (and continue to be) extremely hospitable.

Speaking of that, it’s time for breakfast.

John

Hangin’ at Alice Cooperstown

I have a new favorite moment on this tour, and it happened last night in Phoenix. Matty sold a CD to a police officer – a police officer riding a horse.

I’m not kidding. He was patrolling downtown on his horse and stopped to watch us play for a minute (we were playing outside) and we noticed him and waved to him from the stage. Matty’s been doing a great job selling CDs so he just walked right up to the horse and sold the guy a CD for $10.

 Phoenix was very good to us. We played at Alice Cooper’s rock and sports bar, Alice Cooperstown. The club treated us great — dinner, good bar deal, and a cool green room that was made up to look like a dungeon. It had all these evil skulls and cages and things and the best part was it had air conditioning, and that was huge because it was about 115 degrees outside.

Good set, great crowd. They were a little hard to read while we were playing, but we sold lots of CDs and T-shirts. One guy bought one to bring home to his neighbor. This was encouraging too: Our waitress from the bar in Salt Lake City showed up to the Phoenix gig in a Say When t-shirt. Very cool girl.

The only bad part of Phoenix was that we had to leave right after the show to tackle the 17-hour drive to Dallas for the show tonight. It was a shame, too. Everybody was having a great time, and I wanted to hang out with my cousins TJ and Luke, who live in Phoenix and haven’t seen me in about five years.

But we packed up and got on the road. Zack took the first shift, and I took the second. We filled up somewhere close to the Arizona/New Mexico border, and something in the gas there apparently imbues your car with super powers. The tank took us about 150 miles past El Paso — amazing gas mileage, considering we’re hauling six dudes and a trailer loaded down with amps and guitars and drums and luggage. I call it Super Tank. Gas mileage is not an inherently fascinating topic, but when you’re living on a hundred bucks a day it’s a gigantic deal. I was in disbelief at how slowly the needle was moving toward the E. At one point I even looked in the rear view mirror to make sure I hadn’t left the trailer behind at the gas station. (Which, I have to confess, wouldn’t be the dumbest thing I have ever done. Close, but not the dumbest.)

Driving through the desert at 5 a.m. after playing a show would usually be a drag, but I had a great time. I saw an amazing purple sunset over Las Cruces, N.M., and then when we got into Texas I saw several funny things.

1) Texans

2) A fast-food place called Wonderburger whose logo is a capital W with wings, making it look as if the restaurant is owned by the rock band Weezer

3) A lottery sign that appeared to advertise a $12 jackpot (it was actually $12 million)

Tonight’s a show at The Door in Dallas, then we have a much-needed day off before we venture into the rest of the state.

Texas is enormous.

John

You’re driving me to Phoenix!

We’re on our way from San Diego through the desert, where tonight we’ll play at Alice Cooper’s rock and sports bar. Should be a cool show, we have lots of kids from Phoenix who have been waiting to see us.

San Diego was very cool. We played in Ocean Beach, a funky little neighborhood where the houses were small and the deli sandwiches were delicious. Stayed with Mike’s aunt and uncle, who kept a few of us up until 3 and had breakfast sandwiches ready to go in the morning. Good people.

John

I love L.A.

Or at least what I’ve seen of it so far. We rolled into town about 8 a.m. after Mark drove us all night from San Francisco. The drive was interrupted about halfway through when the rear passenger-side tire of our van decided it had enough of this touring nonsense and quit on us without notice.

Mark had the thing replaced within 15 minutes and we were rolling again. We all blamed Matty, because he was the one sitting closest to the tire and has already broken several things on this tour:

 1) Mike’s computer
2) Zack’s phone
3) My guitar
4) The tire

But we love him anyways. Even though we almost forgot him when shoving off yesterday.

Tonight we’re at the Knitting Factory in L.A. We have a good slot at a great club, and we’re really excited about the show.

Last night’s gig at Rockit Room was great, we played with two Japanese rock bands called California Roll and The Thunders. All were very cool and very friendly, something you don’t always find in the Northeast.

John

How to spite a cow

We camped at a KOA place north of San Francisco last night. Everybody really enjoyed it except for Maxwell, who took it as a personal insult that the cows on the farm next door were defecating on the ground, right there in public. I grew up in Illinois and lived in the country for a few years, so being next to a farm was kind of like a slice of home. But Maxwell likes his cows in patty form, burning on a hot grill, so we exacted our revenge on these gastrointestinally proficient cattle by barbecuing several of their fallen comrades.

And boy, were they delicious.

The campground was the best example yet of everybody keeping their roles in Say When on the road. Mark put up the tents faster than an Eagle Scout on a meth binge. Zack kept his head down at the computer and got us re-booked at several of the places we’ve played already. Maxwell cooked up a delicious feast of burgers and hot dogs. Matty assisted in all tasks, Mike drank a bunch of beers and made everybody laugh, and I just kind of wandered around in the best mood I’ve been in all week.

Mark slept on his Aerobed on top of the van. Zack and Matty slept in one tent and Mike and I slept into the other. I would have had a great night’s sleep were it not for a very weird dream. In it, I went to my grandma’s house in the middle of the night and found a bunch of squatters urinating on her front lawn. It really bothered me and I had to get up and walk around a bit before I could get back to sleep.

We’re in San Francisco tonight, then right after the gig we’re headed off to L.A. for our show at The Knitting Factory.

We like California. A lot.  

John

The San Francisco Treat

…is not Rice-a-Roni. It is an inground pool and hot tub, and we spent all afternoon there. Zack hooked us up with a place to crash in a townhouse community that had a pool and hot tub, and now we’re feeling well-exercised and refreshed.

 Tonight we’re going into the city to promote tomorrow night’s show. Then we’re staying at a KOA campground and cooking over an open fire. This should be interesting.

John

Home cooking, casino parking lot style

RENO, Nevada, Aug. 25 — Today brought the first truly humbling moment of the tour. We checked into our hotel, comped for us by a friend, and Matty and Mike and I went down to the buffet. We were starving; It was about 5 p.m. I’d been up since 8:30 a.m. and hadn’t eaten anything all day. We had our debit cards at the ready when the lady rang us up.

$16.95 apiece.

Damn. Thanks, but we’ll pass. I mean, we each have $17, but we know we’ll need to spend that on gas or something else.

The other guys went back up to the room and I headed out to the van, where we had a cooler and some leftovers. Instead of all-you-can-eat lobster, I was hanging halfway out the driver’s side door, gorging myself on whatever was in the cooler. Thus, I bring you the first recipe of the tour.

DESPERATION SALAD
Prep time: 0 minutes

6 pieces cantaloupe, warm, soft and starting to go bad

1 Quaker granola bar

Stand on the step up to the driver’s side. Open cooler, Dig through melted ice packs and open Ziploc bag. Jam cantaloupe into mouth as if you have not eaten in days.

Look around you, take in the desert mountains, inhale thin, hot air, and start sweating. Experience moment of doubt. Allow it to linger until you grab some cheap fast food on the way to the show, then play a show and remind yourself that you chose to do this.

Then stop complaining.

 

John