Ok, so the recount of
our USA tour finally begins. I will try my best not to drag it out for too long
and just concentrate on the best bits… but a lot of you guys helped fund this
tour, so I’ll try make sure you get your moneys worth too.
So let me start with Day 1 cause it was a bloody doozey. It was a baptism by fire, almost literally…
we landed in a fucking heat wave. The entire two weeks we spent in Los Angeles the
temp was pushing 40 friggin degrees Celsius plus. We went straight from the
airport, jet lagged as fuck, to pick up our hire van. We dubbed the van “Sauso”,
cause she was long and sausage roll shaped. And boy were we stingin for a
sausage roll by the end of the trip, crikey! Americans knows how to do deliciously
bad road food EXCEPT for savoury baked goods.
So anyhoo, after we’d
acquired our road hog, we immediately set out on an almighty gear hunt to find
an entire backline we could take around the country with us. I almost got shot
in a pawn store for walking behind the counter, an innocent mistake I thought,
but apparently the penalty for this is being blasted with a shot gun, of which
they had two next to the register. Luckily for me they realised I was just a
harmless, funny-sounding, dumb Australian. We were off to a good start.
(Our backline crammed into Sauso. The boys are lookin pretty chuffed with their work.)
After running around
in the heat all day...
("Get fucked it's hot.")
...we were bloody exhausted and decided to find a place to crash for the night. The cheapest place we could find was a nice sounding motel
in Inglewood (nice sounding on Trip Advisor anyway). Little did we know that
Inglewood was a gnarly ghetto right next door to Compton. But being four
innocent white boys from Australia we didn’t know any better. Shit got pretty
real all of a sudden when we walked around the neighbourhood later that night
to find some dinner. Within a hundred meters from the motel we’d already encountered
a pimp and his (white) ho, dealers slingin crack, and Latino gangsters complete
with authentic crip walk and mean ass neck tatts. Morgs even busted in on some
dude in the toilets doing the drugs he’d just acquired from out the front of
the Japanese take away joint we were in. Ha! It was pretty damn obvious that we
weren’t locals. But we managed to avoid any trouble and quickly retreated back
to the motel room, not daring to resurface till morning.
Day 2 was also pretty
special because we played our first gig. Which just happened to be 4 hours
north of LA in town called Fresno, the meth capital of America. Bizarre place
for our first gig, and that’s exactly the vibe we got from the place when we
got there, strange. Luckily for us the people that organised the show were the
nicest bunch of people you could hope to meet. We played at Peeve’s Public
House with Midwest Moms and Space Apes. Afterwards we got on the American tins!
Crashed at the Midwest Moms place, and slept on the floor with the cockroaches.
Big ups to Ryan and the others for their hospitality and for making our first
gig experience in America a good one.
So next day we
missioned back to LA, hung over AND jet lagged as fuck. Oh and hot as fuck too.
We had another gig that night but this time in Murrieta, an hour or so south of
LA, another slightly strange spot for a gig. We played at this place called The
Dial, a really cool DIY space in the middle of nowhere. We were in the van kinda
lost in some sort of industrial/business district with not a sole to be seen,
until all of a sudden we turned a corner and were greeted by a sea of underage
high school kids. We were a bit uneasy at first, feeling like a bunch of Rolf bloody Harris peddos, but all the teeny boppers went absolutely skitz when we
played, so it turned out really well.
(The Dial)
They were definitely
the two best and most interesting gigs of the first week or so. The shows we
played in the actual city of LA were nothing special, so I’ll spare you the
details. I’m already at risk of this dragging out into a marathon saga of epic
proportion. The next instalment will deal with our quick side trip into Arizona
and our journey up the coast to the Pacific Norwest.
(Our best pal in LA, the Liquor Clown.)
Oh, and to those still
waiting for pozible mail-outs, please know that they are not far off! We’re
really sorry for the delay, there’s been a bunch of reasons for the hold up,
but I’m not about to start whinging about them now. So rest assured, your goods
will arrive soon. Thanks for being patient with us.
Love Zeahorse xx
